While I'll leave it to the great philosophers to figure out the meaning of life, and there are as many words as stars trying to do just that, this much seems obvious:

Humans are, in this neck of the woods anyway, the best at telling the story of our universe. We are critters of awareness.

I just wandered back from a quick jaunt to the beach to watch the sun set on the Delaware Bay. The sand was ridiculously cool, the water a tad warmer than last week, the sky pale pink, and the soft waves resonated one with the next. The air, well, nothing clears out the conscious brain like a whiff of bay air. I'd describe it to you if I could. I cannot.

No one can.

***

I saw an old friend this week--we've known each other for longer than most humans around today have been alive.I didn't used to believe age meant anything--I do now. We came to the conclusion that maybe we're just here to share stories.

Stories are about awareness. Being human is about awareness, as good a reason as any to teach science.

Here's a list of simple things any of us can do today to increase our awareness:

• Plant some basil
• Walk barefoot.
• Brew some mead.
• Grind some flour. Mix it with yeast and honey. Knead it. Bake it.
• Clam or fish or hunt or gather from the wild.
• Stare at some stars
• Sniff cherry blossoms

Yep, a bit slanted, and likely not the same list you'd generate. That's not the point.

You cannot define the universe, but you can become uniquely aware of your tiny chunk of it. Or not.

I think education is about preventing the "Or not." I doubt Arne Duncan or Governor Christie would agree (or even have an idea of what I am talking about), but I doubt either get Keats or Yeats, either.

OK, not a science post per se, but Yeats and biology are more closely related than biology and engineering.
Kudos to Tom Hoffman for turning me to Michael Ruhlman.

READ MORE - We're here to share stories

Stories matter. Words matter.

The more I "teach" science, the more time I spend on language. If you cannot grasp the essence of a story, you cannot grasp science.

Our stories belie comprehension. If you introduce the Big Bang model into your classroom, describing it as an explosion, using a model that looks at it from the outside, you are not practicing science, you are practicing religion. You've missed the whole point.

It is pointless, truly pointless, to wrestle with pseudo-cosmology. Yet New Jersey wants just that:

"Critique evidence for the theory that the universe evolved as it expanded from a single point 13.7 billion years ago."

NJCCCS, 5.4.12.A.5

The Big Bang model works well to explain why things appear the way they are in cosmology, but--and this is a big but (a gluteus maximus?)--the universe is not expanding within a larger space. Most folks who think they get the Big Bang (including many teachers) do not grasp this. I doubt the committee that drew up Jersey's standards grasps this, either--if they do, they bolloxed the language.

Children will take down the notes, fill in the bubbles, and know nothing.

Meanwhile Jupiter shines brightly over their heads in the early evening, and over and over and over again, the students flat out refuse to believe that it's Jupiter, until they look through the scope we set up outside the school on Telescope Nights.

***

Every child in every class plants a seed. Today I am picking through last fall's basil, squeezing out tiny black seeds from dead flower heads. The sweet earthy aroma stirs my limbus, defying words.

Next week I will start a flat of basil in the classroom--tiny black specks will grow into ridiculously bright green leaves whose aroma will stir memories.

You won't find the word "basil" in the standards. Nor "seedling" or "fertilizer",  or "wheat" or "bread." No mud or ooze or rot or urine. The only time "death" is used is to define the end of a star.

The science standards are crisp and clean, and I'm being churlish, true. But there's more to be learned from the tiny basil seed  than from the religiosity of a badly presented cosmology.

So we will continue to sow in B362.

READ MORE - Basil vs. the Big Bang

Another post for me--if I slap it down here, I won't lose it....

This is a reminder that November can be a marvelous time of year, despite the waning light.

A few of us wandered over to a mudflat to dig up some clams. The new moon did its job, rewarding us with a spectacularly low tide. Despite a couple of minor setbacks (broken rake, and an abandoned beer), we came home with 30 quahogs, about a half dozen for each blister.

The sky would have made El Greco blush. A flock of brants kept us company, their blue gray bodies competing with the light show above.

The water still holds summer's heat. The clams have not yet sunk deep for the winter. It was a good day to be on the water.




Back home we had tomatoes grown a couple of miles away, and squash from our garden. We had a batch of pesto made from our basil, which is still hanging on. We planned on having squash soup, tomato salad, and two pasta dishes, one with pesto, one with clams.

And then we got the call--fresh striper, caught less than a tide ago, already cleaned. Do we want any?

And here's the whole point of the post--to remind me what we did with the striper, so we can do it again. We lifted a recipe from Chef Emeril--here's our version:

Grab several sprigs of rosemary from the bush outside--scrape off the leaves, and chop fine enough to slurry, mix with wine, sliced garlic, a few chopped basil leaves, and a little lemon juice and salt.

Paint most the slurry on the bottom of a grill pan lined with foil, then throw a few slices of onion over the slurry so the fish is not swimming in it. Lay the fish on top of the onions, drizzle the fillets with what's left of the rosemary slurry, toss on a few slices of fresh tomato, and garnish with a few sprigs of rosemary.

Throw the whole shebang uncovered on the grill, off direct flame. I have no idea what temperature, I still use charcoal, but I tossed it on while the the charcoal was still spitting fire. The bass was an unexpected gift, so time was an issue.... I left the grill cover on most of the time, occasionally pulling it off a bit to let some of the juices thicken a bit.

It was done when it was done (forget the rules, you just got to pay attention), and it was delicious.

Local waters, direct to the plate: quahogs and a striped bass
Our garden: basil, rosemary, squash, and tomatoes
Local farm, less than a couple of miles away: more tomatoes.

Can't much more local than that....good food and great company make the coming dark days tolerable.

READ MORE - Hyperlocal

The sun may be dying, but its energy rests in the bonds around us, enough to keep most of us alive until the sun returns.

We are almost a week past Samhain. The bonfires have been lit, the dead done wandering. In the olden days, each clan took flame home from a shared bonfire to carry them through the winter. Animals were slaughtered for the coming winter.

Time to hunker down.

Here near the coast, the air tempered by the warmth of the sea, we get to stretch summer a few more days.

Today we harvested tomatoes and basil from the garden, and clams from the mud. The water is still warm enough for me to walk through the ripples, looking for keyholes that betray the quahogs below.

Tomorrow we may cull the kale and the Brussels sprouts. I may nibble on the few leathery beans hanging from the near dead vines--a reminder of what's past, and hope for the future.

Tomorrow I will gather dead flowers, harvesting seeds.

I will bring some of the seeds to class. A student has asked for a clam shell, one from a creature I have eaten.

Seed by seed, I hope to show my kids what lies outside the windows.

Photos ours, taken today.

READ MORE - November harvest

The sun slips toward the water. The breeze brings with it the thump-thump-thump of a karaoke box from Harpoon Henry's, a shore joint just over the dune. We barely here it over the waves, but we hear it.

I wandered into the muddy bay, up to my waist. The water is a little chilly, but my toes, buried in the sand, are warm, leftover heat from the sun hitting the beach before the tide rose.

A jelly comb drifts by, its edges marked by iridescent waves. A small crab scurries over my foot.

I am alive, as alive as I can be, and so is the jelly comb.

***

Tonight we're eating basil and cucumbers from the garden; yesterday we ate the tomatoes, and before that, the beans.

The tide rises, the tide falls, an incomprehensible volume of water moving twice a day a stone's throw from here.
Why? The moon, the sun, gravity....

Why? Well, the moon and the sun pull...

Why? Good Lord, child, no one knows why, no one....

***

The standardized tests allegedly test what we know. I want a test that tests what we don't know.

If our culture collapses in the next generation or two (and there are signs it may do just that), it will not collapse because of what we think we know.

It will collapse because of our stubborn refusal to acknowledge what we cannot know, or what we pretend to know.

If you watch a comb jelly even for a few moments on a late afternoon in August, really watch, allowing yourself to be washed by the beauty of a creature as foreign as Jupiter, you will (if only for a moment) grasp that we know nothing at all about anything beyond our human conceits.

And if you see the same creature glow at night, you might even worship it.

***

What would a test like that look like? How do you test for true ignorance?

Ignorance is easy to feign--some kids are motivated enough to study arcane ideas for hours in order to do well on tests that will get them ahead in life.

A child can be coerced into memorizing the equation for photosynthesis. Few kids grasp the significance, and why should they in a world dominated by lust and image and inopportune zits? It cannot be taught in a day, a week, a unit.

I could spend weeks on the sun alone, a magnificent star, a sphere of plasma. I could create plasma in the classroom, get my lambs excited about energy and matter as the boundaries between the two dissolve. Nothing here happens before the sun's existence.

But we do not worship the sun anymore.

We worship our words, our buildings, our cleverness.

So how would you assess ignorance, the awareness of how little we really know?
And should teachers spend more time showing what we don't know, instead of what we do?

The photo of Ra is from Falgun Angadia.
The sun photo gets credited to NASA--one massive solar flare hurled towards Earth, and it's lights out.

READ MORE - On ignorance

When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered· the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls· bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory.

Marcel Proust, The Remembrance of Things Past

A couple of months ago I threw a package of expired basil seeds on a patch of peat moss and vermiculite, borrowed the aquarium light for a few weeks (the fish didn't squawk), and now I have a mess of basil growing in the classroom.

We were discussing axils and lateral shoots in AP class, so as I yakked, I pinched basil plants. In a week or two, they will be bushier.

As I pinched (and, um, ate, breaking a fundamental rule in science class), the aroma of basil oils wandered over to the students (hey, diffusion, another lesson!)

"That smells good!"

I had to stop a moment and chew--in my enthusiasm, I had tossed too many basil leaves into my mouth to be suave, and I looked like the contented cow bull I was.

***

I remember a room in the Franklin Institute--the center of the room had a large oval bar, with various sniffing stations. You put your nose right up to the screened opening, and inhaled.

They could have called it the room of dreams--close your eyes, sniff, and your brain spins into old memories, old fears, old loves.

Does it exist anymore? Did it ever?

***

Imagine a world where scent is used to alter your behavior, a world where science research is used to manipulate your emotions.

It's already being done.












It's no accident that the Hard Rock Hotel in Orlando smells like the ocean and waffles.
It's no accident that your Lexus dealership might smell like green tea and lemongrass.
It's no accident that Bloomingdale's smells like baby powder and coconut.

ScentAir "is the global leader of scent marketing solutions." Their clients include ShopRite and Macy's, the Hilton and our military. ScentAir provides smells "just above the level of sunconscious awareness."

ScentAir changes behavior--at least some very smart, very wealthy businessmen believe so.

***

Folks who deodorize classrooms scare me.

Our 20th century culture taught us to fear our noses, to fear ourselves. Fear creates inadequacies, inadequacies create markets. We’ve become what we buy.

Gardening and sex share many characteristics, not the least of which is the need for a good nose. Both have a learning curve. Both were destroyed at the industrial level last century.

Thankfully, though, both can still be practiced well for those who remember their humanity, and even the inexperienced can find joy at the low end of the curve.

Somewhere in school a child needs to learn that monied people will try to manipulate his behavior in ways not healthy to the child. Somewhere in school a child needs to learn that all of us are intimately tied to life, to soil, to sunlight.

If your children prefer the smell of Lysol to composted manure, you may be depriving them of true joy, joy that is not measured by the model of car they eventually drive.

(This post flew out of my head after reading This Brazen Teacher this morning.)

The eraser photo is from CleanSweepSupply.
The ScentAir logo is trademarked by ScentAir.
If the html is completely fubared, let me know....

READ MORE - Proust, meet Bloomingdale's