The No Child Left Behind law requires that 100% of children in public education are proficient in math and reading (in English) by 2014. The law is absurd, something recognized even by those with minimal contact with reality in the fantasy bubble of D.C.

Yet here we go, marching off like lemmings--and that's a royal "we." Every time I hand out number 2 pencils to comply with the state, I am complicit. You are, too. It's a wonderful word that sounds safe but exposes sins. Say it aloud:

Complicit--has a Snapesian quality to it, no?

Arne has offered us a plan to disincentivize our way out. If your state agrees to his plan, one that will cure poverty, end racism, and save corporatocracy democracy, your school will be exempt from the 100% pass requirement built into NCLB.

All you have to do is agree to Race to the Top--more tests, more central control, more privatization, more chaos.

Look behind the curtain and see the folks sitting around the impossibly shiny mahogany table--the powerful and the pale, soulless smiles for the camera, all acting in the name of good, the name of God, the name of greed.

This is a naked power grab by a man who called Katrina "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans," thought firing all the teachers at Central Falls HS was "doing the right thing for kids," and who has confounded the needs of corporations with the needs of a functioning democracy.

Say hello to Eli and Billy when they calls to say congrats this morning. Go ahead, wink at Michelle. A few teachers grumble when you take shots at our unions, but that's not where our hearts lie.

When you hurt our kids, our grumbles become growls, we become tigers.

I teach children what extortion means. When a child says "I'll be 'good' if..." that's extortion.

 I don;t play that game with children, I won;t play it with Arne.

READ MORE - Arne the Disincentivizer

This graphic from Adbusters was shared by someone on the AP Biology listserve.

Issue #84: Nihilism and Revolution

There's not much to say.
Not much at all.

I have never regretted a single moment spent outside, even those times an instant before impact.

READ MORE - A non-NCLB test for your students

"Remember when..."

Late June is a great time to be an American. Stories are told during the long, soft dusk. Lightning bugs almost make up for the skeeters. Talk swings from baseball to beans, passing through epic feats of failure, now funny stories weaved between births and deaths.

"Jodie's not so well... Gawd, how Anna has grown! 6 months?... Really? She barely shows....We're hanging on, barely....What a wedding!....Goodness, it's lovely out tonight....."

We laugh, we drink, we eat, we share.

Your children are not truly competing with the Chinese children or the Finnish children or the Indian children. Our children are now seen as chattel, penned in the same cell as any other child. They are all competing against an international corporate structure that protects their own children at the expense of all others. No, it's not some sekrit international plot--it's just human nature gone amok....

It doesn't have to be this way. We got good earth, and water, and trees, for now. We have seas with fish, and plains with grain, for now. We have coal and wind and sunlight. We have a reasonably moderate climate, for now.

We also have a story, a good story, and a constitution, a good constitution. We have wonderful parables--Johnny Appleseed, Annie Oakley, John Henry. We're the goofy, kind folks who left our native lands, folks who  can solve pretty much any problem tossed our way, in unexpected ways.

When did arrogance and efficiency and misplaced elitism become our story? Why do we care what Bill Gates and Eli Broad have to say? How does a man like Arne Duncan become the national figurehead for what used to be education?

When did we stop wanting to be Americans?

***

I'm not raising children to be chattel. A well-educated child, one who knows where she came from, knows her land, and knows what's possible, makes for a lousy slave.

There's a good reason literacy creates turmoil in tiered cultures.

Literacy takes time.
Education takes time and room.
Living well takes time and room and wisdom.

Our national leaders spent their lives rushing to "there" without ever knowing "here"--hard to love a land you know only abstractly. Hard to love anything you know only abstractly. It's impossible to rightly care for something you don't know how to love.

Love of our land can start with the simple act of putting a bean seed in a recycled milk carton, filled with dirt scooped up by a child's hand from the ground next to the school building. It can start with a walk to the closest stream. It can start with listening to a grandmother describe what her town looked like a few decades ago, when people knew what a stoop was for.

Not sure growing a bean will help a child on the NJASK, our tithe to the NCLB nonsense. But I am sure of this:

A child who has a love of place, of life, of the universe has a better shot at happiness than one who does not. Few things are more dangerous than an educated adult with no sense of place. Right now they're running the show, and telling the tales.

***

You don't need a tinfoil hat anymore to be a conspiracy crank. Here's a headline from today's Star-Ledger:

N.J. hedge fund leaders create group to financially back education reforms supported by Gov. Christie

Last week we got this:

Christie's proposal would give private companies unprecedented control of failing N.J. public schools

Chris Cerf, our Acting Commissioner of Education, used to be the CEO of Edison Schools--ask him how things went in Philly and Baltimore. He knows the problems. He's bright, he's personable, and I trust his heart is in the right place. I tend to trust a lot.

Yet here we go again. How does a bright man with an intimate role in the history of failed privatization of public schools keep doing what he does?

I have a hypothesis (hey, I'm a science teacher)--I suspect that he and those he hangs with share different stories, stories framed by private schools, hedge funds, and power. While Mr. Cerf was cutting his teeth as a teacher at Cincinnati Country Day School, I was busy chelating lead poisoned kids in Newark.

Fancy day schools will pluck out an occasional child of color from the inner city--makes making the websites and pamphlets more, um, democratic. They won't be taking the child whose brain has been severely damaged by lead. They won't be taking the child whose life crises leave a legacy of outrageous behaviors. 

They don't need to--it's not part of their story. They don't know those children even exist.

But I do.

 

To his credit, Mr. Cerf did spend some time with me, far more than I could have hoped for.
I don't want Zuckerberg's money, I don't want to administrate, I don't care much for meetings.
I do care about the kids, and I do care about my profession.
I know a bit about both. 

READ MORE - Stories matter

So, yes, improving education in math and science is about producing engineers and researchers and scientists and innovators who are going to help transform our economy and our lives for the better. But it's also about something more.

It's about expanding opportunity for all Americans in a world where an education is the key to success. It's about an informed citizenry in an era where many of the problems we face as a nation are at root scientific problems.

President Obama,November, 2009

Our problems are not, at root, scientific problems--our problems reflect cultural problems, a society that makes fantastic promises that defy natural limits. 

Lumping natural science education together with engineering is like putting coffee on your eggs--they both have a place at the table, but are best served separately.

President Obama fails to see this. Arne Duncan fails to see this. Bill Gates, Eli Broad,and many others handsomely rewarded by our cultural problems fail to see this. Their "education" has served them well.

***

I cut my teeth at Michigan's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. I could (and did) wander from Fourier to Frost, from lab benches to a benches in the Museum of Art. Though it sounds quaint today, we, the learning community (students, professors, locals, and more than a handful of colorful street performers--remember "Shakey Jake"?) sought truth through inquiry.

Seeking truth through inquiry is how we learn about the natural world, about the human condition, about pretty much anything that matters.


There is no better other way to teach a child.

***

• One was a was a physicist, a theologian, a  natural philosopher, an alchemist, and  an astronomer.
• Another a monk, a gardener,a  beekeeper, an astronomer, and a meteorologist.
• The third was a failed medical student, a bug collector, a marine biologist, a geologist, and a taxidermist who happened to spend a few years on the British survey ship the HMS Beagle.

You do not create scientists by pushing "science" on them-- Newton, Mendel, and Darwin did not pursue science--they were interested in the world, and how it works.

If you know how the story ends, you are not practicing science.
If you tell a child how the story is supposed to end, you are not teaching science.

That we worry more about a young child's access to software than soil shows how confused we have become--no one ever got rich pushing soil to school children.

Someone's getting rich pushing iPads to kindergarterners, though. The Superintendent of that district, Tom Morrill, thinks it's something that "absolutely" must be done: 

“When you take a look at what the IPad 2 can do and you look at the wealth of apps that are out there, everything from learning your letters to books that can be read… fingerpainting, you name it. It’s absolutely something that we must do.”

Only someone disconnected from the world could equate a fingerpainting app with its messy, sensuous reality that teaches so much more than making pretty "art".

Imagine that--"books that can be read...."
The various vocations of the famous scientists were lifted from Wikipedia.

READ MORE - Stemming STEM

These words started as a visceral response to a friend who coined "The One-Boobed Systyrs of the Apocalypse." She's still fighting.




I remember the first breast I saw no longer attached to the body it once helped define. I had seen body parts in various forms before, but this one was fresh. A flap of sallow skin with a wizened nipple defining it, a long trail of fibrous fatty tissue trailing off the slab.

The pathologist, smoking as he dictated, handled the breast like a butcher handles meat about to be weighed, though not as kindly.

The breast had been part of a man who probably did not survive his bout with breast cancer. Most people back then did not fare well, and men fared worse than women.

Incidences of breast cancer change in populations as people migrate from one area of the world to another, suggesting that environmental factors contribute to this disease. There is a continuing effort at the NIEHS to identify these environmental factors and the role that exposures to specific chemicals could play in this disease.

National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, NIH

I shaved my mother's head when the cancer recurred--bony metastases in her skull made the shaving more difficult. She walked like a marionette with tangled strings the weeks before she died. In a radiology reading room, we'd call them "goobers." Goobers on the brain.

Unless it was one of our mothers, our sisters, our daughters--then they were metastases.

***

Since 1985, Zeneca Pharmaceuticals has been the sole funder of October's National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM). Zeneca has promoted a blame-the-victim strategy to explain away escalating breast cancer rates, which ignores the role of avoidable carcinogens. Zeneca's parent company, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), is one of the world's largest manufacturers of petrochemical and chlorinated [organic] products -- including the plastic ingredient, vinyl chloride -- which has been directly linked to breast cancer, and the pesticide Acetochlor.

In addition, Zeneca is the sole manufacturer of Tamoxifen, the world's top-selling cancer drug used for breast cancer. In return for funding the "awareness" campaign, ICI/Zeneca has control and veto power over every poster, pamphlet and commercial produced by NBCAM.

" A decade-old multi-million dollar deal between National Breast Cancer Awareness Month sponsors and Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) has produced reckless misinformation on breast cancer," said Dr. Epstein.

"Chemical Industry Funds Breast Cancer Campaign"

Cancer Prevention Coalition

The media focuses on the strength of cancer survivors, and I have seen tremendously strong women live and die graciously through months and years of chemotherapy and radiation and surgery. The magazines will show glossy pictures of proud women, and these things matter, of course. Avon will sell "Kiss Goodbye to Breast Cancer Lipsticks," Mars, Inc., will sell you pink and white M&M's, and General Electric will sell you a Senographe 2000D mammographer.

They do not show a mother cowering in her bathroom, her bald head bare, blood all over the toilet from a nosebleed that will not stop, her teen-age son standing awkwardly, bravely holding her head.

They do not show the vomiting, the pain, the fear. They do not show a mother with her arm in a machine trying to squish out the fluid building up from lymphedema. They do not show the bony protuberances on a skull, the smell of dying cells.

They do not show a child wiping her mother clean because she is too proud to use a bedpan and too weak to use a toilet.

***

dichlorodiphenyl-dichloroethene
polychlorinated biphenyls

dieldrin
chlordane

heptachlor
polychlorinated dibenzodioxins.

In 1991, these were the 6 most common carcinogens found in breast milk. The news has gotten worse since then. We are at the top of the food chain--toxins accumulate.

It has been known that breastfeeding reduces your chance of getting breast cancer. The longer you breastfeed your babies, the lower the risk. This has been attributed to hormonal changes related to breastfeeding--breastfeeding women cycle less, and had less exposure to estrogen.

There has been speculation (and it is only speculation), that breastfeeding may help reduce the chemical pollutant load on the mother. Guess who gets the chemicals.

***

The lifetime risk of a woman developing breast cancer was just less than 10% in the 1970's, or 1 in 10; it is now 13.4%, or almost 1 in 7 (NCI, 2005). In the 1940's, the risk was 1 in 22. Breast cancer is the leading cause of death in women 34 to 54 years of age.

Until recently, the incidence of breast cancer had gone up about a percentage point every year since 1940.

***

Janet Jackson flashes a breast, and our Federal Government now rushes to redefine obscene. Certain words and phrases will cost lots of money; Howard Stern has opted to put his voice into orbit.

Here's an obscene phrase that won't cost anything--in fact, in past Octobers you have might hear it dozens of times:

Early Detection is the Best Protection.

This makes no sense--once detected, you already have it. The best protection is prevention which, admittedly, would require massive, radical changes in the way we live. The NBCAM folks got wise--they now say "Early Detection Saves Lives"--if you go to their website, they pretend that this is what they have always said.

So it must be true.

I wrote this several years ago for a friend, who is still fighting, and for my mother, who lost.

READ MORE - "Breast Cancer Awareness Month" is obscene

My sister believed that so long as people are capable of change, and they are, we keep fighting.

I believe that within a decade or two, given the insatiable appetite of the economic elite, public education will be unrecognizable, if it even still exists.




So why do I teach?

• Because the world is a wonderful place.
• Because our essence requires that we dance, no matter what, no matter how we're judged.
• I believe redemption is possible.
• And most important, I believe we need to pursue excellence, truth, and love no matter who's banging at the gate. A lot of civilizations more honorable than ours have been extinguished. I pray a lot of civilizations more honorable than ours will rise again.

If you do not know why you teach (beyond the paycheck), please get out.

***

Somewhere in Newark my signature lies on several death certificates of children who should still be alive.

Somewhere in Newark my signature lies on orders written in vain (and ridiculous) efforts to save children the city, the state, the country, and the universe refuse to acknowledge.

I failed.

I wish for the sake of the children that Governor Christie and Mayor Booker and Oprah and Mr. Zuckerberg succeed. Maybe we need a knowingly ignorant Quattuorvirate to come in to save this town.

But I doubt it. I really do.

And in the meantime the children continue to suffer.

READ MORE - Oprah, Cory, Mark, and Chris

Arne Duncan and company just gave Achieve.org $170 million to develop tests to make sure your child is corporate ready once she leaves high school.

This is an example of the sorts of questions Achieve has already used:





Tom Hoffman just did a quick deconstruction of the Common Core ELA standards. Go read it.

A traditional liberal arts curriculum aligned to these standards, or, for that matter, a project-based curriculum, is only held up in Common Core by a few heavily strained pegs.

Tom Hoffman

A traditional liberal arts education is an anathema to a power structure dependent on, well, idiocy creating a functional but uncritical pool of labor.

Maybe I'm confused--I thought the government belonged to "we the people" and that it exists for our needs.

By design, "Achieve's board consists of six governors (three Democrats and three Republicans) and six CEOs."

I don't give a rat's ass what any governor thinks but mine--a governor's authority stops at the state line, no matter what party though 'd be hard pressed to distinguish the two mentioned. CEO's belong in boardrooms, not classrooms--they've already done enough damage.

It is to our utter shame that our government allowed our public education to be hijacked under our noses by private enterprise using our money.

Follow the money....

READ MORE - Another Arne rant

"The days of telling kids to go home at 2:30 and having mom there with a peanut butter sandwich, those days are gone....the hours from 3 o’clock to 7 o’clock are a huge anxiety, and that’s why we have to keep our schools open longer."

Arne the Scarecrow

Many families have limited choices.

Daddy's working. Mommy's working. Grandma's in the old people warehouse.

And we need kids to improve their test scores so that they can compete with the children in India and Sri Lanka, to make more goods few of us need, to keep Mommy and Daddy at work even longer.

***

Maybe Arne should take a peek at Bob Herbert's column today. Arne keeps talking of moral obligations. Herbert today is talking of sin ("A Sin and a Shame").

"At the end of the fourth quarter in 2008, you see corporate profits begin to really take off, and they grow by the time you get to the first quarter of 2010 by $572 billion. And over that same time period, wage and salary payments go down by $122 billion.”

Andrew Sum, PhD
Director of the Center for Labor Market Studies
Northeastern University

That's called a clue, Arne.

If you want families to raise healthy, educated, well-rounded children, at least one adult needs to be home during a child's waking hours.

An adult who can show a child how to sow, how to fix things, how to enjoy life outside the classroom, outside the office, outside the car. Maybe even how to love.

Want to raise school performance? Raise minimum wage to a level that allows a child to see an adult family member for at least half the time she's conscious, doing something worthwhile besides "earning a living."

The Ozzie and Harriet photo is from a website that sells the videos.
And yes, Duncan's quote is sexist, but it's so stupid I doubt he's doing any harm with it.
I'll get back to teaching science again soon.

READ MORE - Ozzie and Harriet and Arne

As part of the show-and-tell of working in grant funded projects taking care of very poor kids in very devastated cities. I got to meet CEO's, sit in boardrooms, greet national politicians--I even got to spend a couple of days in the White House sitting on some sub-committee of some sub-committee.

A few things I learned:

• Powerful people don't pay for coffee--it's just always there.
• Powerful people have pretty fingernails. (I get bored easily at meetings.)
  
• Poor kids of color with bright smiles on their faces loosen checkbooks.
• Nobody really wants to hear the truth.
• It's easy, real easy, to be seduced to join the other side.
  

I had a bad day now and again.

On one such bad day, someone got shot close to our clinic. He died, his blood on my clothes. A few hours later I was sitting with the number two person of a large, local non-profit, an agency that does good work, trying to develop a grant.

I grumbled about something, and the meeting deteriorated.

So I learned to stop grumbling. I learned to stop screaming. I learned to behave civilly. I learned how to do "that smile." And I kept reminding myself why, so I could glom money to keep us in business, caring for children few people cared about.

Our project got the money, the pols and corporations got the pretty press, and I got a lesson in prostitution.

***

I got a few minutes of face to face time with Al Gore, with just 3 others in the room, back when he was running for VP in 1990. He was bright, knowledgeable, and very different from the man who gave a speech just minutes later, when he was hustled out by his people.

I went home confused--how can someone separate themselves like that?

In 2000 he flat gave up the election. Maybe he was tired, maybe someone had something on him, or maybe he wanted to be that private Al Gore, the one I got to meet when he wasn't on camera.

***

Bill Gates. Eli Broad. Arne Duncan. Barack Obama.
None of these men spend any time listening to anyone who has not been filtered through boardrooms and golf courses, anyone who has not perfect the wile and smile needed to gain access to power.

Oh, they'll pose for the photo ops. They'll hand out the checks. They'll do all things possible to get their way.



On Thursday, Mr. Duncan will give a speech on the "quiet revolution" moving through schools. Powerful folks like "quiet." I know that. I kept quiet too many times when jumping on the corporate table screaming out the truth would ended my work, because I liked doing what I did.

And looking back, I'm not sure I changed a thing.

The Arne photo is from ABC News--the child is reading a thank you letter.

The board room belongs to International Flavors and Fragrances--
they polluted a local lake near where I grew up, but boy, look at that room!

READ MORE - Arne's "quiet revolution"

It's July--the sun still reigns, but as it slips slowly away, sordid disorder slips in. Gardens get weedy, wasps a tad touchy. June fools us into thinking entropy is an illusion.

July cures illusions.

***

I am reading both Alfie Kohn and Lewis Mumford this week--Kohn's The School Our Children Deserve and Mumford's The Myth of the Machine. Kohn paints a lovely picture of what is possible, Mumford explains why we do it wrong anyway:

Once automatic control is installed one cannot refuse to accept its instructions...for theoretically the machine cannot allow anyone to deviate from its own perfect standards. And this brings us at once to the most radical defect in every automated system: for its smooth operation this under-dimensioned system requires equally under-dimensioned men, whose values are needed for the operation and continued expansion of the system itself.

Human autonomy has become a quaint idea.

***

Arne Duncan, the quintessential Organizational Man, was predicted by Lewis Mumford--he does what he does to keep the machinery humming.

The sad thing is that a lot of folks, culturally accepted sociopaths, do as Arne does. Joyce Irvine, an effective principal by all accounts, was fired this week to keep the machine humming.

“Her students made so much progress.
What’s happened to her is not at all connected to reality.”

Jeanne Collins, Superintendent of district

***

The good news is this--if you treat children as "humans now" instead of as "workers later" they do as well on the standardized tests as those who get the drill-to-kill treatment, perhaps even better.

I'm busy constructing a constructivist classroom. I'm risking my career on Kohn's words and research. I'm hoping my children become happy, thinking adults.

And I pray I never have an Arne Duncan clone give me credit years later as the driving force in his education.

READ MORE - Alfie, Arne, Charlie, and Mumford

I have an unhealthy (and perhaps unnatural) dislike of oligarchs.

Bill Gates plans to leave $10,000,000 to each of his children because he "doesn’t want to leave them the burden of tremendous wealth."

Read that again. S-L-O-W-L-Y....

Mr. Gates the Third knows nothing about my town, my children, our state, about horseshoe crabs, or about life, judging by the (limited) evidence.

So here's a fair question: what does Mr. Gates the Third believe in? What matters to him? I wouldn't give a rat's ass about these questions if Mr. Gates the Third left my children (and yours) alone.

But he won't. Neither will Eli Broad nor Arne Duncan nor Warren Buffet. So I want to know what they believe. Do they believe in God or an afterlife? Do they believe in the commons? Do they garden or brew or bake, or do they have "their people" do it for them?

People who screw with public education better have good reasons. Our local schools are the last grasp of the public commons that we have; the top 10% of Americans now control over 70% of the wealth; the bottom 50% control 2.5%. The top 1% have more than 13 times what half the nation holds.




Here's an idea--let those of us in the bottom 80% figure out what our children need, those born without "the Third" appended to their names. Those who fight the wars. Those who fill town halls and local bars and public parks. Those whose backs support the dreams of the Bills and Melinda and Warrens in our midst.

The most depressing thing about reading about Mr. Gates the Third?
Will Nelson, our Willie Nelson, played at their wedding.

The graph is from True/Slant.....

The "Bill Gates Hates Children" poster was lifted from Rudd-O,
which grants a GNU GPL license ....

READ MORE - Bill Gates the Third: Póg mo Thóin

Please tell me this is a spoof, that the oligarchs infecting Arne's brain like earwigs* do not believe that this is what it's all about:

Bill Gates wants to dictate education in your town.
Bill Gates envisions the world above.

Why not just turn us all into hamsters?

*Yes, I know, earwigs do not really eat into your brain through your ears. What you might not know is that they don't really pinch much, and that they care for their young. Really....Which is more than I can say for Bill Gates, at least judging by the way he cares for my students.

The Habitrail photo is by JediLofty under Gnu license

READ MORE - Bill Gates's view of Heaven

What matters?

If a child had true control over her education, and she truly understood what matters, would she sit in my class?

Ah, yes, interesting question, but it is our job as
the wise teachers to help her understand what matters....

Do we? Would you risk your livelihood by doing what's in the best interest of our children?

Of course, we're professionals, we are advocates,
can you not hear our self-righteous chest-beating?

Do you proctor state tests you noisily condemn in the faculty lounge?

Ah, well, yes, I see your point, but that's really out of our hands.

What would a well-educated, thinking young adult look like in my classroom?
Would I recognize her?

Ah, yes, the problem child, the one in black
reading Dante's Inferno, not even pretending to hide the book.

I once told a bright, fascinating student reading an interesting book that she needed to learn to be more discrete in the classroom.

Are we creating the kinds of adults we need to create?

Kids start drinking coffee in high school.
We don't use slide rules anymore, we use far more powerful tools.
What are we doing?

READ MORE - Coffee, slide rules, and educated children

Young children, 2 to 5 years old, spend over 3 1/2 hours a day
in front of televisions.

Preschool children need about 12 hours of sleep a day, so figure a healthy child has about 12 hours a day to earn about ants, water, people, and play.

30% of their awake time is spent in front of a television. Throw in the other video devices (DVRs, DVDs, game consoles, etc.) and you're edging up to 40%.

This, of course, is obscene.

But I watch with my child....
Yep, I don't doubt it--why not try watching your child, instead.

But it's educational....
Yep, if you want to make a babbling empty box out of him, an empty box that will swallow dogma and buy lots of shoes.

But I need my free time....
Yep, and you'll get it when the kids hit school, which seems to be the major reason for public school in many parents' eyes.

But it's PBS....
Yep, drop the "P" and you're closer to the truth.

But it quiets down my noisy toddler....
Yep, another drowned voice keeps her safe from that democratic lifestyle.

But it's a dangerous world outside.
Yep, but far less dangerous than the sheltered world we've made for our children. Diabetes will kill your child long before the bogeyman has a chance.

Turn it off.

Photo by Leslie, taken last evening on the Delaware Bay.
Some large mammals with big teeth were nearby, but we survived anyway.
Family around TV via cerritos.edu, listed as public domain.

Source of television stats: NielsonWire. That and some basic arithmetic.

READ MORE - Throw away your television

This is a longish rant meant mostly for me--
it will be as effective as screaming into a pillow,
and, I hope, just as comforting.




Last night I sat in on our Senior Awards Night, a lovely affair commemorating the deeds of our senior class. Over 90 awards were given, many of them specific to our town and our history.

The Ralph C. Diller Outstanding Choir Award, The Eric Segal Memorial Scholarship , The Raymond W. Hartman Outstanding Band Member Award...

Bloomfield has been around a long time--it's a proud working class town that still values effort over just about anything.

...The Edith M. Albinson Choral Award, The Margaret Sherlock Memorial Chemistry Scholarship, The Mary E. Boylan Egan Scholarship...

One award goes to a student with a "grade average of B-C, well rounded person in school, civic and youth activities." Another to a "student who has through perseverance and effort has maximized his potential."

...Suzan Hertzberg-Bohrer--Jason Pelusio Scholarship, Hilda R. Taffet Scho
larship,
Michael Castles Memorial Scholarship...

In 1849, Bloomfield joined the Free School Act, taxing its citizens to provide public education to its children. The Bloomfield Oakes Woolen Mill provided uniforms in the Civil War. A brownfield marks the early development of the atomic bomb in our neighborhood. Street signs carry the names of so many from town who died in wars past.

We've paid our dues.

...The Gay Gerber Memorial Scholarship, The George Daudelin Memorial Scholarship,
The Michael Cozzolongo Memorial Scholarship,
The Joseph A. Bongiorno Career Education Senior Awards...

For all the shouting coming from the Scarecrow in D.C., the folks in Bloomfield are still footing the bill for educating the children in their town. Anyone who has spent any real time in town knows someone who knows someone who knows someone--all of us are connected.

And so sometimes when I hear folks down in Louisiana expressing frustrations, I may not always think that they're comments are fair; on the other hand, I probably think to myself, these are folks who grew up fishing in these wetlands and seeing this as an integral part of who they are - and to see that messed up in this fashion would be infuriating.

A man who moved yanked his children from Illinois

No, Mr. President, folks who know the land under their feet, the water under their boats, do not see "this" as an integral part of who they are. It is, indeed, part of who they are.

Churlish parochialism gets lots of press. Farmers are hicks, clammers are slow, and commercial fisherman piss away all their money within hours of coming into port.

A real education, one worthy of producing citizens who the land enough to defend it to their deaths, must be parochial. If you do not love the earth beneath your feet, you cannot love this huge abstract thing called country.

I cannot know America any more than I can know the moon. I do know, however, the patch of land I tend in New Jersey. I know my clam bed as well as maybe a few dozen other people on this planet.

I will not fight for abstract, nonsensical causes. I will, however, defend a patch of Grassy Sound should someone try to take it.

The same week Mr. Obama made his inane statement, one that resists partisan classification, the Common Core State Standards Initiative released the final version of their standards, designed to make American children fit for the global workforce.

These standards provide appropriate benchmarks for all students, regardless of where they live, and allow states to more effectively help all students to succeed.

Steve Paine, West Virginia State Superintendent of Schools

I looked for the part about clamming--I think they missed it.

A kid growing up in Jersey needs to know about eel grass and horseshoe crabs; a kid growing up in Wyoming may need to learn a thing (or two) about grizzlies and elk. No child needs to learn how to be a private corporate clown. Public schools should be for the public good.If you want to raise a child who preys on others, there are plenty of private schools that will be glad to take your money.

That so few folks see the disconnect we are cultivating is infuriating.

I have no problem with some children "know[ing] and apply[ing] the Binomial Theorem for the expansion of (x + y)ⁿ in powers of x and y for a positive integer n, where x and y are any numbers, with coefficients determined for example by Pascal’s Triangle"--but I have a HUGE problem making that part of a core curriculum in any population where half the students are below average intelligence.

We have a decent town, with a lot of decent folks working hard to raise families, pay taxes, and, dare I say it, pursue happiness. You can live comfortably in Bloomfield even if (or maybe especially) you're not terribly ambitious.

If you cannot see the Bloomfield in me, or in my children, you have no business telling me how to raise them, no matter how much Bill Gates or Vartan Gregorian may need them. for their businesses.

Clamming is an honest business that requires a local education. Too bad we've gone done killed all the clams.

READ MORE - On oil spills, disconnected Presidents, and Bloomfield

We all have a vested interest in advancing our country’s proficiency in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math as a means to driving innovation and jobs — which are key to fueling our economic growth and global competitiveness.

Steve Ballmer
CEO, Microsoft

Yesterday was National Lab Day--major corporations, foundations, politicians, and business folks got together to fuel a national PR project to push technology under the guise of science. Again.

Technology serves the self, science is another beast altogether.

We teach mostly technology in high school--it's what the corporations want, it's what the Feds want, it's what parents want. Get edumacated, get a degree, get a career, get fed, get laid, maybe have kids, and eventually get dead. I'm not saying that's a bad plan, at least not publicly, but it does require limited vision. Thankfully, we live in a culture that's designed to provide the blinders.

Science, unlike technology, serves no one. It is selfless. Peek beyond the hoopla of equations and models and jargon and the floor falls out of the universe.

Or rather, the universe, it seems, has no floor.

If I could teach this to 15 year old brains, bad things would happen. Fortunately, their brains are not mature enough to grasp this, and I'm not half the teacher needed to teach this. Even with tenure, I'm not sure my career could survive a class of children grasping how tenuous reality is.

***

Pick up an object you know, one that gives you comfort, maybe an old shell. It feels solid, has some heft, it's real.

Yet it's mostly empty space.
Yet is is tugged by every other object that exists in the universe.
Yet its elements were fused in the vast gravitational depths of some unknown star.
And maybe most stunning, the oyster was once alive, a sentient creature, and no longer is.

I do not teach religion in class, I teach science. You get to the edges of it, though, and words fall apart. When words fall apart, walls, which are mostly space anyway, fall apart as well.

If a child is locked in a human universe, culturally bound to the myths that will help her become the successful careerist she's been taught to want, grasping even basic physics may ruin her as surely as mainlining heroin.

Thankfully, a child can fly through school "knowing" all kinds of equations without truly understanding their implications. We keep science safe.

Steve Ballmer wants your kid's brain wrapped in gauze. I want your kid's brain so open to possibilities that it oozes all over the universe. I admit his version is more likely to lead to financial success.

But I bet my version is happier.

Photo via ayacop on wikipedia, CC

READ MORE - National Lab Rat Day

I'm hijacking a side conversation started by Doug Johnson, a mensch, on his Blue Skunk Blog. Go take a peek.

Doug recently posted a letter by Janet HasBrouck, a teacher librarian lamenting the limitations of e-textbooks. ("Lamenting" may be too strong a word--I have an awful attachment to alliteration.)

"We seem to make assumptions about students and technology that are often not true, and there seems to be a lot of them about e-texts especially. I don't think we can necessarily combine the discussion about e-library books, including fiction and reference, with the discussion about e-textbooks at the high school or college level."

from Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk Blog

Meet Scott McLeod, a rising national figure, one of the "emerging voices that will shape the future of education technology." His dangerously irrelevant blog is challenging and in-your-face. He loves to tweak teachers, or at least a mythical version of teachers, and his blog is big fun to read, especially if you sprinkle it with a few grains of salt.

He wrote a pithy response to Ms. HasBrouck's piece, and ends it with "I feel like I'm missing something....."

Scott is bright and educated. Yet here we go again, folks squinting through telescopes in their ivory towers, judging us sowing in the field, wondering why we keep sowing by hand instead of using the John Deere 1590 Seed Drill that is so much more efficient.

So here's my reason, a tiny section of an on-line textbook used by my school, cut and pasted from the Holt, Rinehart, Winston website it came from:

To be fair to the Holt, your view of this may be adulterated by technological glitches beyond Holt's control, but the image has a slight pixelated feel when view directly on the computers at school and in my home.

Maybe it will be better next year, maybe 5--call me when it works. If cars were rolled out the same way technology is rolled out in schools, Ford's first Model A cars might have lacked wheels.

READ MORE - The Technorati disconnect

In 29 fell swoops, Westley Strellis advanced education in Atlanta today.


He took out 29 televisions at an Atlanta Walmart using an Easton baseball bat he borrowed from the sporting goods section.

Eight days before the Braves open training camp in the Grapefruit League, Mr. Strellis struck a blow for small businesses, for education, and, by golly, for baseball.


The "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" ought to be mandatory reading for anyone contemplating teaching. The Case Against the Global Economy: And for a Turn Toward the Local ought to be mandatory reading for anyone interested in maintaining our republic. Both were written by Jerry Mander, once a Madison Avenue guy, and a hero of mine.

I know, I know, I shouldn't encourage this kind of nonsense. And maybe those Boston dudes should not have tossed the tea overboard.

The police report was lifted from The Smoking Gun

READ MORE - Jerry Mander would be proud