5 reasons teachers should avoid Facebook

Teachers like Facebook. Jeff Utecht, a self-described "educator, presenter, consultant" recently evangelized about Facebook:

It's not fair to pick on Jeff--he's one of an army of teachers leading the charge to a world of awesome goodness if only those other ~~teachers~~ educators would get it....

I'm one of those old farts resisting Facebook in the classroom. I have my reasons, and I think they're good ones. Here are just a few:

Mark Zuckerberg

Mark is Facebook's CEO.

Here's his T-shirt:

Here's a business card:

"I'm CEO....Bitch"

I don't trust him. I don't deliver my children to someone I do not trust. Nor should you.

Throw away your cell phone

What's a cell phone cost these days? With messaging, $60/month? That's over $700/year--about $1000 of my wages when you factor in taxes, SSI, etc.

But that's not the true cost.

One of the saddest things to see is a mother walking a toddler while she jabbers on the phone. She's not there. And a child learns how much his presence is worth.
The most dangerous thing in most children's lives is the automobile. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, "using a cell phone use while driving, whether it’s hand-held or hands-free, delays a driver's reactions as much as having a blood alcohol concentration at the legal limit of .08 percent."
There is weak evidence that cell phones may be associated with cancer--not enough in itself to make most rational folks hang it up (or whatever one does with a cell phone), but the numbers warrant attention.
Bees may be affected by the cell phone signals--a recent study in India got a lot of coverage but it was a rather limited study. Go ahead, read it. I double dog dare you.
The Feds can track you--the current administration is pushing for "warrantless tracking"--it's in the courts now. The technology is already there.

OK, Mr. Luddite, what do you do in an emergency?

Well, in the olden days, I carried a quarter for pay phones--remember those? Now I ask *gasp* strangers for help.

I'll take my money and go squander it on something really important--maybe I'll buy myself a new spinning wheel.

When you see me walking down the beach, lost in the world around me, just leave a message at the beep. I'll get to you when I get to you.

The image is from MobileCommandos--no idea where they got it.

Throw away your power mower

In 19 years of practice as a plastic surgeon and microsurgeon, some of the most devastating and disabling injuries I've treated are from lawn mower accidents. It's especially concerning when children are injured since most of these injuries are preventable.

William Zamboni, MD.
President, American Society for Reconstructive Microsurgery

(Disclaimer: yes, I know even manual reel mowers can cause injuries--
I managed to tear up a thumb pretty good last year--~~but my thumb is as good as new~~.
I sliced it up again yesterday while cutting a hose.)

200,000 or so Americans are injured by lawn mowers each year, and over 80,000 end up at the hospital.

Lawns are an aristocratic English tradition. We signed the Declaration of Independence on this day 234 years ago, independence from the British and their obsession with mono-cultural pre-pubescent grasslands.

Ironically, the American Garden Club, no doubt run by British agents, promoted this unhealthy practice: "a plot with a single type of grass with no intruding weeds, kept mown at a height of an inch and a half, uniformly green and neatly edged." The Doyle Garden Club pulled out another chunk of front lawn this week.

A gasoline powered mower is loud, dirty, and dangerous. It costs money to run. It stinks.

A manual reel mower is quieter, cuts better, produces finer mulch, and is much less likely to maim you.

Better yet, screw the aristocrats, and plant a garden. A real garden full of odd, sexually active plants sprawling all over the place. If your neighbor raises an eyebrow, give him a fresh Brandywine tomato, If that doesn't placate him, give him a copy of the Declaration of Independence.

Time to go pursue some Happiness....

Painting by Fernand Khnopff, 1889, found at The Victorian Web.

Ad found here at Commercial Mowers.

Throw away your television

Young children, 2 to 5 years old, spend over 3 1/2 hours a day
in front of televisions.

Preschool children need about 12 hours of sleep a day, so figure a healthy child has about 12 hours a day to earn about ants, water, people, and play.

30% of their awake time is spent in front of a television. Throw in the other video devices (DVRs, DVDs, game consoles, etc.) and you're edging up to 40%.

This, of course, is obscene.

But I watch with my child....
Yep, I don't doubt it--why not try watching your child, instead.

But it's educational....
Yep, if you want to make a babbling empty box out of him, an empty box that will swallow dogma and buy lots of shoes.

But I need my free time....
Yep, and you'll get it when the kids hit school, which seems to be the major reason for public school in many parents' eyes.

But it's PBS....
Yep, drop the "P" and you're closer to the truth.

But it quiets down my noisy toddler....
Yep, another drowned voice keeps her safe from that democratic lifestyle.

But it's a dangerous world outside.
Yep, but far less dangerous than the sheltered world we've made for our children. Diabetes will kill your child long before the bogeyman has a chance.

Turn it off.

Photo by Leslie, taken last evening on the Delaware Bay.
Some large mammals with big teeth were nearby, but we survived anyway.
Family around TV via cerritos.edu, listed as public domain.

Source of television stats: NielsonWire. That and some basic arithmetic.

No more test bubbles!

Only by moving beyond basic skills and bubble tests can children develop the critical thinking skills that will one day give them the ability to compete successfully in our increasingly global, increasingly competitive international economy.
Arne the Scarecrow

No more BUBBLING!
Let's cut through the bullschist and
put the children to work at something useful TODAY!

Photo from The Great ReDression, a fabulous website for clothes horses of a different color.

Keeping it real: biology hooks for sophomores

Jorge Posada does it! Moises Alou did it, too!

"Steroids? Growth hormone? Is he on the juice?"

Nope--they both pee on their hands to keep them ready for baseball!

A see one of my athletes slouch in the back, sheepish grin on his face--"yeah, I do it, too..." He'll regret admitting that until he goes away to college.

Not only that, back in the olden days, when I was a kid, some mothers wiped their babies' faces with a wet diaper.

"Like wet from pee?"

Indeed...

"That's GROSS!"

And then I talk about urea--a simple compound, really, and the major one in urine (besides water). I draw the structure on the board, pause, then ask if anyone else in class rubs urea on their skin.

"Dr. Doyle, STOP!"

I ask them if they have any skin softeners--and, of course, everybody does, rubbing emollients onto your skin during class has superseded knuckle-cracking.

Look at the ingredients.

And then I wait for it; in a moment is comes....

SHRIEK!

Sometimes followed by a bottle of lotion flying across the room. Yes, that fancy bottle of skin softener has urea in it. I let the children fathom where it came from....

National Lab Rat Day

We all have a vested interest in advancing our country’s proficiency in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math as a means to driving innovation and jobs — which are key to fueling our economic growth and global competitiveness.
Steve Ballmer
CEO, Microsoft

Yesterday was National Lab Day--major corporations, foundations, politicians, and business folks got together to fuel a national PR project to push technology under the guise of science. Again.

Technology serves the self, science is another beast altogether.

We teach mostly technology in high school--it's what the corporations want, it's what the Feds want, it's what parents want. Get edumacated, get a degree, get a career, get fed, get laid, maybe have kids, and eventually get dead. I'm not saying that's a bad plan, at least not publicly, but it does require limited vision. Thankfully, we live in a culture that's designed to provide the blinders.

Science, unlike technology, serves no one. It is selfless. Peek beyond the hoopla of equations and models and jargon and the floor falls out of the universe.

Or rather, the universe, it seems, has no floor.

If I could teach this to 15 year old brains, bad things would happen. Fortunately, their brains are not mature enough to grasp this, and I'm not half the teacher needed to teach this. Even with tenure, I'm not sure my career could survive a class of children grasping how tenuous reality is.

***

Pick up an object you know, one that gives you comfort, maybe an old shell. It feels solid, has some heft, it's real.

Yet it's mostly empty space.
Yet is is tugged by every other object that exists in the universe.
Yet its elements were fused in the vast gravitational depths of some unknown star.
And maybe most stunning, the oyster was once alive, a sentient creature, and no longer is.

I do not teach religion in class, I teach science. You get to the edges of it, though, and words fall apart. When words fall apart, walls, which are mostly space anyway, fall apart as well.

If a child is locked in a human universe, culturally bound to the myths that will help her become the successful careerist she's been taught to want, grasping even basic physics may ruin her as surely as mainlining heroin.

Thankfully, a child can fly through school "knowing" all kinds of equations without truly understanding their implications. We keep science safe.

Steve Ballmer wants your kid's brain wrapped in gauze. I want your kid's brain so open to possibilities that it oozes all over the universe. I admit his version is more likely to lead to financial success.

But I bet my version is happier.

Photo via ayacop on wikipedia, CC

Training wheels

"Your shower shoes have fungus on them. You'll never make it to the bigs with fungus on your shower shoes. Think classy, you'll be classy. If you win 20 in the show, you can let the fungus grow back and the press'll think you're colorful. Until you win 20 in the show, however, it means you are a slob."

Crash Davis to Nuke, in Bull Durham

Teaching in a public school system is, for me anyway, a shot at the show.

I used to practice medicine. I was pretty good at it, but it consumed pretty much every waking moment, and as the years went by, docs lost quite a bit of their autonomy. I also reached a point where I wasn't going to get much better.

I love to stargaze. A fellow stargazer, a walking star atlas who could pinpoint any deep sky object anyone could name, reminisced about when he began, back when he still got lost looking for the moon. There is joy in the process of mastery, in emerging through the fog of failure into competence.

I practice teaching now, and while I'm not yet half the teacher I was the doc, I'm getting better. It's fun, and I doubt I'll master the classroom in the years I have left. If I do, well, I always wanted to try plumbing.

***

toothpastefordinner.com

Most of my fellow teachers work hard, very hard, and love what they do.

Some teachers complain very publicly about lack of respect, about the need to be recognized as professionals.

First, understand the backlash. We have jobs. We're paid decently, we have good benefits, and we have a lot of days off.

Teachers with a decade or two under their belts make far more per hour than I did as a pediatrician. Most do not have 6 figure debt at graduation, and their apprenticeship was a mere 17 weeks, not several years.

I went into pediatrics because I enjoyed working with kids, and I worked in the projects because that was where I was needed.

I presume you teach because you enjoy working with kids, and I hope you feel like you're doing something useful.

A profession is a calling. I'm not sure where teaching lies--for some it's a profession, for some it's a wonderful job, but still just a job, and for a few miserable folks, it's a trap baited by a pension a lifetime away.

If you're going to complain about not being treated as a professional, toss the shower shoes. The public does not define professionalism, our behavior does. If teaching is not a vocation, literally "a calling," then it's just a job.

And that's OK, too--so long as you keep working to improve.

Donald Hall, biology teacher

Plants strip electrons from water, and use them to help store energy in organic compounds. The left-overs are oxygen molecules. Any schoolchild knows we need oxygen, but few educated adults know why.

If you hold a flame to cool glass, a small patch of condensation forms, a brief patch of fog. It is unexpected, and often missed, unless you look for it. Oxygen is grabbing electrons and protons from the fuel—butane, wax, food, it matters not—and re-forming water.

Along the way the electron has given up energy captured by plants from sunlight—it’s what keeps you alive.

We teach this in biology, or rather we teach a litany of names, a parade of complex molecules that pass the electron down an energy gradient. We focus on the carriers, and in our earnestness, forget that it’s really all about the electron.

***

If you want to learn biology, read Donald Hall.

In "Poem with One Fact," Hall talks of enzymes and amino acids in a poem, a universe, really, that distinguishes life from what we call living. I trivialize it by trying to explain it--go read it.

***

If I used Donald Hall’s words in class, my lambs would soar—they’d forget the AP Exam as they watched an earthworm rhythmically work its way through mud, the peristalsis of life, of love. They’d tie the rocking to the rhythm of belly aches, to making love in the back seat of a dented Dodge Neon.

They’d stop worrying about future jobs and Jacuzzis lost in a freefalling economy, and get on their knees to sniff the sweet soil, knowing that’s where life starts, and that’s where life ends.

They’d no longer try to impress their impressionable parents with words like nicotinamide dinucleotide or ATP synthase (as powerful and poetic they sound when pronounced with care) and instead would say “eek… ook… oop… umm” to describe the journey of a particle of life, an electron, as it gets kicked around from water to sugar and back to water again.

What did you learn in biology today, love? Her mother asks. I saw on the syllabus you’re studying electron transport chains and chemiosmosis. Have you been keeping up with the reading? The exam is May 10th, we have work to do, no?

Amanda would scream EEK! at dinner, loud enough to make Grandma look over her diamond framed lens to scowl at her mother, who married well, but, well, not well enough.

OOK!—not quite as loud. Dad silently calculates the cost of 6 more weeks of sessions, and wonders if Xanax would be cheaper for this girl at the table, eeking and ooking, a girl who grew breasts and thighs and became this womanchild he does not know, eeking and ooking and eeking and ooking.

Oop—quieter now. Sam, her much younger brother, unplanned (ah, evolution) but not unloved, plays along. oop…oop….oop…oop. Amanda nods, smiles, and once more…Oop.

And now a very quiet umm, melodic, restful. The electron is back home, wrapped in water.

Clearly, the girl is troubled.

She gets up from the table, barefoot, and wanders outside under the crescent moon to check on her snow peas, their arched new stems breaking through the earth, just visible in the late dusk light, and thanks she knows not who for giving her light and life, while inside the adults sit in silence. The uneaten dinner grows cold, electrons trapped in brussel sprouts and butter, waiting to be released.

Condensation photo by fmanto, used under CC 3.0.

Proust, meet Bloomingdale's

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....

The Business Roundtable teaches biology

Vision: A quality science education fosters a population that...applies scientific knowledge and skills to increase economic productivity.
2009 NJ Core Curriculum Content St andards

I am a science teacher, and occasionally a good one. I am certified by the state of New Jersey (Liberty and Prosperity), and paid by the Township of Bloomfield, which was bought from the Yancetaw Indians. Our first public school opened in 1758.

This makes me a government agent.

Prosperity (from our state motto) keeps getting confused with economic productivity, which smells like part of the Business Roundtable's undemocratic take-over of a public institution.

***

Tonight I made a butter run (salted, of course) to the local A&P; I said hello to Michael, now a man whom I've known since he wore diapers, while he lassoed some carts, working at the same place his brother has for years. While in line at the checkout, a young child, perhaps 5 years old, shyly made eye contact.

I knew the checkout lady, she's been there forever. I've been going there forever. The store has been there forever. My grandfather, born in 1898, used to work at another A&P when he was still a young man. The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company has been around forever.

Forever's about to end.

***

The Business Roundtable folks may know how to run a business (though the recent evidence suggests otherwise--we're in for a long slide), but they know jack snot about biology.

All economies are ultimately based on reality, on the natural world. Soil. Water. Wood. Oil. Corn. Cotton. Wool. You can still follow the price of pork bellies in the New York Times business section.

If we continue to define prosperity by growth, even prettied up "sustainable growth," our children will be harmed.

Carrying capacity is the number of organisms of a particular species a given patch of Earth can sustain indefinitely.

In class I try to make connect my lambs to the world, to what's real, to what matters. I do not, however, want to give them nightmares--there's time enough for that in early adulthood.

If the NJ DOE continues to kneel down to the Business Roundtable and Achieve, Inc., and other groups who do not have the best interests of my students at heart, then do not be upset if I start sharing the truth.

Humans are animals. The land, the seas, have limits. The economy cannot (and will not) grow indefinitely. The living world is collapsing, and it's going to get ugly, real ugly, in a generation or two if those with money do not pull their heads out of their collective (and full) sigmoid colon.

The young girl I saw tonight, smiling as the checkout lady chatted in a dying store, does not deserve the education the Business Roundtable wants.

She deserves better. She deserves the truth.

The Business Roundtable lifted from their site.
The Monopoly photo from Life collection at Google.
And yep, I'm serious....we cannot handle the truth.

Gatto got it

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnas Sears and W.R. Harper of the University of Chicago and Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College and other to be instruments for the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

John Taylor Gatto
NYC's Teacher of the Year, 1989

If public education truly created a thinking citizenry, it would be outlawed.

Arne wants CEOs to run schools. Arne wants 15-year-olds to save the economy. Arne grasps desperately at gravitas.

I want a dying republic to toss off the corporate crap. I want my kids to learn how to think. Mostly, I just want to teach science.

Not technology. Not engineering. Not complaisance.

I want assertive, thinking, engaged children who will tell me (eloquently, I hope) to fuck off once they're ready to remove their training wheels.

Democracy is dangerous. Thinking is dangerous. Public education should be dangerous as well.

(Yes, I've gone over the edge into full crank mode--if I don't find a crocus soon....)

Sylvester McMonkey McBean and the FDA

Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you - just one word.
Ben: Yes sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Ben: Yes I am.
Mr. McGuire: 'Plastics.'

A few years ago, when I was still playing doctor, the FDA released a "Public Health Notification" regarding plasticizers in IV tubing. Back in 2002, when King W sat on the throne, the gummint advised that hospitals avoid DEHP (if possible), particularly for very young males.

I stormed over to the Chair of Pediatrics (not an unusual event) and showed him the memo. He got excited, and talked to the NICU folks, who were already aware, and had made the changes that were financially feasible.

Watch an old war movie. Look at the IV fluids.

Me: I just want to say one word to you - just one word.
Pediatric Chair: Yes, Mike? [exasperated look].
Me: Are you listening?
Pediatric Chair: Yes I am.
Me: 'Glass bottles.'

Oh, yes, glass safety was raised--I keep forgetting about those pesky babies escaping from their isolettes, tossing glass bottle around when the nurse isn't looking.

***

BPA is in the news--the FDA has raised concerns about bisphenol-A (BPA), used in plastics. Yep, the same BPA declared safe in 2008.

Unlike most potential toxins, BPA (and DEHP) mimic hormones--BPA was specifically designed as a synthetic estrogen and noted as such back in 1936 (Dodds and Lawson, Nature 137: 996).

Hormones work in minute quantities. Very minute.

I will be squeezing last summer's peaches into a food grade plastic bucket today, along with a few pounds of honey, some chlorinated water, and yeast. The peaches will thaw in the same bowl my mom used decades ago, and I will think of her.

Next week I will transfer the bubbling mess into a glass carboy.

And this is where I am supposed to preach moderation and sanity--we all use plastic and chlorinated water--it's safe, why feed the scaremongers and tinfoil hat crowd?

Why indeed....

Because we are deliberately putting a compound designed to act like estrogen into our food!

And Sylvester McMonkey McBean?

National Breast Cancer Awareness Month is sponsored (and controlled) by AstraZeneca, a pharmaceutical company descended from Imperial Chemicals Industries (ICI), the inventors of polyethylene, the same stuff treated with BPA to make it more useful for packaging.

ICI makes tamoxifen, a key drug used for treating breast cancer. ICI also makes huge amounts of organochlorines, associated with breast cancer.

Breast cancer rates for women here have risen from less than 1 in 20 rate before 1940 to a 1 in 8 chance today. Next October, during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, check out how much of the official NBCAM literature mentions environmental causes of breast cancer.

So, yeah, everybody's doing it, drinking BPA, and look, we're all healthy, really.

It's a testament to the power of propaganda that the plastics industry uses a known hormone mimic to package food, and the onus falls on those who think this might be a bad idea to show the link between BPA and ill effects.

(During my mom's last week of consciousness, I carried her to the bathroom, her bones settling into my arms as easily as her nightgown. She died before her 60th birthday. So, yeah, maybe I'm emotionally invested in this--doesn't change the facts, though.)

Images (other than my own) lifted from other websites--
I figure both are icons of culture and fall under Fair Use
in a blog that makes no money and has a readership the size of the Walton family.
If anyone knows otherwise, drop me a line....)

Dollars and sense

"The best thing we can do is educate our way to a better economy."
Arne Duncan, Education Secretary, February 3, 2009

"Consumer spending accounts for about 70% of all demand in the U.S. economy."
WSJ, August 19, 2009

Our last economic boom was fueled by greed and ignorance, as our next one will be, but should we truly educate our children to focus on what matters, on what makes a good life, to critically analyze their choices, well, there's going to be a lot less "consuming" going on.

A deep understanding of "the economy" requires knowing some biology and a lot of agriculture. You can only get so many turnips out of an acre of ground, and we can live the way we have lived, borrowing and borrowing, for only so long. Biologists recognize limiting factors to growth.

If by the economy, Duncan means a grasp of how we obtain and allocate the things we need to live, recognizing our limits, factoring in the cost of our wastes, then yes, he is right--we can educate our way to a better economy.

If, however, Duncan means The Economy, the abstract world of huge numbers flickering in the CPU for milliseconds, wheat futures based on an unpredictable climate, and the myth that the new economy keeps us immune from Malthusian catastrophe, well, then our Secretary Education shows that even a Harvard education can go terribly wrong.

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