(An ice cream shop in London started selling ice cream made from human milk in February for about $23 per serving; a couple of days ago, British authorities stepped in, responding to complaints, presumably about the milk, not the price. I wrote this a couple of years ago. This gives me an excuse to run it again.)

"Beer is living proof that God loves us
and wants us to be happy."

Ben Franklin

I do a lot of things that may not be good for me--I sit in front of this monitor too many hours a day, I like to go fast on motorcycles, and I use the top step on ladders. One high risk activity I refrain from, however, is drinking milk.

Cow's milk is for calves. Breast milk is for young humans until they sprout a few teeth. Aside from some sort of fetish practiced in moderation, adults should never drink milk.

In the cafeteria, Josephine serves me lunch. I love her. She calls me "Pumpkin," and she knows exactly what I like.

Still, I suspect she might be trying to kill me. She can't resist pushing the milk. People love to be in line behind me because I give my milk away. (I can actually get veggies and a fruit for only 15 more cents if I also take a half-pint of milk.)

Beer in moderation, on the other hand, prolongs life. It lowers blood pressure, reduces my chances of developing Alzheimer's, and, well, tastes good. Really good.

Really, really good. (Did I mention that I like beer?)

Guess which beverage gets the huge color poster on the cafeteria wall?

Now obviously I don't think the cafeteria walls should be covered with Guinness ads, nor do I condone drinking among the young (except maybe for those in my immediate clan during wakes).

Our love affair with cow's milk shows what a good PR campaign can do. We are willing to drink the milk from a four-legged critter while simultaneously repulsed by the idea of making ice cream from breast milk.

I'm not going to jump all over anyone for a bad milk habit--live and let live. But on St. Paddy's Day, when I carefully pour the cream over a spoon into my Irish coffee, it's not the whiskey I fear.

It's the cream.

Particularly the cream from the milk of another species.

My students continue to drink milk and Coke and Snapple and all kinds of other things that harm them, truly harm them. Diabetes is no joke.

In D.A.R.E., they learn that beer is a gateway drug. Too much of anything can be dangerous. Thankfully, too much thinking is not one of them anymore. Uncontrolled thinking could lead to all kinds of ruinous activities.

I'll drink to that.

I lifted the image of the beer in a carboy from Homebrew Underground
--at least until they complain or I find my own photo. Addendum: it's cool--thanks, Homebrew Underground!

The udder shot is from Genus Breeding.

Leslie points out, rightly, that cow's milk has not been linked to adult onset diabetes.
Milk has been associated with Type 1 diabetes, but correlation,
of course, does not mean causation.

Leslie also says stay away from BGH (bovine growth hormone).

To be fair, I'm a bit lactose intolerant, so I may be biased.

READ MORE - Udder nonsense

Years ago a verbal scuffle broke out in the back of my classroom.

"Six days!"
"Seven days!"
"SIX!"
"SEVEN!"

The crux? How long it took G-d to create Earth. I calmed them down, and learning that each used King James as her source, suggested that they settle this by actually reading the Good Book instead of barking.

***

These are the shortest days of the year in this neck of the woods. Life needs sunlight, and the light is dying. The longest night of the year looms.

Mammals foolish enough to dance under electric lights go, well, bonkers. Much of my life exists outside of science, as it should. I come from a family that fed me the dominant mythology, a beautiful story that helps us get through these dark days. Other cultures have similar myths for similar reasons. The fading sun frightens us.

Our nation is careening towards cultural chaos as we blend the myths of American and Christian exceptionalism into a story that serves neither well.

I am a science teacher, but the words that follow are not science. They are, however, based on how the myths were constructed over generations, for good reasons.

The Christ was not born in the winter.

The Wise Men were not at the manger while The Christ was an infant.

The current version of Christianity is not in danger of extinction. It has the strength of the United States military behind it. Just ask the Afghans.

The Christ did not tell Constantine to put the cross on the shields of his soldiers before his battle against Maxentius. Constantine may have believed this, but it is our shame that we accept a myth utterly contrary to His words.

We move with energy from the sun, our mass built from the breath of the life before us. Carbon dioxide and water and sunlight play with a few strands of DNA. We are special, but no more special than the yeast that taught Jesus how to make wine.

Christian privilege is real. Try greeting a TSA agent with "Assalaamu Alaikum."

OK, I'll get off my high horse now.

Yes, another repeat. But, Lord, I get tired of the "War Against Christmas" myth.

The illustration is by Tripod2282, found here at Uncyclopedia, released to the public. I think....

READ MORE - Christmas crank

Humans evolved from monkeys.

Ask you students if the above is true. Poll the kids vote anonymously. Heck, ask other teachers in your building.

Human blood in veins is blue.

Here's the trick--I can "teach" them otherwise, but as soon as I lean down to tie my shoe or take a moment to blow my nose, the kids go right back to their previous beliefs.

We all do.

Trees get most of their mass from soil.

Teaching "facts" wastes time--my students have been trained, trained by us, to be credulous. Many, alas, believe anything I say.

Humans are more evolved than earthworms.

We live in a fantasy world. We lie to our kids. We reward them for parroting our lies. And then a few of them wake up and don't believe anything we say. Not good, either.

***

A good chunk of American do not "believe in" evolution. I do not "believe in" it--it's not a belief system--but I embrace it as the core of biology.

Darwin did not come up with evolution--the concept is much older than him. Darwin realized, however, that natural selection could by itself explain the great diversity of life on Earth. No guiding intelligence is needed.

Just about every shred of evidence examined since Darwin's On the Origin of Species strengthens his underlying thesis.

In a 2007 Gallup Poll, over 60% of Americans agreed that it is "definitely" or "probably true...that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years."

Sigh.

***

Here's a problem, a big problem--just about all of my kids are passing tests on evolution. A good chunk do not accept it but pass anyway. I'm not worried about their beliefs, really not my business. My business is teaching kids how to think.

I am very concerned about a system that rewards kids for spouting off what they themselves consider to be nonsense. We need to come up with a way to assess children as they wrestle with evidence, children who were told less than a decade before that Santa Claus exists.

Until we do, however, we'll continue to produce kids who believe in astrology, who blindly follow leaders who lie, and who put this Great Experiment, our republic, at risk.

The Darwin cartoon is old enough to be in the public domain.
Every bold blue statement is false. Really.

READ MORE - Darwin in the classroom

What matters?

If a child had true control over her education, and she truly understood what matters, would she sit in my class?

Ah, yes, interesting question, but it is our job as
the wise teachers to help her understand what matters....

Do we? Would you risk your livelihood by doing what's in the best interest of our children?

Of course, we're professionals, we are advocates,
can you not hear our self-righteous chest-beating?

Do you proctor state tests you noisily condemn in the faculty lounge?

Ah, well, yes, I see your point, but that's really out of our hands.

What would a well-educated, thinking young adult look like in my classroom?
Would I recognize her?

Ah, yes, the problem child, the one in black
reading Dante's Inferno, not even pretending to hide the book.

I once told a bright, fascinating student reading an interesting book that she needed to learn to be more discrete in the classroom.

Are we creating the kinds of adults we need to create?

Kids start drinking coffee in high school.
We don't use slide rules anymore, we use far more powerful tools.
What are we doing?

READ MORE - Coffee, slide rules, and educated children

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.

READ MORE - Throw away your cell phone

I've been reading Umberto Ecco's Serendipities: Language and Lunacy. (Don't fret, I didn't suddenly become an erudite pedant--my brilliant wife left it lying around and it was the closest thing to grab when my colon called. Turns out it's pretty good).

Ahem.

Turns out even star scholars have a clue.

***

How do I know the world is round?



I live by the shore. It looks round. I see boats disappear over the horizon, boats that eventually return with tales of tuna and turtles and finback whales, all remarkable stories, but return nonetheless.

How does a child in the city know the world is round?

She cannot. She can parrot what she is told, but she cannot believe it. If she does believe it, she's more damaged than we know. All evidence points otherwise.

***

We were taught, back in the 1960's, that Christopher (not Cristoforo) Columbus "proved" that the Earth was round. Even Saint Augustine (yes, that St. Augustine) got it right back in the 5th century.

This can be reasonably deduced by scholarly folk with access to libraries and the minds of other scholarly folk. It cannot (easily) be deduced by children, especially children who live on concrete. A 2^nd grader who believes the Earth is round, despite evidence to the contrary, is flying on belief alone, and that, no matter what what Achieve, Inc. or the NGA or Arne say, is not science, it's dogma.

How do I get through 2000 years of science without resorting to preaching dogma?

I know it's a good year when my students leave my class knowing less than they knew back in September. I wish Arne knew that, too.

READ MORE - The Earth is round. Maybe....

Miners die for our sins. That they get paid reasonably well to do this does not disconnect us from our responsibility to them. Miners' lives are cheap, so coal can remain cheap. Cheap as in dollars. Cheap as in life.

We mostly lead cheap lives. If we thought about what we do moment to moment, thought about the consequences to our neighbors, to our babies, to our babies' babies, most of us would stop. The few that wouldn't would go to jail.

Most of us don't think. Most of us. Yesterday I got to meet a hive of activists who know a bit about water and they think about what they know. Even more important, they do something vastly more useful than wringing their hands. They ring doorbells instead.

***

Yesterday I got to talk to a group of aware young adults, canvassers for the New Jersey Environmental Federation--Clean Water Action. I talked to them about clamming, which is dependent on decent water, and while clamming is one of my passions, it's not something most 20somethings spend a lot of time contemplating, but they were polite, and nobody fell asleep.


They work for us and the Earth. They are passionate, knowledgeable, and obviously happy to do the work they do. They do important work, work that matters, and they do it well.

They are not Pollyannas. They make connections. They can see where current cultural practices will lead us. And despite this, they seem, well, happy.

If someone who know a bit about water rings your doorbell, listen to them. Handing them a check for their work keeps them employed, but if you really want to see them glow, listen to what they have to say. They're passionate and knowledgeable, and they believe they can change the world.

And if we pay attention, they will.

Yep, my son is in the picture.

READ MORE - New Jersey Environmental Federation

What's the point of a microscope if a child does not know that every drop of water in the small pond behind the middle school holds hundreds of critters?

What's the point of looking at pictures beamed from the Hubble Telescope if a child has never gazed at her own stars above a dark meadow on a moonless night?

What's the point of financial literacy if a child does not know that everything essential for life comes from from the grace of an ultimately unknowable universe?

What's the point of education?

Not everything worth knowing is testable, and a lot of testable items are, frankly, not worth knowing. I'm not convinced Mr. Duncan, a graduate of Harvard, grasps this.

***

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

The dolphins are back in the Delaware Bay.

They are wild, they are big. You can hear them chirping and clicking if you stick your head in the water, a bit dicey in early spring.

Critters three times my size are swimming just off the beach, that left the land to return to the sea.

How do you teach about the dolphin? How do you describe the swirl of water as a young one dives under your kayak? How do you capture the sound you hear in late August as you bob underwater listening for their chatter?

How can I do better than just point and say look! Look!?

And if I teach a child to look, to learn, to know something by observing, how can that be tested?

It does not matter if a child knows the name Tursiops truncatus. It does not matter if a child can tell me the average weight of an adult male, or how many pound of fish it eats, or where it spends its winter. All of that means nothing, nothing, until the child sees the beast slap its magnificent tail 40 yards off the beach, this wild grinning beast that chose to return to the sea.

READ MORE - Testing, testing, 1...2...3

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

We're testing this week, and I'm cranky. Correlation?

We also believe that if we want to improve student outcomes, especially in high-poverty schools, nothing is more important than ensuring that there are effective teachers in every classroom and effective leaders in every school.

Arne the Scarecrow, March 3, 2010
House Committee on Education and Labor

I used to work in the projects--Stella Wright Homes, Mravalag Manor, Hayes Homes, Bradley Court, Pennington Court--an America we keep hidden in polite company.

Teachers matter, and they matter a lot. But they do not matter as much as food, as heat in February, as albuterol for wheezing. They do not matter as much as coats and underwear. They do not matter as much as a quiet bed, a caring guardian. Abraham Maslow mentioned this way back before Arne was born with the silver spoon up the wrong side of his alimentary canal

Just when I thought his crüe was creepingly complete, with Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich serving as Arne's Dementors, he has now recruited General Powell.




Under the leadership of our Founding Chairman, General Colin Powell, and our current Board Chair, Alma Powell, the Alliance has become the nation’s largest partnership focused on the well-being of our young people.

America's Promise Alliance blurb

Ah, the well-being of our young people--the same man whose false words ("Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-September 11th world") helped lead our young people into a disastrous unwinnable war now has joined the crüe.

Powell's little white lie was driven by data, no?

***

It's testing week. I see my kids working hard on tests that have little value.

I can save a few bucks by pointing out the obvious--there will be a strong correlation between my students' socioeconomic status (a fancy way of separating the full and empty bellies) and their scores.

Yep, teachers matter. Yep, we cannot lower expectations because a child was foolish enough to pick a poor placenta. But until someone shows me a definitive study showing that poor districts are going out of their way to hire incompetent teachers, I'm going to continue to point out the obvious.

I've pulled live cockroaches out of children's ears. I've begged for asthma medicine (and may have borrowed some, too). I've stolen antibiotics. I've treated toddlers for gonorrhea and tuberculosis.

Want to guess how they fared later in life on these tests?

Arne, do you really believe the nonsense you spout? Really?

READ MORE - Cult of personality

It's February.
Snow is racing by the window sideways.
I'm transmogrifying into a psoriatic komodo dragon.


Time for a curmudgeonly crankfest!

Candidates:
Fluoridating public water supplies with industrial waste.
Stuffing fertilizers with industrial waste.
Mandating HPV vaccines for school.
Letting coddled clueless elitists corporatize our public schools.
Spending billions on banks.

And the winner is....

SPACE INVADERS FROM PLANET X!

Now here's something for my students to chew on!

The Hubble Telescope shows us an obvious alien ship, and NASA wants us to believe it's the remnants of a recent asteroid collision.

(It would be a fun exercise to spring in science class--form hypotheses as to just what we're seeing. It wasn't until my grandfather was in his twenties that astronomers accepted that the Andromeda nebula was a separate galaxy.)

AP claims credit for the photo, but they're full of poop--
Hubble took it, I helped pay for Hubble, its our photo.

READ MORE - Space invaders!

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....)

READ MORE - Sylvester McMonkey McBean and the FDA

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 the thing.

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.

No ideas but in things.

The photo was lifted from The Poetry Foundation.

READ MORE - William Carlos Williams teaches science

What's wrong with this picture?

Just to be clear, my quotes from the NJ DOE are not satire--
they are lifted directly from the NJ Core Curriculum Content Standards here.

I am not sure that folks outside education quite grasp what is happening within it.

I graduated high school in 1977. We had standards. Really.

I could handle a slide rule. I knew enough chemistry to make an attempt at creating nitrous oxide ("laughing gas") in class. I wrote history papers using primary sources. I could manipulate differential equations.

I learned to play the trumpet, use a miter box, kiss, gap a spark plug, and defend myself.

Some teachers were wonderful, a few were idiots, and at least one was a drunk.

Overall, I think public schooling did more good than harm.

***

New Jersey has a set of core curriculum standards; I imagine every other state has as well.

Before I go on, I want you to think about a 4 year old child. What should matter to that child? What should that child know?

In New Jersey, that same child is expected to "use basic technology terms in conversations (e.g., digital camera, battery, screen, computer, Internet, mouse, keyboards, and printer."

She is also expected to "use electronic devises [sic] (e.g., computer) to type name and to create stories with pictures and letters/words." Yes, our core curriculum standards committee apparently does not know how to use a spell checker correctly.

Young children do not need time in front of screens. They do not need to drop words like "digital camera" in conversation. ("Digital" is superfluous anyway--it presumes that some people still used film-based 'devises.')

***

Now imagine Elisa at 9. In most countries, she's still a child.

Here, she's required to "create a document with text formatting and graphics using a word processing program, create and present a multimedia presentation that includes graphics," and "create a simple spreadsheet, enter data, and interpret the information."

A little make-up and the right blazer, and she's ready for Kelly Services.

This is obscene.

***

By the end of 8th grade, Elisa will be able to "work in collaboration with peers and experts in the field to develop a product using the design process, data analysis, and trends, and maintain a digital log with annotated sketches to record the development cycle."

Why waste time in high school? She's ready for the boardroom.

***

By 12th grade, Elisa graduates from office clerk to corporate lawyer--she will be able to "demonstrate appropriate use of copyrights as well as fair use and Creative Commons guidelines" and "compare and contrast international government policies on filters for censorship."

If we work hard enough, she can pass the bar exam without bothering with law school.

***

I am a retired pediatrician. I know a little bit about kids. I am also a teacher. I know a little bit about the classroom.

Humans have not evolved much in two generations.

The committee developing the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards might want to dedicate a few minutes of their next meeting to chatting with a live, normal school-aged child.

You can find plenty in the schools, sitting in classrooms. If you have trouble recognizing one (they tend to be smaller, less hairy, and cheerier than adults), a teacher will be glad to point one out to you.

Kids are kids, and no set of "standards" can buck a few billion years of evolution.

READ MORE - New Jersey drinks the NCLB Kool-Aid

I love xkcd, and I love Richard Feynman. I'm fond of zombies, too. I've spent several hundred posts and perhaps a quarter million words to say what Randall Munroe dashes off in a few stick figures above.

The guy's a comic genius, he loves the Pleiades, and he happens to be a physicist, too.

Randall Munroe generously lends his creations out to the bloggers. Really.

READ MORE - Professional development: xkcd

Walking to school this morning, I noticed about a dozen club flyers sitting on the snow-covered street. Seeing scattered club cards on the street is not all that unusual--we live near a college, and even in the age of digiterati, some partays are still announced through cards, personal "invitations" so exclusive you have to bend down to pick one up to get in.

The young woman featured on some cards occasionally catches my eye, the incongruity of her clothing clashing with the cold pavement.

But not today.

Every single card was upside down, with the edges touching the ground, like this:



And if you think about it a moment, it makes sense, and if you think about it a moment more, you have a neat little trick for a physics lab.

READ MORE - Club card flyer physics

A story ran in the New York Times claiming that the Iraqis are using divining rods at checkpoints--a "small hand-held wand, with a telescopic antenna on a swivel" can apparently detect bombs.

Since the device employs the principle of "electrostatic magnetic ion attraction," it must be effective.

I'm still not convinced this is not an April Fool's prank with a calendar problem, but I guess if the world's leading expert on bombs (just ask him) tells you a divining rod can detect bombs a kilometer away (as well as ivory and truffles) and only costs $16,000, well, I got to have one!

It's worth it for the truffles alone.
(Do you have any idea how much it costs for me to maintain Snuffles my truffle pig?)

OK, this is too easy, and I figure a lot of bloggers will jump on the obvious, but that's not what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about our military's response:

“I don’t believe there’s a magic wand that can detect explosives. If there was, we would all be using it. I have no confidence that these work.”

Maj. Gen. Richard J. Rowe Jr, who " oversees Iraqi police training for the American military"
As reported by the New York Times, November 4

We tested it--we spent our hard-earned tax dollars and spent it testing a divining rod. Our DoD used the National Explosives Engineering Sciences Security Center at Sandia Labs to check out the claim.

And this is where I am supposed to sputter and spew about how tax dollars are wasted.

But I won't--because I teach science, and that is exactly how science works. You empirically test things. Especially things that are being sold to monitor checkpoints that might save the lives of our soldiers.

“Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs”

Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri
Head of the Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives.
NYT, November 4

Go us! Despite our love of psychics, astrology, and Dr. Phil, our military still practices science.

If the Iraqi government wants to stake its citizens' lives on magical devices, that's their business. If they want to risk our soldiers' lives by ignoring science, that's ours.

Time to find a magic carpet and get ourselves home.

The photo is from the New York Times, November 4, 2009.

READ MORE - Electrostatic magnetic ion attraction: The ADE 651

Early in the year, I introduced a very simplified version of the kinetic theory, itself a simple (but powerful) idea. Something happened about 14 billion years ago, give or take a billion, and things have been moving ever since.

This past week we've been working on diffusion.

I get my kids up into a corner, then tell them to pick a direction, walk in that direction until they hit something, then ricochet as though you were a billiard ball.

After a few moments, I ask them to stop and note their positions. I tie their motion to the "Whoever Smelt It, Dealt It" hypothesis of fart diffusion--silly but effective--then ask them to keep moving again. The students are interspersed throughout the room, but two critical ideas emerge:

1) They are not evenly dispersed, and
2) Their positions keep changing even when they are at equilibrium. (Equilibrium is a dynamic state--true equilibrium, in the sense that every part of a system has the same concentration of particles, does not hold in tiny volumes.)

I have a box of balls--yellow on one side, black on the other, with a free agent blue ball (yes, sophomores giggle at "blue ball") randomly tossed in the mix. I shake them up until the blacks and yellow balls are reasonably interspersed.

"Will this arrangement of balls ever happen again if I keep shaking the box?"
Most say no.
"Is this arrangement possible?"

Well, yeah, Dr. D, duh--it just happened.

"Will this arrangement of balls ever happen again."

It could, maybe...

"Will it?"

Most think not, and I agree with them. I think. Playing with an infinite number of possible arrangements over an infinite number of trials scrambles the mind.

A child muttered in class this week that she keeps knowing less than she thought she knew.

Success.

I stole this exercise from Ms. Rinaldi here at BHS--I steal from a lot of folks.

Leslie makes a good point--Michael Franti rocks!

READ MORE - "I am a molecule, I cannot stop moving...."

I used to be Oirish Catholic, eventually wandering over to the local United Methodist Church (where my wife and our children worshipped). I left that when my pastor appeared (to me, anyway) to hold the words of Eli Siegel, the founder of the cult-like Aesthetic Realism, on the same plane as the words of The Christ.

Along the way, though, I've found a lot of good things in the Good Book. The things that most interested me were the bits that directly contradicted the words of the folks leading us in prayer.

The Second Commandment takes on a variety of forms--heck, major Christian divisions cannot even agree what the Ten Commandments are--but here's the start of the King James variety:

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

It goes on to describe a jealous God ready to spew all sorts of venom at even the great-grandchildren that dared to cross the line.

Well, we crossed it, and He's spewing venom--welcome to the 21st century.

Well, that cleared the room in a hurry.

***

Arne Duncan believes that education is going to save the economy.

It's the educated folks that got us into it. An MBA from a decent business school was the ticket to riches. We live in an extractive economy, and with the right pedigree, you were once guaranteed a huge disproportionate slice of the pie.

We can give out 300 million advanced degrees in this land, and it will not change how many bushels of corn an acre of land will yield in Topeka this year. It will not change how many billions upon billions of water molecules will seep into the great aquifer below our heartland. It will not affect how many pounds of honey will be produced by the bees in Michigan this year.

The custodians did not screw us. The bus drivers did not blow us. The plumbers did not eff us up. The family farmers (all 17 of them left) did not crap on us. The pump jockeys did not rip us off. The cashiers did not piss on our mothers' graves. The women working the line did not job us. The fruit pickers did not rook us.

We were (and continue to be royally) screwed by the functionally literate, the monied, the educated class.

Yep, I'm part of the problem class--but I am not going to pretend that more people like me are going to solve anything.

If you wonder why a lot of "uneducated" folks get a little rumbly every time someone takes a cheap shot at their official schooling, take a look at who's doing the useful work around here.

***

The Second Commandment was written before the printing press, before the camera, before television.

"Graven" might be the loophole, but "any likeness of any thing" seems pretty tight.

Also seems pretty impossible--but it's not. It's only impossible if you choose to live in our culture.

It was a lot easier when you lived in a nomadic tribe. It was easier to go pick a handful of flowers and toss them back to the ground when they wilted than it was to lug around a painting of the same flowers.

Still, it's unlikely that the commandment was developed as a way to ease your luggage woes. ("Really, Micah, you really have to leave the Dogs Playing Poker behind--Moses says so!")

***

Images have tremendous power. We intellectually know a photograph is not real, but we respond viscerally anyway. If we did not, the gaming industry would collapse in a day. Most of us spend a good chunk of our days living in worlds that do not exist outside our own skulls.

This is a dangerous way to live. The ancients knew that the more we turn away from the world, the less we know.

We've become a nation of educated fools.

***

Our recent economic disaster was entirely predictable by many of the uneducated. If you run up debt beyond what the Earth gives us in a lifetime, it does not matter how you account for the debt--you can inscribed it in stone, write red numbers in a book, or store it as binary language in the soul of a machine. You cannot cash a check the Earth cannot produce.

There are odd exceptions, of course--some people would rather have a lump of gold than a bushel of wheat. So long as most of us fall under the same illusion, the gold holds power.

Me? I'd rather have the bushel of wheat. It's easier on the digestive system.

We are lost--we are lost in a world of graven images, of iPods and monitors and internal worlds that will not matter the moment your neurons stop sending intricate, pointless signals inside your skull.

And yes,I keep fiddling while the world keeps burning. Time to go out and catch dinner--the tide is ebbing, the clams will be waiting.

The stock market dropped a chunk yesterday--the DJIA sank by 250 points. Not one clam bothered to check.

The Earth will feed us if we let it. The clams are eating tiny critters that ate tinier critters fueled by the sun, the closest thing to God we can see.

We have enough sense not to stare at the sun--it will blind us.
Staring at the monitor screen will blind you as well.

Moses with Tables of Law by Rembrandt--he's not available anymore for permission.
The Dogs Playing Poker by C.M. Coolodge.
Both are in the public domain.

Yes, the DPP was part of an ad campaign.
Yes, it's the cultural epitome of tacky.
I like it anyway.

READ MORE - Education, the economy, and the Second Commandment

It's all well and good for the scientific sort among us to rant and rail against the infringement of superstition into science class.

There are few scientific theories more firmly supported by observations than these: Biological evolution has occurred and new species have arisen over time, life on Earth originated more than a billion years ago, and most stars are at least several billion years old. ...To deny children exposure to the evidence in support of biological and cosmological evolution is akin to allowing them to believe that atoms do not exist or that the Sun goes around the Earth.

AAPT Statement on the Teaching of Evolution and Cosmology
April, 2005

Alas, "exposure" hardly makes a dent in anyone's mind, never mind a child forced to endure whatever comes her way in a curriculum designed by committees of adults living in far away cities, many of whom could not pass a sophomore's biology test given this past Friday.




If I were the Education Czar, I'd focus on helping kids get a grasp on what a "billion" means before exposing them to anything more daunting than making observations at the edge of a pond.

I'm make sure that they even realize that hundreds of critters can be found in a few drops of water from that same pond.

Instead, I am pounding macromolecules into the skulls of 15 year old children a year before they take high school chemistry.

(A science teacher bleating "just be able to recognize the structure..." is just plain pitiful.)

(By the way, gentle reader--just how long does it take for a billion seconds to pass?)

READ MORE - I'd settle for less