If you stick your hand into a half full jar of sourdough pretzels in a Jersey July, you will feel your hand get noticeably cooler. Really. Try it.

If you measure the temperature inside the jar, it will be exactly the same as the temperature outside the jar. Any child with any sense and a respectable contempt for authority will tell you this. It's cooler in the jar!

It definitely feels cooler, yet the thermometer says otherwise. What's going on?

(Hint: this wouldn't work in Phoenix.)

Turns out experience is local. No national science curriculum can tolerate the very different results of my pretzel jar demo, a shame, really, because the children in Phoenix can very easily (and cheaply) discuss their results with the children in the humid halls of Bloomfield. Skype, blogs, wikis, heck, even phones.....

The humidity in the jar is much lower than the humidity in most of Jersey. Sodium chloride ("salt") is really good at grabbing water molecules from the air. The salt on the pretzels in the jar assures a low humidity environment, at least as long as you keep on the lid.

2^nd graders do not need to know terms like "sodium chloride" or "hygroscopic." They should know, however, that science and intuition are not mates. They should know that science is based on what we call the "natural world" (itself a concept 2^nd graders have a shot at grasping). They should know that science is testable.

I really don't give a rat's buttocks if a child can convert Celsius into Fahrenheit--that kind of skill matters, true, but that's not science, and it's something I can easily teach. I do care if a child is curious enough to wonder why her hand feels cool in a bucket of Snyder's Sourdough Specials.

Good Lord, I need curious children.We all do.

READ MORE - Thermometers, yet again

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

I've gotten a tad involved with the kindergarten science curriculum in our district. I know a little bit about science, and a little bit about kids.

Looking at much of the commercial stuff available, a lot of well meaning (and well paid) folks know little about either. It's time to put these well meaning folks who make a lot of money somewhere else. Maybe Mars

There's a lot of awful stuff out there. It's eye-catching, and well produced, and quite entertaining, but it's awful. Really awful.

Energy and matter are very difficult concepts to master. It's OK if a 6 year old doesn't know much about Newton's Laws. What is not OK is teaching nonsense that will make it more difficult for the child to grasp science later.

Here's something from PearsonEducaton, written for 1st grade:

Where's the science?

I start each year with a classroom of sophomores who think energy means to move something. By the time I get them, this misconception is seared into millions of neuronal connections. Teaching crap is worse than teaching nothing at all.

(The gratuitous "Go Green" symbol on a page feigning science about one of the most ecologically destructive
inventions ever might, though, make a good lesson on irony. Or cynicism.)

I will be posting a variety of seemingly simple ideas for teaching young'uns some science. The goal is not to produce Junior Scientists® rattling off the scientific names of obscure penguins like some unfortunate child with Asperger's syndrome. I just want to help kids see the natural world.

I do not have a particular beef with Pearson--it came up first when I Googled elementary science instructional materials.

If you look at other companies, there seems to be equal opportunity awfulness.

READ MORE - Diving into early elementary science curriculum

(A heads up--this is local and has little to do with science, unless economics counts.)

We're in the dead of winter now, the last few days of the darkest six weeks of the year. My crank-o-meter needle is dancing on the right side of the dial (yes, it's analog).

Last year Governor Christie skipped a 3.1 billion dollar payment to the pension fund, one of the few truly bipartisan acts we get these days--preceding Democratic and Republican governors had done the same for over a decade!

Our fine money managers managed to blow huge chunks of the money that had been put in, losing "almost 9 billion dollars in October [2008]," and over 20 billion dollars the same year. (In 2008, the total payout by the state was 5.2 billion dollars.)

Yesterday, on a snowy Friday when folks were busy shoveling, the NJ Senate President Stephen Sweeney, a Democrat, joined forces with Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver, another Democrat, to announce the end of the current state pension plan.

"We're blowing up the system that exists to create one that's going to eliminate politics."

Stephen Sweeney, today's Star -Ledger

Those of us not yet retired, all of us, are affected. Those of us with less than 5 years of service are affected more--we will lose cost of living adjustments.

Those of you retired are safe.

This is the best case scenario. Sweeney and Oliver are doing this to help us.

If you are looking for a teaching position in New Jersey, great news! Any rational teacher vested in the pension system has a hard decision to make. Some will stay because they love (and live) for teaching, and never planned to retire anyway.

Many will need to leave because as much as they love teaching, they love the idea of eating and keeping a roof over their heads during their retirement years.

I entered teaching way too late for this to be disastrous news--the newer members of the profession were already getting hammered while local unions strived to protect the dwindling benefits for their more senior members. Property taxes were already becoming unsustainable.

Anyone with even a modicum of economic sense saw the massive market bubble was about to burst the year I entered teaching. (The state market managers used the ol' wing and a prayer strategy--oops....)

The only thing I trust for my retirement is that the seeds will still grow, and that clams and fish will still be in the bay. I trust the laws of nature more than I trust the laws of humans.

The burning money image is from Naked Capitalism.

The money numbers for 2008 came from Ridgewood Views here.

READ MORE - Pension tension

I can't believe I once worried about this:

Am I just a brain sitting in a vat of saline somewhere, controlled by a classroom of advanced post-doctoral students amusing themselves with my epiphenomenal world?

No matter anymore. Seems the whole world chooses to live vicariously now through chips and code written by young'uns high on pizza and caffeine.

Many of my lambs believe the world will end in 2012, that no man ever walked on the moon, and that mere belief in their dreams will get them to the promised land.

It's November, and I'm as cranky as the bees.

***

I teach science. I'm under a bit of pressure.

Arne Duncan says that "Science, Technology, Engineering and Math are at the forefront of our global economic future." He should know, he's a sociologist, and parlayed a mediocre basketball career into the White House.

Al Gore says that "in today's increasingly global economy, America cannot afford to continue to fall behind the world in the very subjects that are going to drive economic growth and development in the coming decades." He should know, he's a retired politician, majored in government, and earned a D in a sophomore science course.

The state of New Jersey expects my students to know this, and that, and some more of this for good measure. New Jersey pays good money to develop tests to make sure I've done my job.

I must confess, however, that I have ulterior motives.

***

Our economy is not based on information, or technology, or engineering, or math.

Our economy is ultimately based on what the Earth produces, on how much we can sustainably extract from the living organisms around us.

A nifty math degree might help me get a higher portion of what we extract than my neighbor who did not finish college. I might earn more money with an engineering degree. The sheepskin on my wall sitting in my attic somewhere might put a jaunt in my step.

To be fair, science has gone a long way to increasing crop yields, to enabling us to get metals from the ground, protein from our seas, but so long as we remain dependent on the sun for our daily bread, we cannot do much better in the long term, say seven or eight generations, than those seven or eight generations ago.

***

Our greatest resources here are not our minds. (The Chinese alone outnumber us almost 5 to 1--their top 20% in intelligence rival the entire population of the United States.)

Our greatest resource here is not our spirit. Parochialism is cherished everywhere.

Our greatest asset is the incredible land base we have. We can grow lots and lots of wheat and lots and lots of corn. We have ore and trees, we have coastline, we have abundant rainfall.

A degree in economics doesn't make you a better farmer; it just makes you better at glomming what the farmer makes.

***

We need plumbers and farmers and nurses and masons; we need electricians and framers and clammers and machinists.

If you are making a living extracting money from the economy without thought to the consequences of your actions, with no connection to the land base, contributing little to the general welfare of the community, you are not particularly useful, no matter how much you make.

The last couple of decades have seen an increasing inequality on the distribution of the financial wealth in the United States.

Producing more scientists will not fix the rising inequity in wealth distribution--it might even aggravate it.

So why do I teach science?

I have a copy of the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence on my classroom wall. I remain a happy skeptic, convinced that thinking Americans can keep our Great Experiment alive.



Democracy cannot survive ignorance.

Every day I go to school with two goals--to show the children the world that they are missing when they are immersed in the human universe of iPods and monitors, and to show them how to think on their own.

If a handful of them go on to become scientists and mention my name along the way, cool beans. I'd be proud, but it wouldn't matter much beyond that.

If, however, children who pass through my classroom learn to love the world around them, and to critically assess how our actions affect the world they love, well, I've done something worthwhile.

Should I just be fooling myself, and I may be, I have a few million yeast bubbling away in 5 gallons of wort in the kitchen, a few Brussels sprout stalks still stealing energy from sunlight a few feet from my front door, and a clam rake I'm getting pretty good at using.

Not sure I'm contributing much to the GDP, but I've become part of the local economy, the one that respects entropy and life, the one that makes me happy. The invisible hand of the market pales next to the grace of the hand of nature.

The title is unfair--Adam Smith's work is like the Bible: widely quoted, rarely read, mostly misunderstood.
Photo from The Brain That Wouldn't Die, 1962, via classic-horror .com.
The "Declaration of Independence" image from the US Library of Congress.

READ MORE - Adam Smith and me