After yesterday's dust off, where I tangentially blame modern technology for the impending collapse of, well, everything, I thought I might need to re-establish some semblance of credentials for the edutech crowd, and perhaps even more important, potential employers.

I had long planned to go clamming this morning. We got people coming over tonight, and nothing beats fresh clams, except maybe fresh tomatoes, and we got those, too.

My trusty paper tide charts (courtesy of Jim's Bait and Tackle), confirmed online,  predicted that the sweetest clam bed south of Newfoundland will lay open mid-morning today.The kayaks are loaded, my clam bucket sits on the back stoop, and my rake is repaired and ready.

Alas, it rained last night. Rain flushes out the street sewers, which hold pretty much anything and everything the ground holds--cigarette butts, squirrel poop, herbicides, human spittle and other fluids, and all kinds of other matter subject to the law of gravity. A cherry stone will filter about 10 or so gallons of baywater a day, and I figure a chowder might do double that.

I have a general policy similar to a few states (though New Jersey, land of the free-to-ingest-whatever, is not one of them)--if it rains a decent amount the day before clamming, best not clam.

A decent amount for me means 1 inch, from the Latin uncia, 1/12^th. Why a twelfth? Why a foot? What science is behind my tolerance? Well, very little. I surveyed the internets again, saw that Maryland closes beds for 1" rainfall, Massachussetts uses 1" in the winter, but only 0.6" in the summer (more squirrel poop around, I guess), and NJ, well, last time any bed got closed for rain was a year ago April so maybe we're not paying real close attention.

We got dumped on last night. How much? Well, I could wander outside and peek into a bucket, all of 15 feet away, but then I'd need to find my measuring tape, last used to measure the fluke I cannot keep, which means finding my fishing bag, which I think I left in the car, and, well, it's easier to look at a screen than get up and walk. Besides, it might be muddy outside. Not to mention the squirrel poo....

According to the internets, our local airport, only a couple of miles away, got 1.89 inches of rain last night. (Imagine that, we're measuring to the hundredths of twelths of some ancient foot standard...a freaking fifth of a millimeter for our more enlightened global neighbors....and which just happens to be the length of your run of the mill Paramecium caudatus.)

So no fresh clams tonight....had it rained 90 paramecium lengths (PLs) less, that is, had my bucket outside only held 99 PLs instead of the 189 PLs it would have held had I left it right side up and moved it two miles away to our nearest airport, I'd be clamming at this very moment, risking skin cancer and contamination with squirrel poop.


Here's a picture of a P. caudatus, just in case we go to that as a standard:

The paramecium photo is by Barfooz, released under Gnu FDL

READ MORE - A clammer meets the internets

I am not inherently opposed to charter schools. 
I am opposed to outsiders narrowing public spaces in my community.
Call me provincial, parochial, or even a local yokel.
We lost much of the commons years ago.I'm fighting hard for what's left.

"If it were up to local municipalities, it would essentially kill charter schools." 

Christopher Cerf, Acting Commissioner of NJ

The commons still exist. We still have community spaces, shared by all, that define who we are. We breathe the same air. We drink the same water--at least those of us who avoid the bottled nonsense.

I clam a tidal flat owned by no one, shared by all. Tidal flats are gifts of nature, of god, of grace. I did not earn it. I limit my haul to what I can reasonably share with my clan before the next low tide.

Public education still belongs, tenuously, to local communities. I pay thousands of dollars a year to support our school system, as do my neighbors. Our board of education meets every two weeks, people who live in town, people who I meet on the street. We work together to create a public school district. It's hard work, and it's not cheap.

Democracy has a price.

***

I just got back from the Bloomfield High Spring Choir Concert. The exuberant young voices brought tears to my eyes (shhh....don't tell anyone). The concert was free.

I've taught 1st generation Haitians and Ecuadorans and Chinese and Dominican Republicans and Filipinos and Albanians and Greeks and Costa Ricans and Viet Namese and British and Bosnians in the few years I've been here.

Imagine a small tidal flat separated into fiefdoms--this flag on the north end, this flag on the south, you get whatever (and only whatever) clams under your flag.

It wouldn't work.

There's a move in a nearby town to set up a Mandarin charter school. About a hundred schools in the States cater to Turkish culture. Folks want to set up a school, well, no law against it, and I have no beef with them. Folks want to spend public money to make them run, though, and now we have a problem.

A very big problem.

***

Anyone who believes the point of school is to improve the workforce available for private business fails to grasp the concept of the commons. Anyone who believes the point of school is to make kids ready for college and the global economy fails to grasp the concept of the commons.

Without a commons, there is no real community, and maybe we're there already. If you know more about the American Idol judges than you do the family across the street, you're a bigger threat to our republic than some ragged Taliban fighter protecting some poppy seeds in a land you cannot pronounce.

He's not likely to plant a flag on my mudflats, our mudflats. But you might.
And I'm going to spend what's left of this lifetime making sure you don't.

Flag photo from USA FlagSupply.com site.
On Monday the Georgia Supreme Court "struck down a law empowering a special statewide commission to approve...charter schools." Go Georgia!

READ MORE - Don't tread on me (or the commons)

Despite a kick butt east breeze blowing at 20+ knots, pushing the water back into our back bays, I  managed to rake out a few clams today. The near full moon helped. I like raking clams almost as much as I like eating them.

Last week's clamming was a disaster. Two of my rake's tines loosened up, and my crankiness was exacerbated by a neap tide. I don't mind coming home with less than a pailful's worth of dinner, but last week I felt defeated. I was racing against the sunset (Jersey law uses sunset to define the end of a clammer's day), and, for the first time in years, I questioned grace.

When I got home, I dropped two clams, shattering them. I returned the remaining few to the bay. Seemed puny of me to eat them while questioning the universe.

So I "fixed" my rake...

***

...sort of, but enough to make it feel right in my hands again. The sand and mud yielded, gracefully, and I accepted the few clams we will eat in an hour or so.

We will eat the very last of last year's kale and Brussels sprouts, both bolting towards the April sun.

This year's peas have already broken through the ground just a foot or two away from the kale.

Our schools are in a crisis now, but not because of spoiled children or bad parents or awful teachers. We are failing because we are trying to meet standards that are inherently impossible. No state will meet 100% compliance with the NCLB by 2013, because 100% compliance is simply impossible.

Impossible. Look it up....

I worked in pediatrics for years. Not every child is blessed with a brain that works well enough to jump though algebra's hoops. Many children cannot speak at all. Most of you will never see these children.

Trying to do the impossible leads to fatigue, and fatigue leads to fear.

Fear kills education.

***

I was interviewed by Dina Strasser at The Line last summer. She's wonderful--she had no agenda, she really just wanted to talk--and we discussed what it means to be a professional.

Here's where I think teachers fall short. If we really believed that the testing demanded by NCLB harms the education of children, and a lot of us do, then we should not participate.

Docs are an ornery lot. I used to be one. If any President issued a proclamation we believed harmed our charges, we'd have simply ignored it. That's part of being a professional, knowing more about what you do than governors, presidents, and emperors. The other part is acting on what you know.

We (teachers) got the first part down. We won't be true professionals until we get the second part.

***

My failure last week, one borne of fatigue, will help me become a better teacher. My students are tired--I've pushed them hard, and I have no problems with that. I do have problems with judging them while they're tired.

State testing for biology is coming up. They will be judged, I will be judged. Fear is the expected, and the wrong, response.

Historically my lambs have done well. I hope that they do well again. If I fret, though, I stop teaching what matters.

I'm not paid enough to teach bull crap. So I won't.

***

I found a robin's egg in my garden today. It's not just humans that screw up.

There are no trees overhead, and the egg was intact--I think it was laid where it lay.There's a story attached to the egg, but the robin cannot tell me.

Was she scared? Stupid? Just plain indifferent? Does it matter?

I considered taking the egg to school, but if it hatches, then what? So it sits in my garden, a reminder that pretty much everything with mitochondria bumbles its way through this universe as we do. None of us chose this, few of us would willingly give it away.

***

I think, in the end, celebrating failure is fine, as long as it's an exuberant failure. Too often we confuse fear and fatigue with failure, and that's not the same thing.

Not even close.

Photos are mine, all taken today.

A Wizard of Oz kind of wind is blowing today. These things affect me. As they should.

READ MORE - Fear, fatigue, and failure

The water's warmer, but not warm, the days longer, but not long.

After a longish week, pushing young adults in AP Biology to perform cartwheels that will, ultimately, matter no more than the motes seen in the beam of a late afternoon sun, I questioned what I was doing. The College Board has made some necessary changes, but they don't officially kick in until the year after next, which means I am supposed to teach next year's class a flawed syllabus.

Questioning one's daily work can be liberating, but only if you are willing to accept the answers. There's something to be said for mindless obedience. Obedience has never been one of my strong points.

***

I went clamming today, again. And again I wrapped my hands around a creature with a beating heart, pulling several out from the muck. Grace, ecstasy, and dinner.

A stiff chilly breeze blew from the northwest, and Brandt geese, a bit annoyed they had to move, watched me from about 20 yards away. The tide crept up as I worked. Under my feet were thousands of periwinkles, too many to avoid. Next time I may grab a bunch to eat.

My rake, once used by a stranger now long dead, is starting to show signs of wear. I do not want to replace it.

I hope I get another season out of it.
And I hope it gets another season out of me.

Grace.
First honey bee of the year today, too.

READ MORE - Clamming. Again.

At the end of the day, the hallways are cluttered with abandoned papers. I picked one up.
Quadratic equations, lots of them, scrawled out with the tentativeness of an adolescent's hand.

I'll rake for clams this weekend, fish for striped bass, then bumble in the still chilly garden for a bit.

Which means reading tide charts, currents, and dirt.

I can't tell you how many times I got hit with quadratic equations, electromotive force charts, trig tables, and that freaking pickle jar in Ethan Frome way back in high school.

Then I'd go home and go fishing.

Not saying school wasn't useful--I may still have a decade or two to stumble upon a situation where I might need to decipher broken pickle dishes--but I learned a lot more useful stuff staring at the surf than I ever learned in school.

1:1 computers doesn't change this.

READ MORE - Clam rake vs. pickle dish

A half moon hanging in the sky late Friday afternoon does not bode well for clamming in these parts. Unless my nephew gets here real soon, the clams will rest easy today (which is all clams really do anyway). Some laws cannot be broken. A late day half moon means an early morning low tide.

No matter what.

***

Every time I meet folks with a bit of power or money (the two usually travel together), and in my itinerant careers I've met a few, I come away feeling oily, not because of their behavior, but because of mine.

Senators and CEO's smile, and tend to be bright, decisive, and charming. They like you. They want to help. They share stories about their children, about their towns. They're effective because they believe their own stories, and with reason. Their stories are true.

Because their stories are true, and because I like to be liked, I smile and nod and share stories, too. And then I speak my piece, feeling off-kilter; the message seems foreign when translated into Schmoozese, it loses its strength.

I watched children slowly die, over weeks, over months, over years from our cultural madness, and I literally sputter when trying to speak of the specifics, and sputtering does not translate well in Schmoozese. And at any rate, there is never just one person responsible, never just one organization, and the few times it is, no one responsible gets hurt anyway.

***

I bet I could tell my stories out on a mudflat at low tide, the sweet seething smell of life assaulting the nose of a Congressman as he leans on a borrowed rake, the soft sound of waves lapping at his feet, awakening parts of his brain he last used when he was a child playing outside.

Our stories, true stories, become real outside, as any stories about life do. There's a reason board rooms look sterile. If board meetings were held outside, we'd have a kinder culture (despite lower stock portfolios).

***

A few things are certain.

Something happened a long time ago, a something we will never grasp.
The tides will rise and fall in tune with the moon. 
And each of us will die.

I remember this at particularly bad times, like the day I watched the city burn from across the river, waiting for wounded that never arrived, or the few awful moments telling a mother her child will never hug her again. And remembering these certain things do help.

Most days, however, I forget what's certain, as most of us "living" in this culture, and the consequences are devastating, if not apparent.

My sister never forgot this, and danced every day. She also moved mountains. She could see the person behind the sheen. She could bring the mudflats into the boardroom, and she did.

I don't ever want to make people uncomfortable because of what I said. I just want them to understand the consequences of what they does. With the exception of psychopaths (and a few of them exist), people can, and do, change.

***

I'll leave lobbying to the professionals, those who can speak without sputtering, and not stare (or giggle) at the well manicured hands of the elite. I can't speak rationally in any room that won't support a plant.

Meanwhile, I'll take my nephew clamming. We catch live critters, and we kill live critters. If you do this fully aware of what you're doing, it changes you. At the very least, it will get you fresh food and spoil your appetite for the stuff that passes as fresh in the supermarket.

If any Senator or CEO wants to try a hand at this, let me know. The only condition is that you don't reveal my secret clam bed. We'll rake clams and` eat them before the next tide rises. I'll even break out the homebrew.

I promise not to talk politics. After years of trying, I know my words won't change you. But the mud might.

If you ever get a chance to dine with the elite, goodness, taste their wine. 

While food from our kitchen rivals anything the ultra-rich eat, I have to admit they drink some mighty fine wine.

READ MORE - Take a Senator Clamming Day

The tines of my clam rake are shiny again, as the rust is polished off by the sand that hides my prey. Spring is here again. I love clamming because, well, just because. I am pretty good at it, too, because I love it and persisted at it. It's not rocket science, true, but there's an art to spotting a keyhole, the mark of a quahog.

What would you teach in class if all your children had decent livelihoods waiting for them that did not require advanced math or public speaking skills? What if you had a child who loved clamming, was good at it, and who wanted to learn more about the world?

I suppose you could argue that he could use geometry to calculate the angles of his rake tines, and biology to find new clam beds, and language arts to create better copy for his business ads, but these are excuses, really, to teach what we want to teach, in 48 minute chunks, 5 days a week.

(When was the last time you used something you learned in high school you could not have learned on your own anyway?)

What would you teach a child interested in knowing more about the world aside from economic aspirations?

Yes, well, um, of course, but such a child is rare, you see, we must focus on the global economy, on future jobs we cannot predict, on beating the scores of China or Korea or Finland--we must prepare them for the "real world."

If you believe that children are not interested in learning about the world, you need to watch them outside of school.

It might just be that they're just not interested in what's happening in your room. Even if it's "on the test."

Imagine if you had to learn about clamming--trivia about the various rakes available, the various shellfish. Where are they found? How do you read a DEP map? How do you get a license? How do you read the tides, the wind, the water temperatures?

You might argue that learning about the particulars of clamming is, well, ridiculous, and I'd agree.

Tell me how "Us[ing] mathematical formulas to justify the concept of an efficient diet" grabs your interest.That's just one of our "cumulative progress indicators"(specifically 5.3.12.B.2) for biology. Now do this for multiple subjects.

And we wonder why the dropout rate is so high....

That's me clamming somewhere in New Jersey, and even saying that much is too much.

READ MORE - The NJ Clamming End of Course Exam

We got a 22 knot breeze blowing out of the true NNW.
We got a full moon, with tides predicted to be 1.2 feet lower than normal even before we got the breeze.
We got ourselves a blowout tide, baby!

And we got a bunch of clams to show for it. In February. Just when all the nonsense gets to be a bit much, grace intercedes.

We got blown about around a bit today, my Uncle Bob and me, but we got clams to show for it.

 (If anyone reading this is down the Jersey shore, get yourselves out there--if you don't want quahogs, scallops are there for the picking.)

The photo is of some of the clams raked today. Clams in February. Life is good.

READ MORE - Blowout tide

The sun burped on Monday--its breath will hit tonight.

Get outside and look up--auroras are possible in this neck of the woods, and possibly as far south as D.C. We have an even better shot tomorrow.

The moon's practically full, so even if we get the show, it may be washed out a bit. But that's OK, that same full moon is opening up tidal flats for dinner on Saturday.

Not often one gets a shot at an aurora and clams in the same week in February.

Photo by NASA via National Geographic.

READ MORE - Look up!

We are visual critters.
We know this, and we forget this.

We descended (with modification) from organisms over billions of years.
We know this, and we forget this.

We didn't start drawing on cave walls until about 30,000 years ago.
After we started, a few of us thought maybe we'd be better off if we didn't.

Last week Mark came to visit--he's a film editor, and a good one. His professional life revolves around his vision. He speaks in paragraphs, about a third of which involve discussing ways to manipulate light.

He makes a living creating graven images.

I introduced him to clamming.

When you rake for clams, you feel the bottom of the bay through your handle. When your rake hits a clam, you as much hear it as feel it. You reach into the soft mud, then wrap your hands around the clam. A quahog fits perfectly in your palm. You know you have one before you ever see it.

No words, no pictures, no imagination can capture the satisfaction of feeling the firm curve of a quahog in your palm, fulfilling a desire you did not know you had.

***

When you stare at the monitor, you are catching photons with your retina. Your monitor mixes together red, green, and blue--your eyes and your brain do the rest.

Oh, yes, old man,we know that trick already. So what? It's just sophistry....

And it is, mostly, just sophistry. A decent magnifying glass will show the three colors, you might be amused for a moment, and then you go on.

Bear with me, this will meander back to teaching science.

I grew up Irish Catholic, and wandered into other sects once I started reading the Bible. My world view, for better or worse, is framed by Christendom. Whether Christendom has much to do with the Christ is another story for another time.

Old collections of words that have survived generations upon generations of readers may not reflect truth, but we can learn from ancient worldviews. Not all of us who own Bibles wield them as weapons, though I do confess they work well on centipedes.

(Please do not presume to know my "beliefs" from a single post. Even if you could, they swirl like the morning fog over a mountain creek, and last just about as long.)

I used to go to Sunday school. (Even scarier, I used to teach Sunday school.)

On the wall in Sunday school class was a poster of Garfield the Cat. It was an ordinary poster, nothing special, just paper and ink. Garfield has his usual snarky expression, and every time I looked at it, I had my usual visceral response. I do not like Garfield.

The Ten Commandments came up in Sunday school, as they will. Most of the commandments are easy enough to understand. Don't kill. Don't steal. Don't lie. Do not lust over your buddy's wife. While you're at it, stop fantasizing about his Maserati. Basic stuff.

Then there's the Second Commandment:

You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

The ancients knew the power of vision. What you see becomes part of you.

Yes, I can step back and see that Garfield is just paper and ink, but this requires work. When you look at a photograph, you are in the world of the photograph.

Until 30,000 years ago, if I saw a big cat, it was a real cat, one that posed danger. I reacted. If I did not react, my DNA ended up in the tiger's gut, not a good place to procreate.

For billions of years, the particular strands of DNA that make up me managed to replicate. Eyes have been around for over 500 million years, and offer an obvious advantage to survival. For organisms with vision, seeing is believing. For humans, it is how we learn about the outside world.

I mentioned Garfield the Cat during a discussion about the Second Commandment, and why I thought that this particular commandment revealed a subtle wisdom by our ancestors. I don't think I'll bring up Garfield again should I venture back.

***

And what does this have to do with teaching?

Our children are surrounded by human-generated images. Art. Advertisements. Branding. They make things real by taking pictures.

A child constructs a model rocket, then captures it with a camera. The image is more valuable than the rocket, which has since been discarded.

In science class we throw image after image at our students, without discernment. We throw picture after picture after picture. Here's a rain forest in Ecuador, there's a polar bear, look, a bacterium--each fills the Smartboard screen in vivid colors, one after another, without reference, without discernment.

A photograph of a frog teaches little if the student has never held a frog.

Once we learned to manipulate images, sight became magical. Our children believe in magic, but so do the adults. We have created our own worlds.

If you live life in an artificial world, in front of monitors and televisions and photographs and books, you can have beauty and dazzle and immortality. You can have joy and tears. You can free yourself from boredom. You might even find love.

You will, however, be limited by the imagination of humans. You will also be "freed" from the reality of natural limits, and for many of us this is worth losing.

When I stand in my garden in April, I cannot truly imagine it filling with tomatoes and basil and dill and squash by late July.

Still, by November, most of the plants are dead, no matter how many pictures I take.

As a teacher, I want the children to grasp the limits of their imagination--only then can they start to grasp this thing around us, what "awesome" truly means.

The Garfield image generated more hits than my words ever did.
I removed it, for my sanity, and yours....

READ MORE - The Second Commandment