I'm a retired pediatrician, a high school teacher, and a Dad. I'm on the short side of this mortal coil thing now. I ignored decent advice when younger, and I expect you'll do the same. Still, it's a chilly late December eve, and I'm in the mood to pontificate.


Stuff you should get your kids before they sprout pubic hairs:


:

A cheap instrument that is easy to noodle:

Harmonica, kalimba, maybe an ocarina. While mastery of a fancy instrument gets you glory and a better shot at a decent college, being able to bend notes on a mouth harp will give anyone about as much joy as she can handle.

Cheap joy's hard to beat.

Glass:

A $2 magnifying glass changes the world. Microscopes are clunky, require prep, and can freak out any child who's paying attention. A decent loupe gives a child just enough new stuff to stimulate the mind without careening into existentialism.

Paper:

The Kids' Paper Airplane Book let's your child build 16 paper airplanes. Or get grandpa to show her how it's done. Flight fascinates even the cynical among us.

Get a book on origami. Few of us use our hands for anything more useful than banging on a keyboard. Let your child experience the joy of human evolution--fingers were made for folding.

A garden:

Plant a basil seed in a Dixie cup. Put a carrot top in a bowl on a windowsill. Scatter wheat berries on a vacant lot.

Maybe, just maybe, your child will grasp that a farmer matters more than a financial analyst (or even a teacher).

An instrument of death:

Every child who eats critters should slaughter at least one before they get too cynical to fully appreciate the sacrifice made by the animal he eats. There is an instant just before the moment of slaughter that hangs frozen forever.

I don't like to kill. I like to eat.The connection matters.

Balls:

Both kinds. 'Nuff said.

Maybe the best gift you can give is one that takes away. Destroy her television, disable his X-box, toss the iPad into the fireplace.

Share your stories, share your time. Trust what you know to be true. None of us get out of here alive.

The kalimba picture is by Mark Holdaway, Kalimba Magic (www.kalimbamagic.com).

READ MORE - A science teacher's gift guide for the larvae in your life

I'm not a fan of SMART Boards™ for a few reasons, not the least of which is my left-handedness.

Left-handers push words when we write. It's not a natural motion, and the SMART Board™ takes southpaws back to the fountain pen days, when our hand would smudge the not-quite-dry ink.

When I write on a SMART Board™, my hand blocks the light. As I continue, my wrist, then my forearm block the light.

Many left-handers can write backwards, though most may be unaware of this. If you're lefty, try it for a few minutes. You may amaze yourself more than you already do.

Some of us can write backwards faster than forwards. I occasionally took notes in medical school backwards, then reverse the paper and hold it up to a light to read it.

So here's my idea for a new assistive technology--program the SMART Board to flip my witing into its mirror image as I write!

Take that, Sister Mary Barbara!

Other reasons I don't like SMART Boards™:

That lag (try drawing lots of dots in a diffusion lesson
Hogs up my whiteboard space
The culture (All caps? Really? How precious....)
Expensive

I secretly take it down for some periods...lots of glorious whiteboard underneath!

Drawing by DaVinci--I tweeted him, but he never wrote back....

READ MORE - Assistive technology for southpaws

In the past couple of days I got to play tug-o'-war with a striped bass (he won), watch a loon chase spearing, and listen to the fog horn go on for hours--it is spring in Cape May.

Last night my brother surprised me with a few gifts. I slipped past fifty when I wasn't looking.

Rock'Em Sock'Em Robots. Labyrinth. A 007 spy camera/gun. A 1959 World Almanac. A classic rod hockey game (nobody ever beat me). A Tinkertoy set. Joe Pepitone, Jerry Koosman, and Tug McGraw baseball cards.

None of it expected, none of it deserved, all of it cherished.

This morning I built a cabin out of Lincoln logs. The container has both a girl and a boy (the boy with an odd expression on his face). Some of the pieces have been chewed on by a puppy who has long died of old age.

***

My Lincoln logs are made of wood. Some fit together better than others. Every single piece came from a tree, and had to be shaped.

I built a small cabin with a window and a door. I forgot to put in a log. I had to take apart a wall, and when I did, it fell down.

No reset button. Just Newtonian physics. A little bit of frustration.

I rebuilt my cabin. A lot of satisfaction.

***

Plastics are cheap, and easily shaped. (That's why they're called plastics.) Plastikos: moldable. About a century ago we figured out how to mold oil.

Ben, I got to talk to you.
I'm just going to say one word to you.
Plastics.

Very low doses of bisphenol A, found in many plastics, prevents chromosomes from lining up right in rats. It has been associated with breast cancer. It has been associated with prostate disease. BPA mimics estrogen.

A year or two this made big news because you can find it in baby bottles. But we knew that already. And we did it anyway.

***

My daughter loves to fish, but will only fish for what she can eat. She lives in New Jersey. This means she can no longer fish for bluefish. Or striped bass. Or eel. Or white perch.

She can eat one fluke a month, and one weakfish. We'll catch our fluke in June, our weakfish in July.

I'm not supposed to eat bluefish more than 6 pounds. I'm already addled. I'm no longer reproducing. I'm eating bluefish.

***

My grandfather was born in 1898. He could eat all the bluefish he wanted. He lived a long life, and finally died in the 1990's. He worked until a a couple of weeks before he died.

He never drank water from a Nalgene bottle, and if he ever had the opportunity to drink from Nalgene, water would not have been his first choice.

Plastics were not invented until he was 11 years old.

Toys were made out of wood because that was what was available. Wood is still available. Plastic is cheaper.

***

Imagine if the Soviet Union sold us baby bottles that harmed out children. Don't worry, it's Dow, GE Plastics, and Sunoco, not the Commies.

BPA was developed in the 1930s, specically as a syntheitc estrogen. Now the States make over 2 billion poinds a year of this stuff.

An estrogen mimic acts like estrogen. Wowzers, stop the presses!

I am a science teacher--hundreds of children have passed through my classes, and I bet not one of them worries about BPA.

Something is wrong.

***

Lincoln logs did not contain BPA in the 1960s--they were made of wood. In the 1970's, plastic replaced the wood because, of course, plastic is cheaper, and in our culture cheaper trumps just about everything.

Lincoln logs are wood again. The fish are still not safe, but at least a few people are aware of the problem. So this summer my daughter and I will catch a fluke or two, then maybe play Skeeball to replace fishing.

Should either of my children choose to have children, they will know what wood feels like.

READ MORE - Lincoln logs

While I was teaching my nephew Keith how to pluck oysters from the jetty, he taught me a few things about skateboarding.

I want to learn how to "Ollie"--it's a little skip move that allows skaters to jump up curbs. More important, it looks cool.

I'm in my fifth decade, sixth if being a fetus counts for anything.

If I want to do a Kickflip or a Pop Shuvit, I have to Ollie first.

I'm a practiced faller. I've fallen off bicycles, motorcycles, unicycles, small cliffs, rooftops, cars, ladders, and snowboards. I've jammed my neck bodysurfing. Falling at any speed is not much fun at my age, but there still remains that tiny huge thrill I get before actually kissing the asphalt.

I try, I fall, I check the damage, I try again. It's fun, and I know that if I want to get to a Pop Shuvit, I got to get through the Ollie first.

Imagine if my nephew said, "Geez, Uncle Muncle, you've spent all you alloted time on the Ollie--we're going to start the Pop Shuvit tomorrow." (My trainer is a 9 year old with sense, so that's not going to happen.)

And so it goes.

Our state tests our biology students mid-May. School runs to late June. I am going to ask students to do the Pop Shuvit in March before they learned how to Ollie. (For the more literal among you, take a deep breath--I am teaching biology, not skateboarding. Maybe once I get tenure that will change.)

Mastery of almost anything requires time, effort, and (dare i say it?) love.

I can "incent" my students to know enough to pass just about any test, but mastery requires time, effort, and love.

Time. Effort. Love.

We can argue about how much blood I need to spill before I learn the Ollie--some techniques may be better (and safer) than others. Still, without the time, without the effort, and without my love of skating, all the arguments of which technique to use are in vain.

I don't care how well the Chinese can do the Ollie. I don't care how well my Ollie compares to the Russians. I don't care if the state has some test to measure my Ollieness. All I care about is mastering something I think would be uber-cool to master.

And I am going to keep trying it until I get it. Wouldn't it be uber-cool if my students had the same opportunity to master walking before I was forced to teach them how to run?

The photo is by Michael Andrus, the skater is Matt Metcalf, and the photo was found at about.com: skateboarding.

I think this is my 200th post.

READ MORE - Ollie Ollie In Come Free!

I'm a float, which means I wander from class to class just like the students do. Since my travels take me to 3 different stories, I need to travel light. (I occasionally lug bowling balls--I only have two--so "light" is a relative term).

Still, toys remain on my list of science class essentials--I'd toss the textbook before I give up marbles, Jacob's ladders, drinky birds and the like.

I have a magic stone. Oblong and deep gray, smoothed by years of massage by a local stream, the stone nestles well in a worried palm. That by itself makes it special, but not magical.

One day, while idly spinning it, it awoke. It spun a few circles, shuddered to a stop, then reversed itself and spun in the opposite direction.

I spun it again. Again, it rattled to a stop, and spun the other way. Spin. Wobble and rattle. Counterspin. I found myself a rattleback.




Rattlebacks have a long history. Stones of similar shape have been found buried in Egyptian tombs (hey, a good toy helps pass away eternity), and people have played with them long before anyone understood Newtonian physics.

The rattleback is also known as a "wobblestone" (for obvious reasons), and as a "celt." As per the OED Celt comes from the Latin word celtes, meaning stone chisel, and is used to describe certain chopping tools used by prehistoric peoples.

I imagine a bored archaeologist spinning a celt as she sat in her tent during bad weather at a dig site. "Why, look, Professor James, this bloody implement is possessed!" If anyone has an idea of the real etymology, I would be much obliged.

You can find rattlebacks sold as scientific toys, sometimes at outrageous prices. Some rattleback merchants wrongly tout the toy as a model demonstrating the coriolis force. Even physicists have a time wrapping their minds around the toy's mechanics. Sir Hermann Bondi wrote: "Many people, even trained scientists, find it hard to understand that the behaviour of the toy doesn't violate the principle of conservation of angular momentum."

When I lend them to students, I try not to tell them what to do. Just let them play.

READ MORE - Classroom toys: rattlebacks