I used to be a doctor, the kind with a stethoscope, the kind licensed to hurt you for you own good. It puzzles children to learn that a physician would walk away from medicine in order to teach, and there are days I am baffled myself.

I liked medicine. I love teaching. I did not know that this would be true when I left medicine, so while it is true, it is not enough to explain why I left. Why leave something you like, especially when it pays ridiculously well?

Every year children ask me this, and so far I have not quite gotten it right. I thought I had it right, but high school sophomores would kind of shake just a little bit sideways. I wasn't fooling them.

I think I got it right now.

***

I saw a lot of bad stuff in hospitals. I saw a lot of good stuff, too, but good stuff can be found in a lot of places. The truly bad stuff has a home in the hospital.

• The unlucky (an elderly woman who slowly died from an infection caused by an errant piece of metal ripping through her car's floor, riveting in her thigh).

• The doomed (a woman burned over most of her body, still conscious, still talking, immediately before we intubated her, rendering her speechless--we knew she was doomed when we did this. We did it anyway.)

• The curious (two babies sharing the same torso, the same heart, the same fate).

• The geographically screwed (an Asian toddler who needed a new heart, but who could not afford one, twisting away towards death as she lived in an American hospital as an alien).

• The innocent (children wasting away from a virus we barely understood, acquired from a mother's heroin habit or her lover's proclivities).

I was very good at diagnosis, and not bad at making things better once a diagnosis was made. A few were better than me, but not many.

***

 When you are surrounded by hurt, there are two ways to respond if you want to remain functional--fix it, or pretend it does not exist. I did a lot of fixing.

If you do medicine long enough, and if you are paying attention, you give death its due. It's real, it's usually ugly, and it's inevitable.

I can't beat death--took me awhile to get to that realization, but I got there. And it's liberating.

Turns out living isn't the goal--living well is what matters.

I was pretty good at helping people live longer. Now I'm getting good at helping people live well.

I thought my job mattered before, but had my doubts in the pitiful wail of a dying toddler, bruised and bleeding as we laid our hands, our technology, and finally our fists in futile CPR on her tiny body as it cooled its way back to entropy.

A life worth living is our only compensation against the greedy hand of death.

So I help children carve out a life worth living.

I'm a teacher.

If you teach, teach as though lives depend on it. If you think this is excessive, get out.
Photos by me or Leslie--feel free to use under CC.

READ MORE - Pediatrics vs. teaching

Last night was Perseids night--we had our lawn chairs out, the full moon's light blocked by the garage at our backs. The mosquitoes, our state bird, were scarce enough that we had not slathered on whatever state-of-the-art organic compounds we use to ward off 6-legged critters these days.

Joe Westerberg, Joshua Tree National Park, California, Aug. 11, 2007

We saw a bat, a welcome sight. Then two. Now a third.

We held still, lying on our chairs, watching the bats chase bugs and each other, a spectacular aerial show against the deep gray-violet of the late dusk sky. And we realized that, really, the mosquitoes were remarkably scant.

A bat swooped up from the ground by our feet, no doubt, munching away. We watched the acrobats flip from their invisible trapezes a few more moments, then one swooped inches from our heads.

Now we know that bats tangling in your hair is an old wives' tale, but the few mosquitoes buzzing about our heads was tempting enough to the bats to show off their aerial skill a tad too close, and as much as we appreciated their predation, we scurried back inside.

Though we missed the main event, the Perseids changed our world in subtle ways:

• We spent the whole afternoon outside, as well as a good chunk of dusk. The dust of Perseid micro-meteorites fell on our hair. (Heck, you can catch micro-meteorites at home--really!)

• A few of my red blood cells gulped by a mosquito (or two) ended up in the belly of a bat, now broken down into tiny pieces. Some of it will become part of that bat, some released as carbon dioxide in the bat's breath, possibly captured by the Brussels sprouts nearby, which I will eat after November's first frost.

Communion.

The meteor photo was taken by Joe Westerberg, lifted from Spaceweather.com, used with permission.

READ MORE - Bats!

The time between anniversaries of the uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima, plutonium on Nagasaki, have the same off-center pull on me of the awful hours on Good Friday. Attaching this disequilibrium to specific times is, of course, a human conceit, as is dreading the inevitable.

Still....

***

 The mid-moon evening tide lets us wander out onto the tidal flats at dusk--there's still a hint of color on the western edge of the bay, but the sun sank a half hour ago.

I wander around collecting horseshoe crab molts, the exoskeletons split along the front edge, where the sea creature wriggled its way out of its shell, self actualization in action. The husks of these ancient creatures hold no flesh.

As I scuffled my feet in water only inches deep, a globular critter wiggled its way from the edge of the sea back to the depths, and I pondered whether it was a sally growler, a croaker, a northern star gazer, or something else.

As if a name matters to it, to me.

To anything.

The shells in the photo were collected two dusks ago.

The critters that once claimed them are likely wandering around in the brown cool depths of the Delaware at this moment, unaware of anniversaries, but not unaware.

Awareness is not what makes us human.

READ MORE - Dusk on the edge of the bay

広島

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. ... It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. . . . What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history.

Harry S. Truman

It happened on this date, this "greatest achievement."




New technology used to "solve" an old problem. We cannot help ourselves.

Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute, suggested "we ought to stay out of the nuclei." Until we have a clue what we want, sounds like good advice.

You cannot separate tools from the critters who use them. Teaching science as some compartmentalized thought process without cultural context is a dangerous game.

What is our responsibility as teachers of science?
As citizens of the United States?
As human beings?

***

This morning I saw a wasp dragging paralyzed cricket along the edge of the driveway. The wasp was not much bigger than the cricket, and the wasp struggled. At one point she let go, stepped back a few inches, stroked her head a few times (much like a human facing a big task), and eventually dragged it down a hole by the driveway garden. The cricket was still alive, but paralyzed.

I did not intervene.

The wasp will lay her eggs in the cricket, and they will hatch in the cricket, still alive, and the cricket will, of course, suffer.

I did not intervene.

The larva wasp will use the the cricket, still alive, for food.

And still, I did not intervene.

Photo by Bruce Holderbaum

***

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that one way or another.

-J. Robert Oppenheimer

Ken Allan is a blogger on the other side of the Earth. ( Kia ora e Ken.) He's quirky, bright, thoughtful, and well worth reading.

He sent me the this video:

And now I teach science to (very) young adults. I have a responsibility to them, to the state, to myself.

Harry S. Truman called the bombing of Hiroshima "the greatest achievement of organized science." If that does not give you pause, you should not be teaching science.

You should not be teaching anything at all.

(Yes, this is from older posts, timeless ones.)
The photo is by Bruce Holderbaum and can be found here--used with permission.


This is posted every year, as a reminder to me.

READ MORE - Hiroshima

Yep, mostly the same post third time around--I like the rhythm of the year.

We call it August now, for Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, a short guy with bad teeth, but this was less of an issue before television--the name was dragged over to England by William the Conqueror, who enslaved both the Anglo-Saxon people and their language with the support of the Pope.

The English had a sensible name for this time of year before William blew through--weed month (weodmonað). We teeter towards the dark months. Things fall apart.

The sunlight diminishes perceptibly now. The plants know.

The past week we've eaten deep purple eggplants and bright pink brandywine tomatoes, yellow summer squash and green-and-red striped beans. Today we will pick basil for pesto, some for tonight, some for February. A bowl full of ripe blueberries waits for us, sunlight incarnate.

But the sunlight is dying, and the plants know.

We do not speak of religion in class, at least not formally, though students will occasionally ask religious questions, and I will deflect them. I explain that some things cannot be known through science, and that what I believe beyond the limits of science falls outside the province of class.

In class we talk of light and hormones, photoperiods and abscisic acids, to explain how plants know. We talk under the hum of fluorescent lights, time marked by defined blocks of time. In class, September light is exactly the same as February light, and class is always 48 minutes long, no matter where the sun sits.

Sunset today marks the start of Lammas, or Loaf Mass Day--joy for the harvests that are coming and regret for waning sunlight. Lammas used to be celebrated--the first wheat berries of the year were ground into flour and baked into bread offered in thanks, some used for Communion, some for the feast that followed.

We thank God (or Tailtiu or Lugh or some other forgotten gods)--harvest time reflects death and grace, whatever the culture. Death and grace feel foreign in the classroom, indeed foreign in our culture. We pretend, at our peril, that life is linear.

Lammas falls halfway between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox. The days are shortening, winter is coming. Until you feel the seasons in your bones, until you follow a grain of wheat from the ground to plant to bread to you then back to the ground again, the modern myths may be enough.

Science can explain why plants produce fruit when they do, and I can teach the steps. We can test whether a student learns what I present, and the students that do this best have access to all our culture offers.

You can become very powerful, very rich, without knowing grace. You can go far in life if blessed with intelligence and beauty, degrees and citations, without ever knowing what a wheat berry looks like, without ever kneading a lump of flour and water and yeast into glistening dough.

In the end, we don't know much, and may never know much. We can, however, recognize grace. We might not grasp it rationally, but we we can grasp it--a good reason to celebrate Lammas.

The Skeleton of Death dances every hour in Prague--photo of the Prague Astronomical Clock by Sandy Smith found on VirtualTourist.

READ MORE - Weodmonað

CO2 is denser than air. This is easily demonstrated in class.

Combine vinegar and baking soda together in a beaker to generate the gas. The students will groan. Yeah, we know this already, it bubbles.... Ask them what bubbles, and they will tell you what everybody already "knows"--carbon dioxide.

Now light a candle. As a diversion, ask them what gasses are emitted (CO₂, H₂0), then hold the beaker over the lit candle, and "pour" out the CO₂, leaving the foamy liquid.

A second or two later, the flame dies, as if sucked back into the wick.

What happened?

***

Just a few hours ago, hundreds of dragonflies swooped around us in the dying dusk. A cold front had just passed through, and the critters were feasting on the swarming insects trapped at the bay's edge, where horseshoe crabs have just about finished their annual orgy.

Dragonflies and horseshoe crabs both came through the Great Dying, a quarter billion years ago. Most of life was destroyed in an event far more extreme than the last mass extinction that ended the age of dinosaurs.

Though it's not clear what happened, extreme CO₂ levels likely played a role. CO₂ snuffs fires, CO₂ snuffs life.

This August marks the 25th anniversary of the Lake Nyos disaster--over 1700 humans killed in Cameroon by a cloud of carbon dioxide exploding out of the lake in a 100 yard high watery mountain of foam, as tall as Manhattan's Trinity Church, the gas suddenly released like the effervescence of  millions upon millions of bottles of seltzer.

The heavy gas flowed down the walls of the volcanic lake that released it, a deadly spree, depriving the living of oxygen as it pushed up the lighter air.

Unanticipated, but not unnatural.

Some locals briefly attributed the devastation to Mami Wata, to a neutron bomb, to "strange Europeans...heavy-set, menacing Nordic...motorcyclists" seen just before the explosion. The eruption had been predicted by a healer who himself did not survive.

***

251 million years ago, carbon dioxide obliterated over 90% of the species around at that time. So little plant life grew that there's a "coal gap" in the fossil record--a 10 million year span where no coal was formed. And yet, the dragonfly line persisted, the horseshoe crabs, too.

These ancient creatures once frightened me with their compound eyes, their complex symmetries, their deliberate living, their bodies so perfectly fit for their niches that little has changed in hundreds of millions of years.

In biology, perfect life does not exist. In biology, the environment defines those who are less imperfect.

But if perfection does exist in life, if there are life forms that will continue to see the dying dusk so long as the sun casts its energy on Earth, it might be found in the creatures that share edge of the Delaware Bay, the bizarre ancient forms of the dragonfly, the slow creep of the horseshoe crab.

I do not know how many of us know the story of Lake Nyos, the stories of Mami Wata, the stories of the horseshoe crabs and the dragonflies, the story of the Great Dying so long ago.

Something so simple as the gas brewed from baking soda and vinegar can silently kill something as complex as a mammal. Next time I snuff a flame with CO₂, I will share the story of Lake Nyos, of the Great Dying--these are the stories that define us, stories that may someday save us.

Our stories make us worth saving.

Candle image by Matthew Bowden, who freely share. Thanks!
Lake Nyos photo by Jack Lockwood, USGS, in public domain (via Wikipedia) 

READ MORE - Unanticipated, but not unnatural

"There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie."

Dr. Cornel West

The price is social, paid by the pangs of hunger of a child at midnight, a child in my neighborhood. I practiced pediatrics a long time in places Arne's never seen.

The price is cultural, paid by the general malaise of folks who cannot resolve the insoluble dissonance of what can be, and what is.

The price is environmental, paid by the woman touching the bloody bandage hiding the wound that marks a missing breast.

We all lose when any of us live a lie. Our silence marks who we are.

***

 
NCLB is founded on a lie, a big, bald-faced piece of nonsense propagated by a few folks in power who do not love your children, who do not know your neighbors, who do not live more than a few years in any given area. They are, in essence, homeless, wallowing in abstract lives, pushing abstract ideas, but making very real money.

Call them on it. Call them each and every time they speak a lie. They're hurting us, bad enough, but they're hurting our children, too, and our silence is unconscionable.

I've always taught like my hair's on fire; I've always taught like our lives depend on it, because they do. Next year I'm going to teach like every day is my last.

If you knew you could only teach another year, another week, another hour, would Arne or Eli or Bill have a whiff of influence in your classroom?

I owe it to my lambs to show them what's possible. It's what I'm paid to do by my neighbors. Bloomfield is an incredible town. I bet you live in an incredible town, too.

Tip of the hat to Mike Klonsky, whose words I read regularly.
None of this happens by accident. Get to work.

Fish heads by Leslie (in Dublin).
Horseshoe crab shell by me, Delaware Bay.

READ MORE - Go West, old man....

Some years I fish, with joy and exuberance, ecstatic at the pull of an animal on the end of the line.
Other years, I avoid it, acknowledging the pain and cost of life to the fish. It's not something I'm ever going to resolve....

I tossed some plastic out at the setting sun on the Delaware. Striped bass are around, and as much fun as they are to catch, they are even more fun to eat.

Flapflapflapflap...

A large bunker had hurled itself out of the sea, away from the jaws of a striper, onto a slightly less inviting scenario, the edge of the surf. Were I a true striper angler, I'd have stuck a hook through it and tossed it back at the striper that precipitated its predicament.

I didn't. I tossed it back. It may well be striper poo by now.

And we had pesto for dinner.

***

I do not like to kill, but I'm pretty good at it. We all are. Every step we take, every spadeful of dirt, every short jaunt in our car, no matter how "green," results in destruction.

We mostly ignore this. This has not always been so.

People used to die at home. People used to get buried without embalming fluids contaminating the earth. People used to wake kin under a shared roof.

I know a lot of people who never witnessed death, except on a screen. Most of us have witnessed a lot of deaths on screens.

Witnessing the last hours of agonal breathing will change you. If nothing else, it puts things in perspective. Exxon and Pearson and Microsoft will be here long after I'm gone. My priorities should not be their priorities. If more of us realized we're mortal, we'd be a kinder culture.

There's a cemetery in Cape May county that still buries folks the old-fashioned way: no diesel backhoe, no embalming, and the casket is optional. The Steelmantown Cemetery has been this way for over three hundred years.

 

Steelmantown Cemetery--where the dead are treated as the dead

***

I find it ironic that my children must limit their intake of certain fish because of the chemicals they contain:

In coordination with the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services and agencies in six other states, the DEP updated its fish consumption advisories and is recommending that the public consume no more than one meal every other month (six meals per year) of bluefish larger than 24 inches.

DEP, June 3, 2009 (Source: StripersOnline)

For women of childbearing age, the recommendation is none. None.

The less we know of death, the more ill we've become.

***

This morning I wandered out to the bay again, this time to the ferry jetty, as steel gray fog rolled in ahead of a thunderstorm. I got to the party a bit late.

Several old men dragged the limp bass carcasses like sacks of manure, leaving abraded scales on a jetty  that was not here 100 years ago, and will likely be gone before the hundred years pass.

The bellies of the bass are full of bunker, and one may have held the partially digested corpse of the bunker I heard slap against the sand last night.

Tomorrow an old man will excrete the undigested remains of a magnificent creature into a bowl, and the water will wash it away into the sewage below our streets, our River Styx now laden with the poisoned remains of animals we no longer dare to feed to our children.

The world is a wonderful and terrible place for all living creatures, incomprehensible in both its beauty and its entropy.

If we cannot teach this, we cannot truly teach biology, or really anything that matters.

The Steelmantown Cemetery picture from an article here. And yes, it is a green cemetery.
The woodcut by Gustave Dore, 1861, via Wikipedia

READ MORE - May life, May death

What do you want?
What do you need?

While ambling through the Bloomfield Green from school this fine afternoon, I saw a squirrel chase a starling, then again, and finally, a third time, pushing the bird to flight. It then went back to gnawing on the acorn it had dug up.

Makes no sense for squirrels to chase starlings. None.

We tend to take a mechanistic view of animals that don't share our roofs, but squirrels are mammals, and this one was, well, squirrelly. Most mammals are in May.

***

We keep talking about education as a commodity, as a way to preserve the economy, as a way to make America great again.

I'm selfish--I don't want to make America great, I just want to teach. I realized this almost 10 years ago, while I watched Manhattan burn, waiting for the wounded at Liberty Island who never came. Medicine matters, of course, and I was pretty good at it, but turns out putting things back together is not enough for me. Selfish.

I want to teach children how to think, how to know what they need, what they want. It's been my experience that most adults don't know either. Maybe I need to get out more.

I've met a few, though--happy scallopers, happy plumbers, happy doctors, happy writers, happy teachers, happy landscapers, happy waiters, happy just about anything you can name.

From my (very limited) experience, I'd dare hypothesize that happiness has little to do with one's particular job. Pretty much all jobs that matter can lead to happiness. A lot of jobs that don't matter don't preclude happiness--a job that does matter, though, certainly helps.

I love rattling on about DNA polymerase III or cytochromes or G protein-coupled receptors--this stuff is fascinating (to me, anyway)--but I have no illusions about this changing anyone's world view. (Understanding natural selection might mess you up (in a good way) but that's another story for another day....) My best teaching happens when I shut up long enough for my lambs to absorb something, anything, other than the drone of my voice.

If they could tap directly into my brain, here's what they'd hear: Hey, kids, this is your world, it's a fuckton more interesting than anything you can find on a screen, and, well, dig in.

And some do. Not enough, but it's a start.

***

A lot of noise about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. My students barely know who he is--they were in Kindergarten or preschool when he struck.

I saw first-hand the destruction he wrought. I sat in the same pew with someone who lost her brother. He was not an abstract evil--he hurt my people.

And I did not rejoice at his death. Because he chose not to matter to me. He affected me, true, and in terrible ways, but he did not matter.

I want every child I teach to matter, and to know what matters.

***

All these words because of a cranky squirrel.

Education is not about finding jobs or making money or bettering the economy. Education is about living a life worth living.

Hard not to be happy when you live that kind of life.

Arne and Eli and Bill and Melinda and Michelle do not strike me as happy people. Each one of them have real effects on my life. But they do not matter about things that do matter.

The sooner we internalize this, and act on this, the sooner we can get back to the business of living life. If you want to glorify evil, no need to look across an ocean.

My Dad kept a piece of a torn up automobile after the 1st WTC bombing--don't ask. It sat on his yard for years, and eventually disappeared.
Bloomfield just got granted a piece of twisted metal from the 2nd attack. We learned this a few days before OBL was killed. I don't want it anymore.

Yes, those are a couple of barnacles--just alien enough when I'm roiled as I am.
The WTC light memorial from "Life as a Human"--photographer not identified.
The barnacle pic was taken by us.

READ MORE - Happiness is not a warm gun

It's silly season--a pope getting beatified, royalty getting married. We need costumes for these, lots of costumes. And music! And, oh, isn't it all so grand!


And under the Delaware Bay stir the ancient longings of ancient critters, crawling up from the cool, dark muck, to dance under the moon again, as they have for millions of years.

I spent the afternoon atop a mountain of dredge fill, surrounded by the skeletal remains of horseshoe crabs and scallops, fish and whelk. Tiny flies congregated in the cracks, worshiping the death that keeps them alive. A hawk hovered a hundred yards away, eying the last moments of its prey below.

In the garden sits a robin's egg, intact but fading under two weeks of sun. A few volunteer basil plants erupted a few feet away. Last year's Brussels sprouts are now a riotous yellow.

Each time I wander outside, I am reminded how the story ends, as I am reminded how the story starts, a story without fine linen or fine music, and a story without end.

Every day I share pieces of the story with my students, and every day it surprises them, as every day, it surprises me.




 

Photos by us, use them as you will. Another beautiful day.

READ MORE - An afternoon on the dredge spoils

Some say the world will end in fire;

Some say in ice.

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice"

There is some evidence, maybe enough, to conclude that life was here on Earth at least 3.7 billion years ago.

There is some evidence, maybe enough, that the sun will use up its hydrogen in 5 billion years, expanding into a red giant. At any rate, it gets hotter and hotter as it consumes its core, and Earth will be dessicated billions of years before then.

What does this mean?

Were more than halfway through our story, at least here on Earth....and that, oddly, saddens me, when sitting inside on a rainy April evening, locked into a human universe.

But when I'm outside, the breakers crashing on the beach, the wash of froth licking my chilled feet as two oystercrackers stare at me over their preposterous red bills, linear time dissolves. For most of the living, there is nothing but now.

More importantly, for all of the living, there is nothing more than now.

Worrying about how it all ends is a human conceit.

***

I teach about the natural world, or rather, how we think about the natural world. There are moments when the classroom is humming, particularly when students tend their fish, their wheat plants, their sow bugs, or their slugs.

Before I attempt to cram their worlds with models of what exists, they need to know what it means for life to exist. They need to be able to see it, sniff it, touch it, and follow it--for hours, for weeks, for months.

The above question, a sophomore biology classic, is not particularly difficult to answer, not particularly difficult to teach, but is not particularly science. Not even close....

If my lambs spent several weeks with fruit flies, crossing this phenotype with that, analyzing the results, and then (maybe) coming up with a reasonable approximation of Mendelian genetics, maybe a question like this makes sense.

But they don't--we don't have time. We don't have time, because we have a laundry list of things that need to be covered. So our kids learn how to do Punnett squares. They enjoy doing them--they really don't require a lot of thought, at least not at the level of mastery expected, and the kids think they are doing science.

The parents think they are doing science.
The Board of Ed thinks they are doing science.
The state thinks they're doing science.
Arne and Eli and Joel and Bill think they are doing science.

They're not. They're doing Punnett squares.

Truth be told, much of high school sucks.If it didn't, Punnett squares wouldn't be so appealing.

***

Every now and again I get kids caught in an existentialist trap--what is the meaning of life, the point, the goal, the end, and it's little wonder. I bet no child gets through a day without hearing someone ask what they plan to do with their lives.

I bet no child gets through a day without hearing that ""these are the best days of your life, you better enjoy them" from aging adults who have yet to start living.

We compound this with tests we pretend matter. Knowledge matters, thinking matters, but most of these tests do not (beyond their extrinsic consequences).

Let's play a thought game: if a test existed that could objectively measure happiness ten years after a child took my class, would it matter more (or less) than a test that measures my lambs' collective ability to do a Punnett square?

Ah, Dr. Doyle, you are lowering the bar! You are diluting the product! You are condemning your students to a life of poverty and ill-breeding!

No, I'm not. The current tests do not encourage me to teach science. They do not encourage my students to learn science. They will not lead to a better informed citizenry pursuing jobs or happiness.

***

We have a lot of life in class, which means we have a lot of death, too. I worried about this--will I trigger more existentialist angst?

I'm sure that long after I'm dead and my voice no longer a memory, a few students will remember the moment they witnessed their favorite shrimp in the world happily munching on their favorite hermit crab. These things are not planned, but are bound to happen in a classroom such as ours.

I was worried, but I needn't have been. They were enthralled. They were in the moment.

And yes, I still worry about what will happen in a few billion years. Except when I don't. Like now.

This one will likely get chopped up into a few pieces before I'm through.

The photos all taken today under a gloomy sky--the robin's egg is the same as the one seen last week. It is getting duller.

READ MORE - The Tao of now

Some days, often in May when the bees are buzzing, the nectar is flowing and each day is longer than the next, I feel like introducing myself to strangers:

Hello, my name is Michael, and I'm mortal. And you are, too. It's a luverly day. Let's dance!

Or sing, or tell stories, or plant, or clam, or fish, or sing, or skate, or spin, or weave, or grind wheat, or bake bread, or strum a guitar, or hum on a kazoo, or just bask in the sunshine doing nothing at all.

But I never do. OK, sometimes I do, but never in the classroom. Very few of these things are taught, and even then, only taught as "electives."

Living well, and consciously, and joyously, requires knowing mortality. Not in some existential sense, not as an allegory, not as a spiritual retreat, not as some far away event that happens in foreign lands.

But in the fecal leaking, gas belching, groaning agonal breaths that await each and every one of us, short of an errant bolt of lightning out of the blue (or a rather ordinary car crash).

Pretending otherwise constrains us in ways we cannot imagine.

So in Room B362 we raise critters, and we deal with death. We sow, we water, we feed, and occasionally we mourn. On rare occasions we even dance. Yep....

Plastiquinones matter. So does ATP synthase and phospholipid bilayers and cyclic AMP. I teach them because I am required to, and because they interest me.

But I also teach that everything alive, dies. Everything alive is connected to everything else that's alive.

What I don't teach is that Microsoft will outlive me, though it will. I also don't teach that life will outlive Microsoft. If I didn't believe that, though, I couldn't teach children.

I love teaching, and I love living.

The title is from Walt Kelly, my hero.

READ MORE - "Don't take life so serious, son, it ain't nohow permanent."

A roly poly died in class this week. That in itself is not unusual. This particular roly poly, however, lived in a terrarium maintained by two students. No rock fell on it. It had food and water. Unless we get an autopsy, it will go down as an "up and died." It was found in the classic dead bug position, even though, technically, it was a crustacean.

The two young women who maintained the tank were upset, but once I assured them that the roly poly died of old age, they were fine. "Old age" is foreign to the young, as it should be. Besides, I made that up. Nothing dies of old age. Nothing.

***

I am meeting with the governor on Tuesday. I hope it goes well, and I hope he uses his office to promote education, but I know we will not be talking about dead roly polies.

School should be a dangerous place, with dangerous ideas. The young should be pushing us. My students were mere embryos in 1996.

They were born in a world of incomprehensibly destructive weapons. In a culture that values words and contracts over life. In a world defined by systems and machines,

That they do not run out of the building screaming by 11 A.M. shows how much they trust us.

So we'll dither about merit based pay, and education reform, and what education means to democracy, but we won't talk about dead roly polies.

***

I have a dozen or so clams in my belly now, critters that were alive 3 or 4 hours ago. They were delicious, and nutritious. They're now dead.

That's the way it works.

 

We all die, of course, and we mostly ignore this. We eat to live. I eat the clams, they eat plankton. Most of the clams I raked up today were less than a decade old. I have no idea what clams know, and they have no idea what I know. They know enough to try to escape when I rake. Most living things, conscious or not, make every effort to stay alive.

And if we want to stay alive, and if we do not have chloroplasts, we need to eat other organisms. "Eat," a simple 3 letter word, one we do not ruminate over much, means this: taking into your body the once living body of another, in order that you can keep living.

The alternative is  premature death.

 ***

Peter Singer, an ethicist, waivers on whether eating clams is OK. He seems to think it depends on whether they have interests:

[T]he only legitimate boundary to our concern for the interests of other beings is the point at which it is no longer accurate to say that the other being has interests. To have interests...a being must be capable of suffering or experiencing pleasure. If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for disregarding that suffering, or for refusing to count it equally with the like suffering of any other being. But the converse of this is also true. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of enjoyment, there is nothing to take into account.

This is an interesting issue. We could spend weeks in class discussing it. But we won't, not if I want to keep my position.

I doubt a single child in my class worried about the well being of a roly poly before coming into Room B362. I can take no credit for their newfound concern beyond bringing in a few roly polies. Just about all living organisms are more interesting (and complicated) than we know, until we bother to get acquainted with them.

Every organism alive on Earth today has been evolving for the same amount of time. We are not special. And we will die, too.

So I bring a few in, so my lambs can watch them. And they do pretty much what we do. Wander around, eat, drink, socialize, reproduce, and die.


No one knows the why. No one.

***

I teach biology, the study of life. To study life, you need to grasp how we stay alive, which means you need to have a handle on death.

We spend a lot of time talking about meiosis, about biomes, about transcription and translation, about DNA. "Death", however, is not in the New Jersey curriculum standards, except when referring to stars. "Love" is not in the NJCCCS. Nor is "global warming," nor "nuclear warfare."

So what matters?

***

I slaughtered, deliberately, 27 clams tonight. I slaughtered many more organisms while raking for those clams, even more while driving to my sekrit clamming bed.

I can (reasonably) expect to die within the next 20 or 30 years, though I would beat my family average should I live so long.

Walt Kelly got this. He was one of my best teachers ever, and I only knew him through Pogo

Microsoft will outlive me. So will Cisco and GM and the US Federal Government, all fabled institutions, all protected by law. I either matter, or I don't. I'm too old to worry about that anymore, so long as i get my clams and my books and my beer, but it's a worthwhile (and interesting) question for my lambs.

Every family in my town pays a huge amount of taxes ts support our local school system. I am thankful that they do. The least I can do is teach things that matter.

If I tell my townfolks I teach about meiosis, and polymerase chain reactions, and other forms of modern nonsense, well, many would believe they're getting their money's worth, and maybe they are.

If I told them that their children were studying roly polies, I am not sure I'd get the same reception. Governor Christie could destroy me with that.

Still, death matters. A lot. Maybe not if you're a corporation, and maybe not if you're a clam, but it does if you're a child.

Imagine what we could do if each and every one of us recognized our own finiteness.

The bluefish and the clam shown were both delicious.

The Pogo cartoon used with permission--that I had contact with anyone in the Kelly family made this blog worthwhile.

The photos are ours.

READ MORE - Death in a classroom, again

Yesterday a blowout tide rolled back the waters, farther back than I've seen. We got a mess of clams, including the one above, and we enjoyed them.

I must have looked like a madman, feet clad in sandals and smiling at no one as I leaned into the winter breeze to rake the flats, clam after clam after clam. I was happy. I have a hypothesis as to why.

***

Look at the edge of the quahog shell--each tooth glistening in tonight's setting sun, each with a complementary notch on the other shell. A cherry stone can clam up tightly for days when need be.

This particular clam looks about 15 years old or so, and may easily have lived another 15 years. I have no idea if it was happy, but I do know this much--every thing about the clam's existence helped it live as long as it did, where it did.

It evaded minnows the 1 or 2 weeks it spent swimming as a larva. Its tough shell protected it from whelk and starfish, horseshoe crabs and gulls. It survived the icy cold winter waters and the warm wash of summer. It ate, it grew, it reproduced, and last night it died.

Our crocuses are near bursting now--in a few weeks, bees will visit their open flowers, and will leave covered with bright yellow pollen. Everything about the crocus has a use. Look at the picture. The spears are now blunt from poking through the frozen ground, still protected by sheaths at their bases; the whole plant leans towards the sun, catching photons.

Descent with modification does not require a master plan. Each tooth on the clam, each petal on a crocus has a cost. Order requires energy. Every organism seems to be designed exactly for its niche--we assume, reasonably, that every part (if organisms truly have parts) has a purpose.

And if so, what is ours? Without delving into the metaphysical and the mystical, just look at your hands, your arms, your eyes, your nose. We have been been around a long, long time, far longer than computers, far longer than the written word, far longer than spoken language that we believe defines us.

We twist ourselves into our own universes, contorting to squeeze ourselves into schedules guided by clocks and not stars, by words and not smells, by imagined fears and not the predators that used to hunt us in the night.

When I am on the flats, a stiff wind sending whiffs of death and salt from the exposed flats, my fingers wrapped around my rake, waiting for the telling vibration of metal against living shell, I am alive as alive can be, everything aligned for the hunt, anticipating the feast that waits.

I sliced my finger pretty good yesterday, and rinsed it in the muddy waters--brilliant crimson drops splashed on the beach like small carnations, feeding critters too small to see. My hands were numb from the cold, and I knew I'd feel it later. None of the fear I'd have felt indoors, where wounds seem foreign.

My hypothesis? The more we use our bodies, our minds, our senses, our being for being, the happier we are.  Just a hypothesis, true, but what have been your happiest moments?

Photos taken today.

It may just be that I am, in fact, bats.

READ MORE - Happy as a clam

(Just my annual Bloomfield crocus phenology post. Move along, nothing to see....)

We're thawing in February.

The pond ice is melting.
Two fish floated, lifeless, on top.
Winter is over for them.

Crocus spears pierce the Earth.
Spring is just starting for them.

For us?
We have light, we have grace, and, for the moment, we have time.

For the moment.
And a moment is all that is promised us.

READ MORE - Death and crocuses

A small asteroid was discovered today, hours before it passed within 5,000 miles of us. "Us" as in the critters on Earth.

It was tiny, as far as asteroids go, and it didn't get a whole lot of press, but it was a literal reminder of how little we control. It wouldn't have done any damage, our atmosphere would have smoked it before it smacked Eath, but still, no one knew about it yesterday.

I think our children ought to know how little we actually control, but even adults fail to see our limits. You'd think that death would put things in perspective, but we avoid the whole issue.

If you believe our time here on Earth matters, and that that time is finite, act on it. Sooner or later our planet is going to get smacked up pretty good by a large rock now hurtling in space. Chances are pretty good you'll be gone long before that happens, but either way dead is dead.

I don't recommend that you start each day by proclaiming the ultimate demise of each of your lambs as they  saunter into class, but I do recommend that you plan your lessons with that in mind.

Every thing we assign takes a piece of a child's finite lifespan. Make sure the piece you take is worth what you give back. And no, word searches do not qualify.....

Photo by G. Sostero and E. Guido, Remanzacco Observatory,Graphics by NASA--we paid for it, so I figure it's in the public domain.
found here,

READ MORE - Hokey Smokes that was close!

We're a few weeks away from the crocuses. They know the sun is coming back. I do not know how they know but they do. Soon green fingers will break through the corms.

Meanwhile, my clams have settled in for the winter. Not deep, maybe 2 or 3 inches deeper than July, but still deeper, clammed up tight, waiting for the water to warm. Deep for a clam, though.




We still have a few stalks of Brussels sprouts growing, still with a few tiny sprouts left.

At this moment, the tide is just starting to rise again on the mudflats, under a crescent moon dancing between wintry clouds low in the west. The clams are there, under the black water glistening from the sliver of moonlight, as they have been before we came, as they will be when we're gone.

In a few more hours, a few feet of water will rise over the clams, then recede again before dawn.

***

We can teach about tides and the moon, we can talk of gravity, but until a child wrestles a clam from the mud, she knows nothing about them.

Most of what we teach, or pretend to teach, means nothing to a child, but often, sadly, nothing to the teacher as well.

I know of tides, but not the taiga or the tiger.

I know of quahogs, and reasonably well, but my words and pictures cannot replace an afternoon on the mudflats, the pungent sweet smell of life mingling with death, jolting young noses more familiar with Amber Romance and Axe.

A single afternoon on the flats can be ruined if I emphasize the abstract, especially to a generation that knows only the abstract. So I will pretend to care about mantles and siphons and the economic importance of hard shell clams while I hope that a few of the children get curious about this unknowable universe we've kept hidden from them.

And for the next few weeks, I am trapped in their world, until the crocuses come back.

Thanks to PSE&G, about 150 young adults will get to spend a day on a tidal flat in May.

READ MORE - Crocuses and clams

19° degrees outside, and the furnace decided to nap. A reminder, but not an omen. There's a difference.

I love Galway Kinnell. I am fascinated by snot. The two are not unrelated. I saw Galway speak last night, which is like saying I saw Pavarotti sing, or Frank Lloyd draft.

I last saw him over three decades ago. We're both still here. We'll both be gone a few decades from now. When I remember this, I behave differently.

***

Eating is part of the deal.
Defecating is part of the deal.
Chlorinating is not....



I grab my rake when the tide and the winds are low. I paddle my plastic boat out to the flats, lugging a rake older than me.

I work the mud knowing that it will give up its secrets.

Quahogs quietly eat, quietly grow, quietly drag tiny organisms into their guts. Do zooplankton ("wandering animals") drifting in light, suddenly tossed into the dark, struggle against the siphon's current?

Before the sun rises again, a few clams will be killed, and eaten, and then shat. Bacteria will feed on the remnants of molecules spliced together by plants and clams. My shit will pass under the street in ancient pipes, delivered to a wastewater treatment plant, and slaughtered as the chlorine rips through the lipids in the cell's membrane.

The clam gave its life, as I will, as you will, knowing that it will remain, in pieces, part of the whole of life.

I pray no one pumps my veins with formaldehyde when I die. I want my carcass to burst from corpulence as the bacteria, freed from the tyranny of my immune system, rip the energy from complex molecules I will no longer use.

***

Chlorination works. I like safe water. I am not against chlorinating our water. (Don't get me started on fluoridation, though....)

If a lot of mammals squeeze themselves into small areas, excrement and water find each other. Excrement is dangerous because it's alive. Given a chance, the critters in scat will eat, grow, and reproduce, living life with the same impunity and unawareness we all do. Holy shit.

Humans are special, true. Only humans have the ability to consciously and utterly remove ourselves and other critters from the cycle of life. Formaldehyde, mercury salts, and chlorine mark our progress.

Chlorinating water works. It was developed by the U.S. Army as a way to make a lot of water safe in a hurry for our soldiers as they wandered away from the American tap water we take for granted. 3 ampules of calcium hypochlorite are added to 36 gallons of water in a Lyster bag, releasing chlorine gas.



Proteins work because of their specific shapes. Any function in a live organism that requires a particular shape, which is just about everything, requires proteins. Change the shape ("denature"), and the protein no longer does what it's designed to do.

Chlorine changes the shape of proteins in bacteria, changes their nature, and they die. The proteins in humans are made of the same stuff as bacterial proteins.

On April 22, 1915, in Ypres, France, thousands of men, and innumerable other creatures, had their proteins denatured by a yellow-green cloud smelling of "pepper and pineapple." The gas destroyed the cells lining the airways.

Suddenly down the road from the Yser Canal came a galloping team of horses, the riders goading on their mounts in a frenzied way; then another and another, till the road became a seething mass with a pall of dust over all.

Plainly something terrible was happening. What was it? Officers, and Staff officers too, stood gazing at the scene, awestruck and dumbfounded; for in the northerly breeze there came a pungent nauseating smell that tickled the throat and made our eyes smart. The horses and men were still pouring down the road. two or three men on a horse, I saw, while over the fields streamed mobs of infantry, the dusky warriors of French Africa; away went their rifles, equipment, even their tunics that they might run the faster.

One man came stumbling through our lines. An officer of ours held him up with levelled revolver, "What's the matter, you bloody lot of cowards?" says he. The Zouave was frothing at the mouth, his eyes started from their sockets, and he fell writhing at the officer's feet.

Anthony R. Hossacks memoirs
Soldier, Queen Victoria's Rifles, 1915

Chlorine gas strips away functioning proteins, irreversibly disabling your cells. It is not an easy death.

One nurse described the death of one soldier who had been in the trenches during a chlorine gas attack. “He was sitting on the bed, fighting for breath, his lips plum coloured. He was a magnificent young Canadian past all hope in the asphyxia of chlorine. I shall never forget the look in his eyes as he turned to me and gasped: I can’t die! Is it possible that nothing can be done for me?”

John Simkin, Spartacus Educational

***

Leslie and I love to paddle. We have kayaked as far up the Passaic River as you can, until the water becomes too shallow to allow even a 10" draft.

A few miles before you reach the shallows, we pass a sign facing away from the river, just above an active discharge pipe.

The pipe belches out sickeningly sweet water, pepper and pineapple. The smell reminds me of a mall, where the aroma of too perfect cookies mixes with the aroma of too perfect perfumes and too perfect people.

I beached my kayak so I could get out and read the sign.

The sign announced that the effluuent was the shit and pee and spit and snot and blood of the good citizens of Livingston, caressed with chemicals, now safe for the river.

I got back in the kayak and headed upstream, my paddles dredging through the shallow muddy bed. I dragged my fingers over the paddle blade, the mud sliding back into the water, and then held my hands to my face, the mortal mud's smell reminding me who we are.

***

One of my lambs ran an experiment to see if water would start to smell if left out for a week. He was startled to find that water smells right out of the tap, like, well, chlorine. In a day or two, the chlorine smell dissipated.

Decades from now, I doubt he'll remember much of anything in class, but he will remember that.

We do not talk about "shit" in class. We talk of excrement and E. coli and waste, but never of shit, sacred shit, Holy Shit.

If high biology were truly the study of life, of death, of cycles, we'd read Galway Kinnell's Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, or Mary Oliver's poem "Oxygen," or W.B. Yeats, who asks the essential question of science, of life: "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

I would give up an eyetooth (or two) to have Galway Kinnell teach my students biology. I talk of ecology, Galway talks of life:

The black bear who swatted down the apples
from the lower branches began before first light
expelling foot-long cylinders of apple-chompings
—some apple nectar removed, some bear nectar added—
which could almost be served up in a restaurant
in Lyons or Paris as Compote de Pommes des Dieux.

Galway Kinnell
From "Holy Shit" (Imperfect Thirst)

Until we teach biology as the study of life, we have no real hope of pretending we are not those young men who tossed the chlorine gas at other men, and whoever else happened to be in the way, back in 1915.

Until then, I will sink into tidal mud flats, filling the air with the molecules of the dead, a pungent smell we've been trained to fear, scratching for clams, each one reminding me of impermanence, of what matters.

In May, I will again be trekking over a hundred young humans to Sandy Hook Bay,
where many will smell tidal mud for the first time.
Biology cannot be taught indoors.

Lyster bag photo from Olive-Drab, which posted the photo
"courtesy Family of Jack Chriss, veteran of Co. B, 129th Airborne Engineer Bn., 13th Airborne Div."

Clam and tomato photo taken on my windowsill. Both were eaten soon after.

READ MORE - Thoughts shared after hearing Galwall Kinnell speak in his 9th decade

I tossed some metal into the Atlantic surf for about an hour today. The sun has settled low in the south. Gashes of December light broke through the wintry gray clouds. Even the midday shadows are long now.

The chilly brine bathed my feet as I cast. It may be time for boots.



The sun sets at 4:29 PM today, as early as it will for the year. The shortest day arrives in a couple of weeks.

I pulled the last tomato off the vine today, tinged pink on dull green. It froze last night, and had the consistency of pumpkin pulp. I spit most of it out, and tossed the rest back in the garden.

We're down to kale and Brussels sprouts now, then we are done.

***

I pray the sun comes back.

But just in case it doesn't, the prayer is one of thanks, for what was.
I am seeing Galway Kinnell again in just a few days.

Last time I saw him, he was the age I am now. He wrote of love, and loss, and timelessness.
Now he is three decades older, as I am, and he still writes of love, and loss, and timelessness.

He reminds those of us getting through life that there is no "through." Talking to his young daughter Maud, he talks to all of us:

learn,
as you stand
at this end of the bridge which arcs,
from love, you think, into enduring love,
learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come – to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
which tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

If I keep thinking of cycles and orbits and tides and the spin of electrons in invisible particles, if I keep chanting about redox equations and hydrolysis and the Gibbs free energy in the classroom, I miss what is herenow.

I tried to capture a December rose in the fading light with a camera, to share. But I can no more share this than share time itself.

Galway reminds me of this every time I read or hear his words.

He knows, he knows, and yet he writes of what we cannot believe.

We all make the same mistake, we all "commit...the error of thinking, one day all this will only be a memory."

***

Leslie worries that I might someday wander around barefoot too long on the beach, in the snow. She's right to worry, of course. I can get distracted outdoors long enough for incipient ice crystals to tear open my cells with their intricate patterns.

I don't need to worry yet. The water temperature is still in the high 40's--my feet feel warm when washed by the sea when the air is as chilly as it is today.

Back inside, I worry about what might have been. When I am outside, there is no "what might have been." Just sound and light and smell and touch.

I'm not sure ""Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair In The Moonlight" would have made much sense to me the last time I saw Galway Kinnell read, decades ago, shortly before I held my own child in my arms, before the filament of life passed from me and Leslie to two lovely people who, should our prayers be answered, breathe long after we're dead.

It makes sense now.

The lines by Galway Kinnell come from "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair In The Moonlight," from The Book of Nightmares.

READ MORE - Dying light