Students can use this to tell a story, and be creative and imaginative. The 3D pop-up really brings a story to life and makes it much more fun. You can rotate around the book in 3D space, add your voice to the characters to have them speak, and even use a webcam to add yourself into the story in augmented reality. Very cool!
There is a gallery of stories, so you can search and get some ideas. You can upload your own graphics and images or use some of the 10,000 free images and materials they have on the site. You can share the book by sharing the URL or you can even embed it in a site.
This is a great way to get students creating stories while having fun and being engaged. It can really bring out their creativity. Students can even use it to show their mastery of a topic by creating a tutorial book on that topic.
Here's an example of one on the Pythagorean Theorem.
I went fishing yesterday, tossing a bucktail into a channel behind West Wildwood. The sky was steely, a mist was falling, and the bugs enjoyed slurping hemoglobin from my scalp.
I didn't catch anything, which was fine with me--I have scallops from Walt the scalloper in the freezer waiting for next Saturday, and we have a chunk of last summer's fluke waiting for us as well.
While working the beach I stumbled across a couple of the holes we left clamming the day before--I fill my holes, but the bay was double-checking my work. A few feet from one of the holes I saw a grand-daddy of a quahog--a huge chowder clam just sitting on the flat exposed by the low tide.
A quahog that big may well rival me in years on this Earth. It didn't get that large by acting stupid, and here's hardly enough nervous tissue for clams to get senile. Still, there it was.
I went to pick it up. It resisted. I went to pick it up again. It resisted again, as if glued to the beach.
I tugged yet a third time, and the sands shifted--the clam was stuck to the base of an old horseshoe crab, now buried in the sand. Her kicking legs pushed the sand next to the clam.
A large horseshoe crab may well be 20 to 30 years old.
Here they were, an old horseshoe crab tethered to an even older quahog, waiting for the tide to rise. The quahog, guided by millions of years of instinct, clams up tight at low tide. With the edge of the horseshoe crab wedged along it edge, though, it faced dessication.
I tried to remove the clam again, but dared not pull any harder than I did. I left the two critters there to square their issue with the next full tide.
Some things cannot be anticipated, and some things cannot be fixed.
Why wait for the future, though? We already have all kinds of technological doo-dads that have doomed humanity (if not humans):
(Runners-up: Automobiles, telephones, and the incandescent lamp. And record players (recommended by John Spencer).)
Number Five: Television (and other forms of e-media) Very few folks control television, and very few appreciate how this medium has altered our minds. Democracy depends on discourse, and folks who spend hours a day "consuming" visions produced by very wealthy people with very narrow objectives effectively remove themselves as true citizens (though they can, alas, still vote).
Democracy is essentially dead in the States, and hasn't flourished in most parts of the world anyway, so as influential as televison is, I relegated it to fifth place here.
Number Four: The Haber Process
Prometheus gave us fire, Fritz Haber gave us nitrogen fixation. We were now one with the gods.
Before the Haber process, only bacteria and bolts of lightning made nitrogen available for life. Without nitrogen, we have no proteins, no nucleic acids. Haber gave humans control of the nitrogen cycle. We are gods now, able to make ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen.
We no longer had to rely on poop for fertilizer. Our huge human population depends on fertilizer made possible by the Haber process. Ammonia can also be used to make lots of explosives.
Why is this on the list (aside from my innnate hatred of golf courses)? Haber's process created industrialized agriculture. We disconnected ourselves from the mystery (or so we think), and now believe we can continue to grow food relentlessly, without thought.
Haber helped trigger the Green Revolution. In the end, it will only mean that many more carcasses to burn when our fossil fuels are depleted, and artificial fertilizers become too expensive for all but the elite.
Fritz Haber also developed chlorine gas for use in warfare, and personally oversaw its use in France.
Number Three: The written word
Yep, I use them. I read, I write, I even (*gasp*) blog. I'm a hypocrite.
Words are abstract. They freeze moments. Our collective oral memory evolves through generations, tailoring the needs of the clan with the needs of the community. The written word changes all this.
NONE of any of the rest of this list happens with oral tradition alone. The written Bible does not happen, nor the written Koran. Old conflicts dissolve with time in the oral tradition. The written word keeps grudges alive forever.
In my best moments, words disappear.
I'm OK with burning books, as long as we burn all of them.
Number Two: Computers
We can now process thought faster than we can think. Every one of you reading this post can be traced. Databases record your keystrokes. There is no longer privacy for anyone committed to living the 21st century life.
I'd like to pick my nose and maybe even savor the results without anyone knowing. (That was allegorical, folks.)
Computers allow telecommunications, allow nuclear weaponry, allow large hadron colliders, allow genomic typing, allow pretty much every foray into risky high tech hi-jinks without an iota of thought.
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
D.H. Lawrence
I regularly check on Patrick Higgins' blog, Chalkdust101. He writes well, consistently. His latest got me brain roiling, and here's the result.
But first a bird story.
Most people, if pressed, would tell you that birds, at least the wild ones that go mostly unnoticed outside, instinctively fear humans.
Now I do not doubt they fear us, and with reason. I do doubt, though, that it's instinctual. You don't buck instinct.
I spent most of today digging out the driveway. We have almost three feet of snow that never happens down here. While rescuing what's left of the rosemary bush (with its ridiculously optimistic purple flowers looking bright against the snow), I exposed a tiny patch of earth.
A robin hovered nearby.
I turned around to grab another shovelful of packed snow, then when I stepped to throw it over to the side, came this close to stepping on the robin snooting around the dirt. It flew a few feet away, not far, and waited for me to grab another shovelful.
Had you seen us from a distance, you'd have thought I had brought my amazing trained parakeet outside to help me shovel.
***
Higgins' most recent post has a brief TED talk towards the end. You can tell its a TED talk even without the video--the speaker has the bright, bouncy voice of someone interested in their subject yet educated enough to tailor it just so for the audience. TED talks are the Chautauquas of the net--content matters, of course, but performance matters more.
Jump to 2:40:
We now have a generation or two of children (and not nearly all of them, to be sure) who value the recording of an event more than the event itself.
One sad scene in the clip shows a young woman taking a picture of her kissing her beau. Sad because she's wasting the use of a perfectly good hand. Even sadder because she is removed from the moment.
If you're going to share, really share, a passionate kiss, you're eyeballs should feel like they're going to twist inside out. Time drifts away. Touch blends with smell and warmth as self-awareness melts. No time. No self. Just. This.
The only reason a kiss is worth photographing is because of the stuff we cannot see--we can only hope to imagine the infinite moments. If you're multitasking during a kiss you've missed the point.
My robin may not have much self-awareness; really no way to tell. He did have, however, a splendid understanding of his situation. Hunger refines interests and awareness of the moment.
If it had instinctual fear, it would not have weighed its hunger over the large mammal carrying a shovel no more than a foot or two away.
***
So why do we record anything? Why write?
There's a danger when we let the story, the picture, replace the moments when we lose self to a broader sense of awareness. Humans have only recently mastered the written word, a Faustian bargain.
We create stories to help explain our (in a broad sense, not the limited ego factories we've become) place in the world. It's a confusing place. Even a simple walk outdoors overwhelms our imaginations when we pay attention.
And, of course, we die. Words and photos do not. We place an awful authority on the things that we think define us beyond our lifetime. Alas, we think wrongly.
***
I've lived a charmed life--flying off motorcycles, working on the docks of Newark, in Athens right after the earthquake, practicing medicine in the projects.
I have many stories in a clan that of folks who all lived charmed lives. When we get together as the sun sets on a late June evening, we share our stories, reframe them, shaping them for the next time we share a sunset.
But the stories are not the lives. They are reminders that we all live charmed lives, that none of truly grasp what the world brings to us, and that we like sharing the sound of our own voices.
At the end of the ferry jetty, the waters swirl in a large eddy as the tide ebbs. Cormorants seek fish tumbling in the odd currents. I see them surface briefly, occasionally with a writhing flash of silver in their beaks, and imagine what they know.
Imagine the cormorant as it plunges into the gray-blue shadows looking for flashes of silver, then feeling the writhing of muscle in its beak.
But, of course, we cannot--if we create the story as we live it, we lose it.
And when I find myself outside putting together stories, I stop. I am not the story. My death will not be unique. My clan will continue to live, and tell stories, hopefully for thousands more years.
And when I start to put the stories ahead of the living, I stop telling stories until I remember what matters.
***
I teach science. Science is all about creating myths, in the broad sense, to help explain our universe. For science to work, we must pay attention to the universe, or else it's no longer science. That's not to say other kinds of stories are pointless, but it is to say that stories can (and do) get in the way.
The hardest thing about teaching science in a public school under a curriculum dictated by committees is that many of those in charge of science education act as though the stories themselves are what matter most.
Memorize this theory, that equation-both are special kinds of stories that help us grasp what we see. Too many children, even (or maybe especially) the bright ones, confuse the story for the universe.
The universe is ultimately unknowable to creatures like us. A good story gets us closer to the truth, but cannot replace it.
We are awash in strings of vague capital letters--and it's easy, so easy, to gloss over them like names in a Russian novel.
BPAs, PCBs, PBDEs--yawn....
The PBDEs get the stage this week--flame retardants found in just about everything. Now while I am (mostly) rational, and while I frown on babies in flaming pajamas, seems that the PBDEs designed to protect the little people may prevent the little people from ever arriving.
My sister knew PBDEs were a problem years ago, worked hard to get them banned in Michigan, and she (with many others) did just that.
"The Mary Beth Doyle PBDE Act" got two forms of PBDE banned in Michigan back in 2004, not long after she was run off the road by a devout Christian missionary, who later assured me her death was all part of God's plan; this week the Michigan assembly added a third form of PBDE to the act.
Mary Beth was not a professional scientist, but she was a keen observer. She danced through life. If I could teach anything in science class, it would be how to open your senses to the world. She did just that.
So here's a Mary Beth story, lifted word for word from a friend of hers, Darrin Gunkel. She changed a small corner of the world by her sheer will and her fearlessness, and this story serves her memory well.
Twenty years ago today, Mary Beth and I arrived in the fabled Hunza Valley, the model for Shangri-La, in northern Pakistan. We stayed in a town on a cliff 4,000 feet above the valley floor, in a hotel that cost about 5 bucks with a view of 4-mile-tall Himalayan peaks. The poplars lining irrigation canals – brimming with pearly and opalescent glacier runoff, feeding stone terraces of apricot wheat, mulberry, grapes – had just come to full flame. An orange and yellow hearth fire lapping at the feet of the mountains 18,000 feet high, capped in blue glaciers.The altitude started getting to me. So, Mary Beth took a walk.
A few hours later, she came back, her fancy scarf from the Sindh – the one with real silver threads, presented to her by relatives of the mayor of the town of Khaipur – traded in for one of the rough cotton veils Hunza women wear working their terraced fields.
“I traded my scarf! And got some presents!!” She was carrying a huge bunch of grapes and a loaf of bread that smelled like a fire place and was so dense, huge, and nutritious it took us a week to finish off.
“I met some farmers! Check it out!” She’d spent the afternoon in the compound of a Hunza family, a rare privilege. “They all thought I was insane once I got them to understand I wasn’t lost. Kept asking ‘where’s your husband? (in this medieval world, it was just easier, and more sensible, to claim we were married) Why did he let you come here alone?’ How the fuck am I supposed to explain I’m the one who dragged my ‘husband’ to Pakistan.” (Coming here was Mary Beth’s idea. That’s another story.)
She was glowing from the encounter. Not a lot of people are served tea in the kitchens of Hunzakot matriarchs. Not a lot of people are like Mary Beth. Travel is like being a rock star in that to succeed,it takes a certain talent – the kind Mary Beth possessed in spades, wheel barrows, truck loads full.
Later, we shared this experience: that evening, Hunza was celebrating an Ismaili Muslim festival. After sundown, people scaled the surrounding mountains and set bonfires. As the peaks faded into the night, the whole valley – dozens of miles long, and thousands of feet deep – came alive with bonfires. The sight left even MB speechless. Unforgettable stuff like this made Pakistan her favorite location of the whole year we spent in Asia.
Mary Beth, who I miss more than life itself, was thrilled I decided to become a teacher.
She was no Pollyanna, and knew as well as anyone where we're headed in our current madness, but she danced easily knowing she was part of this wonderful whatever were living through, and she did what she could to make it better.
We have been bombing tribal villages using drones, aircraft without faces.
If one student of mine wanders happily around this planet because of something that happens in Room B362, I'd say I've done good. I'm not Mary Beth, but I was her big brother.
Who knows who I may be shepherding in class....
"Who's That Girl" was written by Dick Seigel for Mary Beth. And I'll be poking Darrin for permission when I get roundtuit,
I keep thinking about the blue sparks I saw, and heard. Evanescent, almost palpable, rippling under the cotton.
I remember now when I last saw the same kind of ethereal blue. August, at the edge of the bay, I watched an errant comb jelly flash away its last few moments of life.
And my mind keeps wandering back to voltages and electrons, human (though useful) conceits.
No ideas but in things.
William Carlos Williams knew this, I'm still learning it.
We just finished ecology--we started just before the solstice. I wish I had started with this:
The half-stripped trees struck by a wind together, bending all, the leaves flutter drily and refuse to let go or driven like hail stream bitterly out to one side and fall where the salvias, hard carmine— like no leaf that ever was— edge the bare garden.
WCW, "Approach of Winter"
No ideas but in things. That's where science starts. In the rolling blue light under a t-shirt is the thing. Everything else about it--voltages and electrons and energy and photons--concepts to explain, epiphenomena, but not thething.
We need to teach children to see before they can think. There is no way to test this in a multiple choice exam.
My students are required to observe, and write about, a perennial plant. Each student watches the same plant throughout the school year. A few thought it was, well, pointless when they started, but since it was easy point, I did not get too much push-back.
And now they have grown attached to what they didn't notice before.
Teachers in various departments had a rare chance to sit together at a conference at Bloomfield High School this week.
We are diving into "Understanding by Design"--Dr. Grant Wiggins has developed a nice cottage industry for himself called Authentic Education. He's managed to grab the state's ear (and a good chunk of its money), and he put the sexay back into the synthesis/evaluation steps in Bloom's taxonomy. I'm not sure he's created anything spectacularly new, but it's a well-crafted program that gives teachers some control over lesson design, and our district has bought (psychically and fiscally) into the program.
During the workshop, different departments were asked to develop essential questions. The language arts crew came out with a question I misheard as "What makes a story true?"
I don't remember the original question, but I like my mangled version, and I'm running with it.
***
High schools have fiefdoms called departments--our kids spend 48" a day in each fiefdom. Exactly 48 minutes.
We teach our units in chunks, each fiefdom on a schedule independent of the others.
The kids get that literature requires imagination, but they do not get that truly great fiction is always true. To be fair, there is no way to understand most of what matters when you're just a few years beyond embryohood.
Science also requires imagination, and more importantly, is a special kind of fiction. The kids see science as the Truth. More than once I have heard a high school junior scientist type sniff "I love science because it's real, unlike fiction," often a child with a poor grasp of his native tongue.
"Truth" in science is squirrely--it never quite stays in the same place. A great work of literature remains true for as long as a culture exists (and even beyond); a scientific truth changes over time. Turns out science is a special kind of story-telling.
Scientists (attempt to) explain why things in the natural world behave as they do. "Natural world" is the world we can sense directly or indirectly, and requires the faith that what happens here and now would happen then and there if the conditions are the same. (Miracles are excluded by definition.) Science gives us tremendous power because it allows us to predict and manipulate natural events.
Take the story of the electron. You cannot see an electron. We have indirect evidence for its existence, but any visual image for it falls short. Scientists create sophisticated models helping us to understand why the electron (itself a slippery concept) behaves as it does, but understanding an electron beyond the story makes no sense. It does not exist.(This is not to say something does not exist--clearly something does--but our concept of the electron is just that--a concept, not the electron itself.)
Ask a child to draw an atom--she will draw the Bohr model, the one that looks like planets spinning around the sun. Her parents will draw the same model. Quite a few teachers will also do the same. It's a cultural icon, though it's almost useless now in science.
Electrons exist, but not as "things". Atoms exist but not as particles, at least not in the solid sense. An atom is almost completely empty space.
Electrons have no dimensions. At least that's how we understand them today. How we understand them today is more "true" than how we understood them yesterday; tomorrow we will have a more "true" understanding than we do today.
Most of our culture does not get this--we worship science because it gives us neat stuff; many of us avoid great literature because it gives us pain.
What makes anything true? Not sure I can find it in science. Not sure I can find it in literature, either, but I bet I have a better shot at it there. I love Robert Frost. Here's a piece of "The Black Cottage"--should souls survive independent of their bodies (and in Genesis it says otherwise), I hope Mr. Frost can forgive me for slicing his work.
I started reading a book this morning, a good one.
This particular book was printed in 1903, sat in our high school library for about 30 years before checked out in May, 1934, then sat on the shelves unmolested another 45 years. "L. DeMatteo" checked it out in December, 1979--read under the same dull December light that glows now.
I fetched it out of the library discard pile two years ago, then forgot about it.
It's alive again.
***
Spoken words define humans. We tell stories, create our universes, through evanescent sounds repeated again and again, never quite the same way twice.
To hear our stories, we needed to sit close. I saw your face, you saw mine. I touched pieces of you inside my nose, and you felt pieces of me. Voices rise and fall as did the light from the sun, then the fire. The dynamics of our voices mattered--adagio complemented allegro, pianissimo then forte and back again.
Our limbic system, the seat of emotion and memory, worked hard--a good storyteller reminds us we are more than our cerebral cortex.
***
Written words are dangerous. They are static. They take on power far beyond the fleeting thoughts of the one who writes them down.
They are so powerful that people get paid well to tell the rest of us what a string of written words mean. Lawyers, judges, and professors earn power and prestige debating the meaning of words held fast in stone, on paper, words written yesterday, words written millennia ago.
If you cannot read you cannot participate fully in western culture. This often gets misinterpreted as meaning you are less than fully human. Reading opens doors, true, but it also closes them.
We sometimes forget this in the science classroom.
When you are reading, truly involved in a book, the only sense that's being used is your vision. Reading is a wonderful thing, of course, but we forget its limits. Words represent meaning, meaning ultimately attached to something beyond the photons bouncing of a page.
I can unleash your memories of eating an orange, but only if you've ever eaten an orange.
A lot of kids in school are reading about oranges without ever having tasted one. This is fine if a child really needs to know about them, and if there's no better way to do this.
Best way to teach a child about an orange is to give each child an orange. The only way to know the taste of an orange is to eat one. Too often we confuse "knowing about" something with "knowing." Forgetting the difference contributes to what Clay Burell school calls "schooliness."
The kids use a different phrase for the same thing: school sucks.
***
There is too much sentiment in our passion for nature. We make colored plates and poems to her. All honor to the poets ! especially to those who look carefully and see deeply, like Wordsworth and Emerson and Whitman. But what the common run of us needs, when we go a-wooing nature, is not more poetry, but a scientific course in biology...the fearful and the wonderful have a meaning and a beauty which we ought to realize.
Dallas Lore Sharp, A Watcher in the Woods
We do not need more written words in science class, we do not need more text books, we do not need more photographs. All are too static.
We need more sounds of children gasping as a hydra grabs a tiny piece of fish food while they watch under a microscope, then realizing the universe is far larger than the words in a classroom.
Until the students realize that words merely reflect something much larger than ourselves, science class will remain terminally interminable as students stare at the clock instead of the nifty Powerpoint slide you diligently crafted last night.
***
In December I trust words far more than I do in June, one more reason to hibernate. Dying light scares me, so I hide in the world our culture creates. It is not healthy.
Much of what we do in the classroom is unhealthy.
We know this and do it anyway.
***
I may invite Galway Kinnell's words into my classroom this week. I'd invite him, but I'm guessing he's busy this week.
If he should happen to wander into my class, I would ask him how much he trusts written words.
I'm guessing he'd raise those magnificent eybrows of his and say "not much."
Kinnell felt what he called in one interview "a certain scorn that there could be a course in writing poetry."
Here's a piece from one of his poems, "Under the Williamsburg Bridge," that says more successfully in 33 words what I babbled on above:
Tomorrow, There on the Bridge, Up in some riveted cranny in the sky, It is true, the great and wondrous sun will be shining On an old spider wrapping a fly in spittle-strings.
The sun is just starting to settle down a tad later today than it did yesterday. The solstice is still over a week away, but the evening light is creeping back. (Really creeping--the sunset today is only a few seconds later than yesterday, but I'll take it.)
The days are still getting shorter, true, and will for a few more days. If we used a sundial, our earliest sunset would indeed fall on the winter solstice.
Unfortunately, we use clocks. Blame the Benedictine monks.
So here's a little brain exercise for your science class. Mention to your students that the sun is starting to set a little later each day. With any luck, the smart aleck in the back will say in his best wise guy voice--"You got it wrong--the shortest day of the year is still over a week away."
Might make for a nice discussion on time.
***
Another fun mini-lesson to present in class....correlation does not mean causation.
The Science Times last week reported that Scorpios are more likely to develop asthma than those under any other zodiac sign.
Stars at work?
Well, maybe the sun--children born in the fall are at a critical age during the winter months. At 4 months or so, their maternal antibodies are waning, and respiratory viruses are rampant.
(If you really want to annoy the astrology folk, point out that the zodiac signs are based on the position of stars over 2000 years ago. Pisces now rules when the vernal equinox arrives.)
The Stonehenge photo is at winter solstice in 2004, found here. There may well be copyright issues, but I figure since my ancestors helped build it, sharing a few photons is karma.
"I don't eat plants." Um, you never eat cereal or salad? "Oh, I eat those--I just don't eat plants."
The disconnect between science and language in school kills science education.
Grasping mathematics may be necessary to understand higher physics (knowing which algorithm to use on a calculator doesn't count), but the does not make math the language of science.
The language of science (in these parts) is English. If you cannot manipulate words coherently, meaning will fail.
That's a high falutin' statement. Some qualifications:
1) Words/language may be oral. Written language allows manipulation oral language does not, but I do think my non-readers can grasp some science.
Reading, though, takes them a lot farther. (Or is it further?)
2) Aha! moments often do not depend on meticulously structured language.
Still, sharing how you got to the Aha! moment does.
3) I am talking about science in a formal sense, beyond mere empiricism.
If I take a kid clamming on a falling tide, she sees (hears, smells, tastes, touches, too) more in a few hours than she will in a year of 48 minute periods in my classroom. Still, reminding children that they have senses that are spectacularly adapted for the outdoors is not science (though it is the first step).
A few days spent outside is more likely to make you a believer in spirits and magic than a "believer" of science. Reading a science textbook won't change the odds.
4) You can know English without grasping all the grammar and spelling nuances.
I'm a heretic. I insist that my students write meaningful answers, yet I do not insist on proper spelling and complete sentences if they can get the meaning across otherwise.
I am a hair-splitter when it comes to meaning--my students quickly learn this. They work hard to convey what they mean. If a child knows grammar inside out, it's one less hurdle to sharing meaning, but if they don't, hesitating over the proper structure of a pluperfect subjunctive will stop their thoughts dead.
(I am not advocating bad English. Still, if we're going to require students to read The Canterbury Tales (ful of wo and deth) in high school, I think it's OK to give them a break with spelling in science.)
***
We are talking about atoms in freshman physical science. This is not honors. This is not the step below honors. We don't have low level courses anymore, but we only have three steps. Do the math.
The textbook talks of orbitals, spends about 27 words about how the Bohr model has been superseded, then spends the next dozen or so pages using the Bohr model. The kids are, well, bohred. I hold up a golf ball, calling it a nucleus. We talk about how far apart the electrons are, somewhere in the next town over. We talk about science fiction and force fields. We talk about trying to walk to the nucleus from the other town, hitting the energy wall of electrons. We talk about empty space. The class is amused, the teacher is a nut, it's like Philosophy 101 after drinking a a few cans of Red Bull.
Time to bring it home.
I slap my hand on a desk. What did I hit?
"Um, the desk?" Good! What atomic particles did I hit? I slap the desk again.
Electrons banging against electrons.
Mathematical models get us to the big picture, and Wolfgang Pauli spun us a beautiful web.
(That's a gratuitous math equation lifted from Wikipedia to give this some oomph--in science class we call it learning. In the real world I'd call it a cheap shot.)
Takes English to translate the math back to reality, or as real as language can take us.
A slap on the desk becomes cool. A slap on the desk, done enough times, cues the students back to the space between nuclei and electrons, or the space of "stuff".
***
The best students in high school can make the analogies, can do the math, can "get" university level science.
For the rest of them, the emphasis on the math without effectively tying it to our native tongue makes science class pointless.
The students put about as much work into doing something pointless as you and I would, just enough to pass, to get the diploma.
New Jersey used to require 2 years of pointlessness, now it requires three.
I bet if you made the first year of science worthwhile, geared to the lives of children not destined for college, you wouldn't have to make the next two mandatory.
Occasionally I will stumble upon an exhausted bee, dying on a flower. Too tired to move, but still alive enough to thrust its tongue into the nectar. I leave those bees well enough alone. Should I be gasping my last breaths with my tongue buried in my life's lust, I trust the bees will return the favor.
Tonight I found a bee clinging to a cluster of oregano flowerlets. Her head hung awkwardly over the cluster, missing the pollen and nectar of the flowers under her feet. I only saw it because I went to pick an oregano leaf.
The bee's middle leg occasionally moved, as though reaching for an itch. The wings trembled. It was dusk, the bee was, I thought, dying, or maybe, I said aloud to my wife, it was just resting.
I explained to Leslie, who has heard me explain too many ridiculous theories in our 31 years together (she listens intently, as though I might make some sense, and I speak intently, knowing she will listen, no matter how silly I am being--we love each other, after all), that perhaps the bee was only resting.
She challenged me, fairly. "How do you know it's only resting?"
Well, I saw a bumble resting on a marigold just last week, and in the morning, it was gone.
"Did you look on the ground," she asked, and I admitted that I had not, preferring to believe that my comatose bumble had been resurrected (a wonderful word). And at that moment, I suspected that my bumble had merely fallen off the marigold, dead.
Still, the idea of a bee dying on a cluster of flowerlets with her head hanging awkwardly off to the side bothered me enough to push another cluster of flowers towards her head. My wife watched. As I mentioned, she loves me, and she knew why I wanted to bury that bee's head in a flower, as crazy as the idea was. Because she knew my motive, she remained silent--not a skeptical silence, more a let's see where this goes silence, a silence of faith.
The bee buried its head into my offered flower. I figured that was it--she'll die there, and in the morning, when I see her carcass still on the flower, her head buried in nectar, I'll be glad to know I made her last moments a little better. Why not?
Still, we live in a wonderful universe and few things end as we predict. I was now in a peculiar position. The bee held her head in the clump of flowers I held; the bee's body, however, was still on the original bunch of flowerlets. Even in my most magnanimous moments, I do not envision holding a plant for an hour or two for dying insects. I am not a hospice for infirmed winged critters.
I gently tried to pry the flowers apart. The bee's body followed the bee's head, and I let go. She now rested comfortably with her head buried in an oregano flower. I have buried my own nose in oregano flowers. There are worse places to die.
Maybe it was the calories in the oregano nectar. Maybe it was the shimmying of the flowers. Maybe bees do in fact just rest at times (shhhh, don't tell the bee mythologists). She pulled her head out of the flower, then flew to a neighboring oregano plant, one where a human was less likely to interfere with her rest.
Seven weeks before my mother died, she danced. We had gathered at the Crab House in Cape May, where our family swarms annually. The Crab House is like so many other places down by the shore--plain brown paper table cloths, crab mallets, beer, and music.
Breast cancer had poked my mother's brain with nests of useless cells. Her bones ached. Her liver was swollen from metastases. When no one was looking, she moved like a marionette. Publicly, however, she moved slowly, gracefully.
In June of 1996, we danced. We knew she was dying. She knew she was dying. Others at the restaurant had no way of knowing, and they joined in our maniacal twirling, swinging, laughter. The others could not know she was dying, her energy so high, but we knew, and danced all that much harder. We knew she would not be back next year, we knew she was suffering, but the joy that night was real. We were celebrating life--not just hers, not just ours. Our joy was contagious, and the joint was hopping.
My mother taught her children to bury our heads in nectar the rare days we could find it. That nectar even at all exists boggles the mind. That it exists for us and for the bees, a miracle.
Another oldie. The picture of the bee is from, of all places, Fermilab, a gummint site. I figure the Crab House folks won't mind the plug--been a rough year for them. Well worth the visit once they reopen.
I grew up close enough to the Jersey shore to have spent many hours submerged up to my nose in the Atlantic Ocean. If you tilt your head back underwater, you can see your reflection in the underside of the sea; a silvery, shimmery Neptune child gazes back.
I mostly bobbed up and down, nose sometimes in the water, sometimes out, pretending I was a salt-water crocodile. With eyes so close to the surface, the seaweed and broken reeds floating by loomed like large islands. When I turned away from the shore gazing eastward, I was the largest creature in the universe, not quite human anymore.
In New Jersey, what most of the world calls silversides or smelt, we call spearing. Menidia notata. They are mostly translucent, no bigger than a pinky. Each side has a silver band that looks like smooth tin foil. They have straight jawlines that make them look rather glum close-up, but since we mostly saw them when threading them on a hook, looking glum seemed appropriate.
Spearing travel in huge schools, almost invisible except for the occasional flash as the sun catches the silver. The surface sometimes erupted with them when a predator came underneath the school, but otherwise spearing had no particular reason to jump.
Or so the books will tell you.
One August afternoon, when I was 11 or 12ish, and I was busy conquering the seaworld, a piece of a phragmites reed drifted by. A tiny fish jumped over it. Odd.
I drifted closer to the reed, my eyes inches away. One fish, then another, their bands of tin flashing in the sun. I spotted the school just below the surface. I figured a few got too close to the reed, and jumped over it out of need. I continued to watch.
The fish jumping over the reed appeared to turn back. The school was mulling about in no particular direction. The fish were lining up to jump over the reed.
For the empiricists:
The individual subjects were observed approaching the reed at about 1 to 2 inches below the surface, then leaping about 1/2 inch before the reed, clearing it by no more than a 1/2 inch, then appeared to turn after reentering back into the water. The fish consistently approached the reed from the same side.
For the rest of you:
How do you know the fish are enjoying themselves? They jump for no apparent reason over a randomly floating object on a lovely day when (for the moment) no predators were interested in them, when the water was not cloudy with the milt of spawn, and when they forgot a crocodile sea god was watching.
I observed this more than once, or so I remembered. I am old enough now confuse imagination and memory. The tale above says as much as needs to be said contemplating joy in fish, and the tale reminded me of my jumping spearing.
Then the tao met Google.
Had anybody ever reported seeing fish jump over reeds for no apparent reason (or at least for any reason apparent to humans, who have an insatiable need for "reasons"). If you throw "fish" and "jumping" and "twig" together, you get a few hits. One of the hits is for an entry in Fish-Sci.
Fish-Sci is a listserv, a "scientific forum on fish and fisheries." On it fish biologists carry out long, serious conversations about, well, fish. You will find discussions on "otoliths in dolphinfish", "iron content in adult eel", and "fish biomass estimates for oligotrophic systems," all within the past 6 months.
The inquiry started innocently--Randy E. Edwards, Ph.D. and principal scientist for the Center for Coastal Geology needed to present a poster to International Symposium on Sturgeon in Oskosh, WI back in 2001. His question was simple: why do Gulf sturgeon jump? In his thoughtful letter, he listed numerous known reasons why fish jump.
A number of hypotheses have been brought forward to explain jumping behavior and include: parasite shedding, startle reflex, behavioral communication (to alert other individuals of their presence), to help shed eggs during spawning, nuptial behavior, and air gulping or swim bladder adjustment. .... Gulf sturgeon jumping is not temporally random, but instead is concentrated in the early morning and late afternoon. Why mullet jump (often in the same habitats as sturgeon) is not known.
The resulting discussion takes on a dance worthy of Albert the Alligator and company in Pogo. Fish apparently jump, at times, for no discernible reason.
Ivor Growns, a scientist with the Australian government, dodged the issue with an anecdote:
On a lighter note, I have heard of a member of the public sending a letter to their local parlimentarian asking why fish jumped. The minister asked for an explaination [sic] from the Fisheries department. The staff member sent back a reply saying "Because they are happy."
Another scientist, Glenn Crossin, a salmon specialist for Centre for Applied Conservation Biology in Vancouver, Canada, notes that sockeye salmon expend tremendous amounts of energy getting to their spawning grounds, yet when they get there, spend two weeks jumping and wasting energy.
Energetically one might think that this would be a risky behavior. Salmon typically expend most of thier [sic] fixed somatic energy reserves (mostly lipid) just reaching the spawning ground. Thus to expend limited energy unnecessarily, particularly when their one and only spawning opportunity lays ahead, seems risky.
When he asked his 9 year old nephew what he thought, the child answered "maybe they are just so happy to have made it there."
Ha-ha, kids are cute, let's get back to science.
Dr. Rodney Rountree is a scientist. He has a Ph.D., he teaches at the University of Massachusetts, he knows fish. He finally said what the others were skirting:
Fish likely jump for a lot of reasons, but I've often observed fishes jumping for no obvious reason (i.e., no predators or feeding behavior). I've often felt that the often cited purpose of jumping as an effort to dislodge external parasites (e.g., ocean sunfish) seemed inadequate. I even admit to thinking that some fish are just playing after on many different occasions watching Atlantic silversides (Menidia menidia) jumping over floating twigs over and over again. It sure seemed like a game.... The jumping fish never made contact with the twig, which might be expected if they were trying to rub off a parasite or scratch an itch.
Spearing like to play. Or at least it's a reasonable hypothesis.
I wonder what else I taught myself to forget.
Sources: FISH-SCI archives, June, 2001, http://segate.sunet.se/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0106&L=fish-sci Personal observations and a ragged memory
I wrote this somewhere else about four years ago, and I still like it. The top photo is from NOAA collection; the silversides drawing is by H. L. Todd back in the 1890s or so, so likely public domain, and ca be found here. The Pogo frame is from, of course, Walt Kelly, my favorite cartoonist ever, and I'm betting he'd be cool with the picture here, but it's too late to ask him. I found this frame here, but if Constantine von Hoffman objects, I have the original somewhere, and will scan it.
Yesterday Leslie and I paddled along the edge of Cape May Harbor, again showing our prowess with tide charts by struggling against the ebbing tide on the flip side of our voyage.
Because pushing against the tide is tiring, I edged towards the beach and just drifted for a minute.
While doing pretty much nothing, I noticed a gull dropping something.
It followed the object, picked it up, the swooped back up, higher and higher, hovered a moment, then dropped the object again.
Gulls are marvelous fliers, despite the inane way they're pictured in Jonathan Livingston Seagull--I once saw a flock of them chasing down insects, rivaling swallows in their gyrations.
After its fourth try, this time successfully nailing a small bed of rocks on the beach, the gull had its meal.
Now, I know this has been reported, and I have found smashed shells on jetties, presumably from gulls, but I had never seen it done.
A few things struck me:
The gull did not randomly drop the mussel--he clearly was aiming for the small pile of rocks.
As the gull hovered upward, he went a bit higher than gulls usually do when just hanging around--it knew enough to get some air between its meal and the rocks below
The gull consistently went to about the same height, and it took a bit of effort to get there.
So here are my bizarre questions of the day, which should be answerable, though I have about 37 other things I should be doing.
How far does it take a falling mussel to reach terminal velocity at sea level? How close was that gull to that height?
I bet that gull was about as close to the answer through experience as I'm likely to calculate.
(Herring gull photo by Adrian Pingstone, 2003, via Wikipedia Commons; mussel photo by Joan Muller, Waquoot Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, 1996, via NOAA)
I have been reading an anthology of articles and letters from Nature, a weekly British science journal which started in the Victorian age, and continues to serve as a major publication for scientists around the world.
Throughout the decades, Nature has continued to publish letters of all sorts, including a few that purport intelligence in beasts other than humans and the few others (dolphins, whales, primates) popularly accepted to have some level of intelligence.
Throughout school I was told over and over and over again not to anthropomorphize animal behavior. While my teachers (correctly) asserted that humans were animals, and that humans had some behavior similar to other mammals, one should not infer specifically human characteristics in animal behavior.
"Well, why not?" "Because you are assuming the behavior reflects something human--that's anthropomorphizing!"
The circularity in the reasoning bothered me a bit, but teachers still carried the weight of authority, which I accepted.
In Nature, there have been all kinds of letters ascribing human characteristics inferred through observing behaviors of critters as varied as sea urchins, dung beetles, dogs, pigeons, and scorpions (credited with committing suicide to avoid life not worth living).
So here is my story--the observations are true, the inferences, of course, up for discussion. Since I have been on a Galileo kick, I will mention his take on using analogies in science.
Galileo was referring specifically to sunspots, and used clouds as an analogy to describe them. He was challenged on this, and Galileo explained why he used the analogy:
I do not assert on this account that the spots are clouds of the same material as ours, or aqueous vapors raised from the earth and attracted by the sun. I merely say that we have no knowledge of anything that more closely resembles them. Let them be vapors or exhalations then, or clouds, or fumes sent out from the sun's globe or attracted there from other places; I do not decide on this--and they may be any of a thoudand other things not perceived by us.
Galileo, "Letter on Sunspots," again quoted in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, translated by Stillman Drake, Anchor Books, New York, 1957, p. 100.
So here's my first in a series of observations of animal behavior that my teachers told me to interpret without relying on analogous human behavior. It occurred April 20, 2003, and I wrote down what I saw:
Today, I spent a good bit of a warm Easter afternoon watching a wasp make the third cell of her nest, creating paper walls from her mouth. I mentioned it to my wife; she reminded me of the wasp problems the summer before, so I decided to knock the nest out now, before the fish held a colony of wasps. I felt ridiculous caring about the work the wasp had already done.
When the wasp had gone to gather more water, I took the fish down off the fence post, and knocked off the new nest, as well as the larger nest left from last summer. I set the fish upside down on our patio table, a good 10 feet from where it had hung, and forgot about it. The little sadness I had felt for the wasp dissipated with a shake of my head, reprimanding myself for my silly sentimentality.
I spent the rest of the afternoon wrestling with a grape vine--I want it to go one way, it insists on following the sun. As I walked past the patio table, I noticed the lone wasp walking back and forth on the overturned fish. It looked frantic. It rapidly walked one way, then the other. It clearly was looking for the nest I had knocked off.
I called my wife--the wasp had clearly identified the fish as the home of its nest. My wife is rational, and a good empiricist--she keeps me sane. She could not understand why I got so agitated.
"Maybe it can smell the nest." The nest lay a good 15 feet away. I have a habit of saving wasp nests, shells, acorns, anything of interest not made by humans. "How do you know it's the same wasp?" she wondered.
I brought the tiny nest back to the iron fish. I laid it next to the wasp. A breeze blew the nest away. A moment later, the wasp left.
I was shaken. The wasp clearly recognized the fish, upside down on the table, more than 10 feet away from its original site. She clearly exhibited an increase in movements. At the risk of anthropomorphizing, the wasp was clearly distressed.
There is more to this world than I can ever hope to understand.
I'm not claiming that wasps "feel" what we do, far from it--but I would not be so quick to dismiss any and all animal behavior because it might, somehow, resemble human behavior.
It's not that we're not special--we are. But we're not the only things special in this universe.
We are too exclusively bookish in our scholarly routine...In the Garden of Eden Adam saw the animals before he named them: in the traditional system, children named the animals before they saw them.
A.N. Whitehead (lifted from The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts, Vintage, 1968, p. 100)
In the 1890’s, the Committee of Ten decreed that the public high school curriculum shall start with biology, followed by chemistry, then physics, or so the myth goes. Turns out the Committee actually said students should take either botany or zoology at some point in their high school career.
Still, public schools in these parts still tackle biology before chemistry and physics. A lot of teachers think the bio-chemistry-physics sequence is a bit outdated now.
We would suggest that a modern day Committee of Ten would recognize the need for “biology” to adapt to its new educational environment and would recommend resequencing high school biology so that it is studied after introductory physics and chemistry. Also, as an absolute minimum, introductory high school biology should be a 2-yr course—something that the original Committee of Ten did not nor could not anticipate.
One child in my class last year complained that the text was misleading—“it had a picture of two owls in the beginning—it was the last time we saw an animal until March”—and I don’t think she left knowing any more about penguins than the day she started.
Richard Feynman tells the story about naming a bird—his father was seen as less that astute by his friends’ mothers since his father did not bother teaching the names of the birds.
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
Richard Feynman
Zip up to 5:17 to hear the story.
To name a creature tells you nothing about it—it is a symbolic sound that spares us the effort of running around trying to find one to point to when we want to convey its image, but it really says, well, nothing. I can turn it around—hand each child a sow bug. We have 48 minutes to do something with it. Figure a couple of minutes for the “Do Now”, then a few minute for the anticipatory set (perhaps showing the Feynman video, though he’s such a natural even my live performance cannot touch the 2D video of a man sitting in his chair telling a story). A good story. A happy man.
Each child has a sow bug, in a Petri dish, and now the pregnant silence.
“Mister Doctor Doyle, what are we supposed to do?” I write the assignment on the board. “Tell me what it is.” “How many words do we have to use?” So it goes. Few good stories. Fewer happy students.
Maybe I could give them each a ”pet” sow bug. Just ask them to keep it alive for two weeks. Everyone can get an A. (No sense instilling any more competitiveness here otherwise I’d find a lot of dead sow bugs with a day.)
Just what do I want a child to take away from a nameless animal?
Science is about stories. Really. Without diving into Campbellian mumbo-jumbo, or pulling a Barth, we construct stories to help us figure out the universe. And so here is a story I tell my Freshman science class, my PCP’s, the ones with the revolving labels.
My clan comes from west Ireland, where folks still speak Gaelic and live under thatched roofs. (For those of you who know me, remember, this is a story—the truth matters more than the facts). My clan is dark, we are black Irish. And (shhhh…) we have travelers among us, gypsies, Romani….
Now at this point, the class is a little skeptical. I point out my nose—way too big for the classic Irish look. My skin is dark in September, hardly the fair stereotype of leprechauns. (“You're a brother?” “We’re all brothers—but yeah, black Irish.”)
By now the class is hooked. Hey, it’s science class, and I’ve taken them back to storytime. Kids love storytime. They’re ready to break out their blankies. So back to our story.
My great-grandmother would tell us about a mystical force, a powerful force, called savallah!. We are all connected by this pull. All of us are pulled towards one another, indeed, pulled to all the objects in the universe. The moon, the sun, the farthest planets, indeed the farthest star the eye can see on moonless night all exert a force on us. Savallah!
It helps if you say the word a bit louder with some vague foreign accent (mine sounds Indian, it’s the best I can do). A few look skeptical. I carry on:
The closer two things are, the stronger the force…savallah! The larger the objects, the stronger the force…savallah!
By now I’m practically spitting the word, my eyes wide. A few students look nervous. I’d like to believe they fear this mysterious force, but more likely they fear their teacher has lost it, and they’re not sure what to do.
I ask how many “believe in” gravity. All hands go up.
And then I substitute gravity for savallah!. And they’re hooked. I tell them to go home and share the myth. When I get that phone call, I know they did.
Now I’m a Flat Earth Society member and teaching religion. I keep the administrators busy.
