"The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was."

Bottom, Midsummer Nights Dream

Except in June.

Just about every day this week I grabbed a few small, dark cherries from the small trees lining Liberty Street--just the right bitterness to counter the almost too rich fruitiness. The sun seems to have frozen in the north, teetering a week or two before starting our slow plunge back to darkness.

Life brims mid-June, feeding on the energy that bathes the Earth this time of year. The energy starts to dwindle tomorrow. Tonight I put my shoes away for the summer,unless, of course, there'a a wake. I took them off as I left our graduation ceremony. The ice returns in just a few months, as inevitable as the wakes that keep my shoes busy.

If you pay attention to these things, the dwindling light, the mad dancing of organisms in the June dusk, the aroma of honeysuckle drifting through your skull, the incessant buzzing of hundreds, thousands of critters aware of you, you'd go mad, of course, a Mid-Summer's Night Dream kind of insanity,

And many of us do--pay attention and go mad--mid-June, midsummer, when living requires little, as fine a time as any to toss a class of young adults out into the world.

And how many are "college and career-ready"? Not sure what that even means.

But I am sure of this--several hundred children from many different cultures, from many different lands, from many different circumstance, left our building tonight having an idea of what is possible, of what democracy can look like. A lot of them left our building "college ready" for schools they cannot afford, and "career ready" for jobs that left north Jersey a generation ago.

They are kind, they are brave, they are bright, and they are now adults entering a world Arne does not (or will not) recognize. As we turn inexorably to November, to darkness, to fear, I hope that a child's new-found knowledge of how the natural world gives her pause before she plunges into cynicism, or to self-loathing.

It's a beautiful world out there, but a world defined by limits imposed by our sun, our soil, or water. Our children are of this world, so long as they live. This matters more than any games imposed by wealthy gentlemen governing from hundreds of miles away.

Congratulations to our Class of 2011. This is your world, get to know it beyond the boundaries imposed by human words and limited ideas. Embrace it like you own it.

Because you do.

Teaching matters.
The print is Titania, by Joesph Noel Patton, 1850.

READ MORE - Solstice graduation

We're winding down.

Tomorrow I will wander over to the windowsill, pluck a few snowpeas who know only our classroom, and eat them. I will remind the students that their breath was combined with water, using the energy of the sun.

Communion without fanfare, a miracle unrecognized.

And if a few students leave class this week, our last few days of class, pondering the mystery of biology, the flow of energy, the flow of life, well, I've done my job.

***

I spent countless hours as a child trying to figure out transubstantiation. The wafer tasted like, well, a wafer, but the priest assured me it was the body of Christ.

In my head I imagine molecule after molecule substituting another. I did not know the concept did not originate until a thousand years after Christ's death.

This is my body.

And it is, complex organic molecules fused together by plants, abetted by the nitrogen fixing abilities of bacteria. In physical terms, at the molecular level, we are, truly, what we eat.

And everything we eat ultimately gets back to plants. OK, sunlight. Well, yeah, to something over 10 billion years ago.

***

We had some births in class, we had some deaths. Most of our tanks are unfiltered, unprocessed--light in, air in, and the occasional flakes of crushed shrimp. We have 2nd generation peas and wheat and fish and third generation snails and umpteenth generation of transformed bacteria that fluoresce.

We have the shells of horseshoe crabs and land snails, starfish and whelk.

Our class witnessed a starfish consume a snail, a shrimp snack on a hermit crab. None of this planned, all of it inevitable.

I am not a particularly religious man. My faith rests in the sun, in the plants, in life. I do not pretend to grasp the why of anything in science, and I do not ask my students to grasp anything I cannot see myself.

We do a lot of observation in B362. We see more than we can understand. We form hypotheses, we see hypotheses smashed, and we form new hypotheses.

I'm not sure how my lambs did on the state test, though historically they do well enough.

They leave my classroom more confused now than when they entered back in September.
And that's OK. That was the goal.

The world is, well, awesome. A fresh snowpea of a windowsill plant tells me so.

READ MORE - Another year ends

As I type this, a tiny gnat is trying to break through my monitor.

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

Theodosius Dobzhansky

I should be crafting a descent with modification (misnamed "evolution") exam.

Descent with modification is the heart of biology. Without it, a world with red-lipped batfish, roly-polies, and humans makes no sense, no matter how clever God pretends to be.

Without it, nothing in biology makes sense. Nothing.

Seems sacrilegious to test it using vocabulary and a few standard examples any student paying attention can just fly through half aware of our universe.

 ***

 
I walked tonight, crushing thousands of insects and worms, breathing in microbes, watching squirrels and starlings and dogs and robins and humans go about their business.

A cherry tree late for the party dropped a few last petals on my head.

Mosquitoes paraded around my tiny pond, blissfully unaware that soon it will be filled with young fish born in a tank in Room B362, trapped by glass they learned to avoid, soon to be munching on the young wrigglers laid today.

Sunlight bathes us now, and everything that buzzes or tweeps or flaps or gurgles has forgotten that darkness was ever possible. At least I have.

And if I can forget, despite centuries of words telling me of death and of destruction and of entropy, well, what hope does the fledgling robin I saw bouncing around the Green yesterday have of grasping how serious this all must be.

Seriousness is a human conceit.

It's May. I going to listen to the fledglings for now, as long as now lasts, as long as the sun continues to bathe us with grace.

Red-lipped batfish--really, how serious can we be if red-lipped batfish exist?

The red-lipped batfish photo from PBS here.

READ MORE - Spring silliness

Been busy, as we all have been, and maybe a tad cranky, as some of us have been.

And when I get busy and cranky, I forget what I should not forget. All of this happened in a day, this day, and this was not an unusual day.

• I found 3 northern brown snakes this morning, and brought one of them to school, possibly the crankiest brown snake I've ever handled, and I've handled plenty. When I released him this afternoon, he struck not once, not twice, but three times. A snake with a grudge.
• I dug up a dandelion to show seniors its roots, and an earthworm scurried under my fingers as I did. The seniors were outside looking at dandelion flowers more carefully than most of them ever had before, so I looked more carefully, too.
• One class witnessed what happens when a slug crawls on the head of a cranky snake. It happens fast, and it does not end well for a slug.
• I watched a young woman watch a slug as it crawled on her finger. If we spent more time watching how young humans react with the world, we'd all feel better,
• I peeked at a drop of pond water I brought to class yesterday--it was full of critters. Most of them were returned to the pond water.
• We released some more fruit flies today--the kids are growing attached to them now. They're not "flies" anymore. Familiarity may occasionally breed contempt, but my experience has been otherwise. It's why I teach.
• A few of us in the BHS Astronomy Club set up a telescope on the sidewalk outside our school and saw Saturn tonight, always a treat, and a great way to end a day teaching science.

None of this will be "on the test," whatever "on the test" even means. I worry a lot, too much, on what is "on the test." The AP Biology test looms in less than two weeks, the state biology exam a couple of weeks later.

Not sure the students are quite as worried as I am--maybe I need to learn a thing or two from them.

Yep, it's a wonderful world out there beyond the words and images we wrap around ourselves every day.

READ MORE - A day in the life

Despite a kick butt east breeze blowing at 20+ knots, pushing the water back into our back bays, I  managed to rake out a few clams today. The near full moon helped. I like raking clams almost as much as I like eating them.

Last week's clamming was a disaster. Two of my rake's tines loosened up, and my crankiness was exacerbated by a neap tide. I don't mind coming home with less than a pailful's worth of dinner, but last week I felt defeated. I was racing against the sunset (Jersey law uses sunset to define the end of a clammer's day), and, for the first time in years, I questioned grace.

When I got home, I dropped two clams, shattering them. I returned the remaining few to the bay. Seemed puny of me to eat them while questioning the universe.

So I "fixed" my rake...

***

...sort of, but enough to make it feel right in my hands again. The sand and mud yielded, gracefully, and I accepted the few clams we will eat in an hour or so.

We will eat the very last of last year's kale and Brussels sprouts, both bolting towards the April sun.

This year's peas have already broken through the ground just a foot or two away from the kale.

Our schools are in a crisis now, but not because of spoiled children or bad parents or awful teachers. We are failing because we are trying to meet standards that are inherently impossible. No state will meet 100% compliance with the NCLB by 2013, because 100% compliance is simply impossible.

Impossible. Look it up....

I worked in pediatrics for years. Not every child is blessed with a brain that works well enough to jump though algebra's hoops. Many children cannot speak at all. Most of you will never see these children.

Trying to do the impossible leads to fatigue, and fatigue leads to fear.

Fear kills education.

***

I was interviewed by Dina Strasser at The Line last summer. She's wonderful--she had no agenda, she really just wanted to talk--and we discussed what it means to be a professional.

Here's where I think teachers fall short. If we really believed that the testing demanded by NCLB harms the education of children, and a lot of us do, then we should not participate.

Docs are an ornery lot. I used to be one. If any President issued a proclamation we believed harmed our charges, we'd have simply ignored it. That's part of being a professional, knowing more about what you do than governors, presidents, and emperors. The other part is acting on what you know.

We (teachers) got the first part down. We won't be true professionals until we get the second part.

***

My failure last week, one borne of fatigue, will help me become a better teacher. My students are tired--I've pushed them hard, and I have no problems with that. I do have problems with judging them while they're tired.

State testing for biology is coming up. They will be judged, I will be judged. Fear is the expected, and the wrong, response.

Historically my lambs have done well. I hope that they do well again. If I fret, though, I stop teaching what matters.

I'm not paid enough to teach bull crap. So I won't.

***

I found a robin's egg in my garden today. It's not just humans that screw up.

There are no trees overhead, and the egg was intact--I think it was laid where it lay.There's a story attached to the egg, but the robin cannot tell me.

Was she scared? Stupid? Just plain indifferent? Does it matter?

I considered taking the egg to school, but if it hatches, then what? So it sits in my garden, a reminder that pretty much everything with mitochondria bumbles its way through this universe as we do. None of us chose this, few of us would willingly give it away.

***

I think, in the end, celebrating failure is fine, as long as it's an exuberant failure. Too often we confuse fear and fatigue with failure, and that's not the same thing.

Not even close.

Photos are mine, all taken today.

A Wizard of Oz kind of wind is blowing today. These things affect me. As they should.

READ MORE - Fear, fatigue, and failure

The water's warmer, but not warm, the days longer, but not long.

After a longish week, pushing young adults in AP Biology to perform cartwheels that will, ultimately, matter no more than the motes seen in the beam of a late afternoon sun, I questioned what I was doing. The College Board has made some necessary changes, but they don't officially kick in until the year after next, which means I am supposed to teach next year's class a flawed syllabus.

Questioning one's daily work can be liberating, but only if you are willing to accept the answers. There's something to be said for mindless obedience. Obedience has never been one of my strong points.

***

I went clamming today, again. And again I wrapped my hands around a creature with a beating heart, pulling several out from the muck. Grace, ecstasy, and dinner.

A stiff chilly breeze blew from the northwest, and Brandt geese, a bit annoyed they had to move, watched me from about 20 yards away. The tide crept up as I worked. Under my feet were thousands of periwinkles, too many to avoid. Next time I may grab a bunch to eat.

My rake, once used by a stranger now long dead, is starting to show signs of wear. I do not want to replace it.

I hope I get another season out of it.
And I hope it gets another season out of me.

Grace.
First honey bee of the year today, too.

READ MORE - Clamming. Again.

This was sent to me by a friend I've never met.

Today I watched a dozen young adults get excited staring at fruit flies. Fruit flies, like pretty much anything alive, have stories to share. The deeper you delve, the more interesting they become.

Too much of what is called "science" in school is just pushing around big words with little thought. Knowing the definition (if not the meaning) of, say, "ubiquinone" may impress a few folks outside of science, but really, what's the point?

If you do not share the wonder and the beauty of this huge thing that wraps around us, is us, then what hope do any of our lambs have?

I'm not saying you got to make this a touchy-feely quasi-religious ecstatic experience. But if you're doing this right, you are going to ignite a few students along the way.

Isn't that why most of us got into this business?

Screw STEM, I want to teach science....

If you like the cartoon, go watch Dr. Bonnie Bassler--she's wonderful!

READ MORE - xkcd channels Feynman

First full day of spring today. I've used up well over half allotted to me in this lifetime.

Got some serious planting done yesterday. Every year I am surprised at how muddy mud can be, then surprised again as I wash my hands in the sink, the dirt tracking into the drain, dark and sinuous, like blood from a deep wound.

The difference? There's a lot more life in a handful of decent dirt than in my veins.

I don't recommend that every child see her own blood washed down the drain, but I do recommend a life where that remains a possibility.

Photo by Leslie.

Now that's a lot of mud.

READ MORE - Mud and blood

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
'Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'

'Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.

Yeats' Crazy Jane makes sense mid-March. This is a hard time of year for mainstream churches. Words fall flat when the earth erupts again.

Today is the kind of day you count the old men in the neighborhood after a long winter. Still missing one, but he may be recovering from St. Patrick's Day. I will wander by his stoop again in a bit.

The cherry blossom buds are tumescent, ready to spew their sperm on our streets, our cars, our heads. Life is, again, for the living.

The big old moon reared up on its hind legs this evening. The clams are in trouble. I could feel the moon pull me along with the sea water. It seems unfair, raking clams when the moon sneaks up so close. The moonlight will dance on their siphons just past midnight tonight, and maybe a clam or two will share in the dance. They need not fear my rake tomorrow.

The crocuses have tossed off any sense of decorum, popping up pretty much anywhere they please.

The sun has returned, and with it, life. The old men left shuffle past and mutter hello, in shoes impossibly thick and black. They know, they know, what we all pretend to ignore.

Grace comes, again, unearned. None of us leave this life intact. Drink the wine, the sun, the pollen, the life.

"The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that," said CNBC anchor Larry Kudlow. 

How many of us don't have a freaking clue? Is that the global economy my kids are supposed to worship?

READ MORE - Spring!

We got a 22 knot breeze blowing out of the true NNW.
We got a full moon, with tides predicted to be 1.2 feet lower than normal even before we got the breeze.
We got ourselves a blowout tide, baby!

And we got a bunch of clams to show for it. In February. Just when all the nonsense gets to be a bit much, grace intercedes.

We got blown about around a bit today, my Uncle Bob and me, but we got clams to show for it.

 (If anyone reading this is down the Jersey shore, get yourselves out there--if you don't want quahogs, scallops are there for the picking.)

The photo is of some of the clams raked today. Clams in February. Life is good.

READ MORE - Blowout tide

(Just my annual Bloomfield crocus phenology post. Move along, nothing to see....)

We're thawing in February.

The pond ice is melting.
Two fish floated, lifeless, on top.
Winter is over for them.

Crocus spears pierce the Earth.
Spring is just starting for them.

For us?
We have light, we have grace, and, for the moment, we have time.

For the moment.
And a moment is all that is promised us.

READ MORE - Death and crocuses

“We need at least a 3 percent to 4 percent increase in total wheat production.”

Abdolreza Abbassian, 

Economist, UN Food and Agriculture Organization 

I just ordered a bunch of seeds, something I do every year. I save some seeds from last summer's garden, but I'm a sucker for cute little seed packages, and it makes it easier to use the left-overs in class.

We grow all kinds of vegetables, and we're still nibbling from the Brussels sprout stalks that survived the heavy snows. We like to eat. Most animals do.

We like to drive, too. Most animals don't. And our driving habits are biting into our eating habits.

Wheat and corn cost about 50% more than they did a year ago. That's not such a big deal (yet) here in the States, where we casually drop a dollar to buy a box of Candy Sweethearts for our love, less than 10 minutes worth of minimum wage labor.

A few years ago, all of our grain went to feed us, or the animals we planned to eat. Now a chunk of it goes to fuel our vehicles.

Teasing apart the stories can be tedious, and the corn-based ethanol folks will be quick to point out that the corn they use is feed corn, that it saves lots of petroleum that would be used otherwise, and that, by golly, it's the American way. Food prices go up for a lot of reasons--drought, speculation, floods. In the next few months you'll hear a drumbeat against the Chinese "hoarding" wheat.

To be fair, a lot of stomachs reside in China, and it's been hit by drought. It's easier (and so much politer) than blaming the SUV your neighbor drives.

It's pretty simple, really. So long as our population and grain yields go in contrary directions, our food prices will rise. So long as Americans can buy candy for a few minutes of work, we won't notice. And so long as economists keep getting paid to announce the blazingly obvious, they'll keep shouting about it instead of tilling the earth.

It gets down to biology. We are graced with just so many calories a year from our sun, with more stored as petroleum from millions upon millions of sunny days that preceded the arrival of humans.

I got a class full of children who can recite the stages of mitosis, and I get paid reasonably well to make sure this happens. If my lambs cannot make the connection between the corn in the Candy Hearts, the biofuel in their mother's SUV, and the effect of rising food prices in Egypt, well, I've not done my job, no matter how well my students perform on a state test.

I need to do better. It starts with the packets of tiny seeds.

The Necco Candy Hearts image from the Necco site here.

READ MORE - Wheat does not grow on trees

Crocus spears erupting through last autumn's maple leaves, North Cape May, February 6, 2011

Every year, every single year, this surprises me.

So long as I see myself as an organism, a being distinct from the world around me, I suppose it will.  I need to work on that.

In the meantime, though, I'll bask in the joy that suffuses my soul when I see the year's first crocus stand erupting from the earth.

Photo by us.

READ MORE - Grace

As I was poking around the classroom garden yesterday, getting the plants ready for the weekend, I found a pea pod dangling from a tiny pea vine.

The child who nurtured it will get "extra credit"--I used promises of points to get the some of my lambs 'interested' in putting dried peas into icky peat moss. She won't remember the points. She will remember the pod.

I hope she remembers the countless times she breathed on her hand--carbon dioxide and water released deep in her cells. Our plants are built on the carbon backbone of our exhaled breaths.

I do not pretend to know anything of God or gods. I enjoy reading the words of cultures past, to see what they saw when words were still so young that they were used carefully.

I can recognize grace, though--a pea pod given to us for the cost of our breath and a little bit of water.

***

I just came in from picking a few scrawny Brussels sprouts from very chilly plants--two of them now gracefully bend towards the ground, forming archways, seemingly honoring the earth that bore them, the last harvest of last spring's garden.

The sun is returning, slowly, so that our exhaled carbon dioxide can be used again, with grace.

 I can show the kids the graph above--the annual wobble in CO₂ levels reflects the dance between the light of life and the ensuing darkness each winter.

Chloroplasts and mitochondria, ancient critters in cells that keep much of the living alive, work in tandem. Chloroplasts capture the energy of the sun in sugar, and mitochondria release the energy as the sugars tumble back to water and CO₂.

A child feeds on the lies of our culture. Magic erupts from screens, voices erupt from wire. We are consumers on the infinite, and we tell the children lies because we believe them ourselves.

She memorizes the photosythesis equation without understanding,  because we tell her she must, in order to graduate, in order to get to college, in order to earn money, in order to eat.

A tiny pod just might put a tiny seed of doubt in her. It came from nothing, or so it seems.
It's tangible in a way photons can never be, no matter how thin the computer, how bright the screen.

***

So I will keep teaching about electron transport chains and ATP and things that can be tested with no more than a scantron and a pencil. I get paid to do this, and I enjoy it.

Our classroom garden provides the real lessons. Heads of wheat are erupting from plastic bottles, impossibly yellow squash flowers lean over plastic trays, and the peas keep wrapping themselves around everything in their path.

Not everything thrives--some of the children get quiet when their seedling wilts, a few get angry. There are always more peat pots and seeds in the back, and eventually another seed gets planted, converting our breath again to the living.

Biology.

Do not confuse grace with religion, nor technology with science. I know nothing. None of us do.

The veggies came from the back yard, the graph originally from NOAA

READ MORE - Late harvest

Someone stumbled on this old post yesterday, and kindly commented. 
As we celebrate Dr. King's birthday today, it seemed like a good one to repeat....


Organizations love mottoes and mission statements and other sorts of committee-speak that expend lots of time and energy that might actually be used for, say, teaching.

Committees drink lots of coffee, committees fill appointment calendars, committees eventually compromise on some pablum. I never expect committees to spew anything resembling wisdom.

I teach at Bloomfield High. I live in Bloomfield. I grow vegetables in Bloomfield. I scan its skies through the urban glow to see miracles above me. We don't have a ton of money, but we have stoops and more than a few stay at home parents. Many of our children here will work in the family business whatever that may be--painting, masonry, landscaping, plumbing.

While the glorified among us search for bodies to fill the elite skilled positions in life, towns like Bloomfield continue to provide a sturdy class of citizens ready to roll up their sleeves, lend a hand, make a community work. We've got real bakeries, real pizza, real craftsmen (and craftswomen) and real stoops.

The motto for our school district reflects committee-speak:

Educating the Leaders of Tomorrow

Few folks buy it. While Bloomfield has produced a few leaders, even our town's namesake, General Joseph Bloomfield, did not actually live here.

Still, we're not a town of followers either. Connie Francis lived here, Tony Soprano died here, and Sarah Vaughn is buried here. We're Norman Rockwellville with an edge. It's a great place to rear edgy children.

The town supports its schools.

Let me say that again. Bloomfield, a decent but not particularly wealthy town, supports its schools. We pay taxes. We go to the school plays, the games, the art shows. Most of our local taxes go to support our schools, and most adults in town do not have kids in school.

We are not unique that way.

Our high school, however, has its own motto. I'm not sure it's the official town creed, but it's how we live.

So, Mr. Arne Duncan, let me toss my high school's motto your way, a motto painted boldly on a wall next to our arts atrium on the second floor, a wall painted by students on a weekend.

In three words it captures our town, and I think most of the nation not warped by the Wall Street madness that infects so much of our public life today.

Learn to live!

It's right up there, big as day. It's not "Learn to work!" or "Learn to follow!" or "Learn to do Algebra 2! or "Learn to kick India's ass!"

Learn to live.

***

Next week is the HSPA testing. This week the state (again) changed its mind on the curriculum. I can't really blame them--they're trying to train students for corporate jobs that don't yet exist.

When I left school today, a few dozen students were going through our musical's dress rehearsal. A dozen more young women played basketball in front of a hundred or so locals watching our kids in our gymnasium, paid for by us.

A dozen more kids were selling pretzels and candy for the Key Club, money ultimately donated to several local causes involving local people.

Here's a list of companies and foundations not giving us money:

Gates Foundation.

Walton Foundation.

Bruhn-Morris Family Foundation.

Capital One

Cartier

City First Bank

Comcast Cable

Donatelli & Klein

Graham Fund

Hattie M. Strong Foundation

Marpat Foundation

National Geographic

National Home Library Foundation

Payless ShoeSource Foundation

Radio One

The Sallie Mae Fund

Susan W. Agger Family Fund of The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region

Target Stores

The Washington Post Educational Foundation

Learn to live.

***

If I wasn't under the NCLB gun to get my kids through the HSPA, here's a lesson I might teach my lambs--the history of oystering in the United States.

We all have property rights independent of whatever patch of land the few of us might be lucky enough to own.

We all own a piece of public land, the commons. We all have a stake in the "public trust doctrine"--we, as citizens, have rights allowing us to gain access to water and land that we do not individually own.

I can gather oysters on the Delaware Bay without interference (beyond applying for a license and spitting out $10). Without the public trust doctrine, I am nothing more than a pirate (which would be way cool, of course).

I have this right because a few folks braver than me fought on the Mullica River back in 1907. Two hundred or so oystermen fought against the few who were among the privileged.

You won't read about this in any high school history textbook. You won't read much about the coal wars fought by miners, or Tom the Tinkerer (Whiskey Rebellion). Kids learn about the Boston Tea Party without grasping its anti-corporate thrust.

A child can go through school in Jersey without learning a thing about how to get an oyster just a few miles away from her classroom while being forced to learn the quadratic equation if she wants to earn a diploma.

Oystering melds biology and history and craftsmanship and industrial arts and nutrition and, perhaps most important, citizenship. The story reminds us how we, as American citizens, serve as the foundation of the Great Experiment.

HSPA won't test this. It's not in the biology curriculum. It's not in the history curriculum. It's not in the industrial arts curriculum.

Still, it matters. And I teach in a town that still recognizes this.

***

Oysters live on oyster beds. They cannot live on bare sand or mud--they'd suffocate.

When I pull a few oysters off a bed, I just about always pull a few off that are too small too eat. Oysters wrap themselves around each other, and pulling one involves pulling several.

When I get a handful of oysters, I break off the small ones and toss them back to the bed. Oysters pile on top of oysters which pile on top of oysters.

The cultch is the pile of shells and debris that allow oysters to continue to reproduce. Oysters need hard surfaces, oysters need calcium. When I toss my tiny oysters back, I am helping the community to survive.

I cannot oyster on Sundays, but I usually return to the beds anyway, to toss back the shells of the oysters I ate the day before.

I could throw them in the garbage. A truck comes by every week to pick up most anything I want to throw away.

My oysters were alive Friday. I killed them Saturday. On Sunday, I return the shells to the bed. The flesh of the oysters is a true gift, unearned.

I was born in America yesterday. I reap the benefits today. I hope to give back to the children what I have enjoyed. Living in America, our America, is a true gift, unearned.

The least I can do is prepare the bed for future generations.

My bias is, obviously, oysters. The American story can be told by weavers, by farmers, by miners, by carpenters, told by soldiers.

Our story is local.
Our story is real.
Our story matters.

I do not recognize the American Diploma Project as citizens, despite the name; I do not recognize multinational corporations as American; I do not believe that CEOs of multinationals have my town's interests at heart.

I cannot think globally. No one can. It's a lie. I can imagine a village here, a city there, but imagining a global village is like imagining a million deaths--both become abstract piles of numbers . I can imagine, however, a single child dying. We all can. We're human.

Get your butt outside, get to know your neighbors. Get involved with your school district's curriculum.

I'll take care of the oyster cultch. You take care of what matters in your neighborhood.

And if you think your neighbor is worthy of teaching your children your local history, get involved in education.

ATT isn't going to take care of you when you're old or ill, but your neighbor will.

Photo by Leslie.

READ MORE - Blue oyster cultch revisited

I can't believe I once worried about this:

Am I just a brain sitting in a vat of saline somewhere, controlled by a classroom of advanced post-doctoral students amusing themselves with my epiphenomenal world?

No matter anymore. Seems the whole world chooses to live vicariously now through chips and code written by young'uns high on pizza and caffeine.

Many of my lambs believe the world will end in 2012, that no man ever walked on the moon, and that mere belief in their dreams will get them to the promised land.

It's November, and I'm as cranky as the bees.

***

I teach science. I'm under a bit of pressure.

Arne Duncan says that "Science, Technology, Engineering and Math are at the forefront of our global economic future." He should know, he's a sociologist, and parlayed a mediocre basketball career into the White House.

Al Gore says that "in today's increasingly global economy, America cannot afford to continue to fall behind the world in the very subjects that are going to drive economic growth and development in the coming decades." He should know, he's a retired politician, majored in government, and earned a D in a sophomore science course.

The state of New Jersey expects my students to know this, and that, and some more of this for good measure. New Jersey pays good money to develop tests to make sure I've done my job.

I must confess, however, that I have ulterior motives.

***

Our economy is not based on information, or technology, or engineering, or math.

Our economy is ultimately based on what the Earth produces, on how much we can sustainably extract from the living organisms around us.

A nifty math degree might help me get a higher portion of what we extract than my neighbor who did not finish college. I might earn more money with an engineering degree. The sheepskin on my wall sitting in my attic somewhere might put a jaunt in my step.

To be fair, science has gone a long way to increasing crop yields, to enabling us to get metals from the ground, protein from our seas, but so long as we remain dependent on the sun for our daily bread, we cannot do much better in the long term, say seven or eight generations, than those seven or eight generations ago.

***

Our greatest resources here are not our minds. (The Chinese alone outnumber us almost 5 to 1--their top 20% in intelligence rival the entire population of the United States.)

Our greatest resource here is not our spirit. Parochialism is cherished everywhere.

Our greatest asset is the incredible land base we have. We can grow lots and lots of wheat and lots and lots of corn. We have ore and trees, we have coastline, we have abundant rainfall.

A degree in economics doesn't make you a better farmer; it just makes you better at glomming what the farmer makes.

***

We need plumbers and farmers and nurses and masons; we need electricians and framers and clammers and machinists.

If you are making a living extracting money from the economy without thought to the consequences of your actions, with no connection to the land base, contributing little to the general welfare of the community, you are not particularly useful, no matter how much you make.

The last couple of decades have seen an increasing inequality on the distribution of the financial wealth in the United States.

Producing more scientists will not fix the rising inequity in wealth distribution--it might even aggravate it.

So why do I teach science?

I have a copy of the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence on my classroom wall. I remain a happy skeptic, convinced that thinking Americans can keep our Great Experiment alive.



Democracy cannot survive ignorance.

Every day I go to school with two goals--to show the children the world that they are missing when they are immersed in the human universe of iPods and monitors, and to show them how to think on their own.

If a handful of them go on to become scientists and mention my name along the way, cool beans. I'd be proud, but it wouldn't matter much beyond that.

If, however, children who pass through my classroom learn to love the world around them, and to critically assess how our actions affect the world they love, well, I've done something worthwhile.

Should I just be fooling myself, and I may be, I have a few million yeast bubbling away in 5 gallons of wort in the kitchen, a few Brussels sprout stalks still stealing energy from sunlight a few feet from my front door, and a clam rake I'm getting pretty good at using.

Not sure I'm contributing much to the GDP, but I've become part of the local economy, the one that respects entropy and life, the one that makes me happy. The invisible hand of the market pales next to the grace of the hand of nature.

The title is unfair--Adam Smith's work is like the Bible: widely quoted, rarely read, mostly misunderstood.
Photo from The Brain That Wouldn't Die, 1962, via classic-horror .com.
The "Declaration of Independence" image from the US Library of Congress.

READ MORE - Adam Smith and me

How much do I have left of the loyalty to earth,
which humans shame, and dislike of our own lives,
and others' deaths that take part of us with them,
wear out of us, as we go toward that moment
when we find out how we die: clinging and pleading,
or secretly relieved that it is all over,
or despising ourselves, knowing that death
is a punishment we deserve, or like an old dog,
off his feed, who is suddenly ravenous,
and eats the bowl clean, and the next day is a carcass.

Galway Kinnell
from "The Striped Snake and the Goldfinch"

This post is for me, again. November is a tough time.

Mary Beth, my sister and my soul, was killed by an errant Christian missionary a few years ago. Not sure his being Christian matters, but his views that God somehow had something to do with all this soured me on this whole Christian thing. (Something about God's will and my sister's liver being bench pressed by a tow bar left a distaste in my mouth....)

Soon after her death, Toledo Hospitals asked me what I though about her care there. She died, usually a minus, and they got her confused with some other Jane Doe the night she died, so my opinion of her hospital care did not garner the kind of support hospitals yearn for. (Goodness, they even got the date of her death wrong....if the CEO is reading this, and disagrees, chat with me...)

She's still dead, and the hospital still exists, so my answers on their quality assurance questionnaire really made no difference, though it did get me a nifty letter from their CEO.

In one of the saner moves in my life, I shredded both the missionary's and the CEO's letter regarding her death. I care not for the hospital's profit margin, and even less for errant Christian minister's views of entropy.

Life is life, and here we are.

***

Last night I saw the Andromeda Galaxy. Light that left there about 2 million years ago lit up a rod on the back of my retina.

About 2 million years ago, Homo habilus roamed the African plains, over a million years before H. sapiens developed. A few photons left a star or two from Andromeda, and headed our way.

Last night they lit up my brain.




Mary Beth was a descendant of H. habilus, as are you and me. I would have liked her to remain alive long enough to share photons from Andromeda last night, but that was not to be. God's will, according to the person directly responsible for her death, but I can hardly blame Her for the piss poor driving of one of Her agents.

And so (as Vonnegut said) it goes.

***

I am getting older.

That I can still see Andromeda naked eye is no small feat.

Those photons traveled a long way to get to me. I was ready for them. I lay on the grass, my back wet from the dew, and I absorbed the photons. I feel a little bit guilty that I did not stay all night. A whole lot of photons traveled a long, long way just to hit the imprint of my back on a lawn that defines entropy.

***

The more try I to teach, the more I realize that teaching is, well, impossible, unless you're propagandizing.

This is not good.

***

Professional astronomers made a huge announcement this week, one that went mostly unnoticed.

Huge gamma ray "bubbles" are emanating from the center of the Milky Way, our galaxy. Vast amounts of energy (a term few of us understand, and I certainly don't) are flowing off the galaxy.

This is a big deal.

I like science. I also like theology, even if some scientists believe our beliefs are genetically programmed. (I suspect happiness erupts whenever we pursue our genetics, and I may be the happiest fool on the planet.)

I think we discovered heaven. And I think maybe Mary Beth's presence there bumped up the gamma ray production up a magnitude or two.

***

I teach a lot of nonsense. Right now I am teaching about functional groups to children who have no grasp of chemistry. This is like teaching color to a blind woman.

I am an agent of the state. Not sure that's a good enough justification for what I do, but the benefits are good.

***

The darkest 12 weeks of the year start now. That my sister got killed right when the sun fails us is not her fault, but messes me up just the same.

The love of her life grows apples. Apples. And bees.

I love apples, and I love bees. And I love Dave, a man who grows both apples and bees, and who keeps the few solid parts of Mary Beth left on his land.

Enough said.

***

I saw a few bees today. They're frantic.

How do I know? I watched them.

If you (unfortunately) believe in a mechanistic view of the universe, you would expect bees to be ponderous today, moving slowly, governed by the laws of kinetics and thermal energy.

Turns out the bees in mid-November have more energy than Richard Simmons on Red Bull.

Despite the low temperatures, despite the lack of nectar (or maybe because of the lack) in local flowers, doomed as they are as the sunlight fails, the bees are zinging along like they're mainlining amphetamines.

How do I know.
I watched them.

I could read about it, I suppose, or watch a YouTube, or maybe dive into Wikipedia, but I have the intelligence of at least an ant, and I trust my senses. Do you trust yours?

***

I am old enough to (finally) realize I am going to die. This is shocking news to me.

If I do nothing else this year, I hope to instill in each of my students that they will die, too, that everything eventually falls apart, that they should pursue things that matter. They are surrounded by voices that pretend humans are immortal.

One voice reminding them otherwise won't hurt, and it might, just might, push a child to pursue a path she would not have, because her father said she should be a nurse, because his father said he should become an

If I do that much, they will not have wasted their time in Room B362.

When they're my age, or even decades younger, knowing that a carboxyl group makes a molecule more acidic will not matter a whit.

***

I saw Andromeda last night, naked eye.
I saw a 40" striped bass rotting on the beach today.
I saw bees struggle to grab some nectar from cosmos flowers in November.
I am alive when my younger sister, my brilliant sister, my loving sister, is not.
I made a batch of beer today.

All of this is related. I'll name this ale Entropy.

***

We know nothing.

Gamma rays, death, rotting striped bass carcasses on the beach, it's all the same.
Something happened 15 billion years ago. I hope it happens again.

In the meantime I'll brew, sing, bake, rake, and dance.

I don't get it, but I'm glad I'm part of it. How about you?

The brightest man I know never finished high school. But he can grow apples, raise bees, play slide guitar, and think.
The most loving woman I know got killed by a Christian missionary.
The farthest thing I can see, Andromeda, I can still see.

The Andromeda photo is by Boris Štromar

READ MORE - Thoughts on seeing Andromeda on the anniversary of my sister's death

I have been reduced to stacking up chairs on desks, then knocking them down.

I'm up on the third floor--the whole science wing reverberates when I knock down the furniture.

I stack up the desks--energy in.
I break the bonds with a shove--activation energy.
The desks cascade down, unleashing noise and heat and movement and chaos--ΔG.

Over and over and over again, I implore my sophomores to think like "kidneygartners." I don't want fancy words. I don't want "right" answers. I don't want to hear that energy is "the ability to do work."

Some laugh, now and then one is near tears.
I'm confused!

Good! Now we're getting somewhere.

***

Occasionally I have story time. It's always the same story.

I sit in the middle of the pods. (The students form their own pods of desks at the start of every period. 30 seconds of chaos saves me hours of headaches--I do not have Ann Landers' talents, and larval humans show a remarkable political ability to arrange themselves in minimally disruptive arrangements. I could use some old tennis balls, though....sliding desks make a lot of noise.)

I walk along the class timeline. Humans (just a blip, really)--dinosaurs--plants--bacteria--water--Earth's formation--10 billion more years--Big Bang.

The Big Bang, of course, makes no sense. None. The students get that we have evidence that the universe is expanding. They get that galaxies are farther apart this week than they were back before Hallowe'en. And they grasp why some physicists came up with the model.

But it's only a model, a mythology, and an incomprehensible one at that.

I tell the story over and over again. I emphasize that it is, indeed, a story, told under certain constraints.

And then I topple the desks again.

***

We exist because the sun decays.

(Second Law of Thermodynamics)

We exist because the sun decays.

(Laws are what we observe, consistently, persistently--no explanation needed.)

We exist because the sun decays.

(No worries, the good news is we'll all be dead before the sun gasps its way into a red giant.)

We exist because the sun decays.

(No, I can't answer that--that's a religious question....)

***

Have you spent much time talking to 5 year old children? They'll believe anything but they'll question everything.

My sophomores won't believe everything, but they believe the world will end in 2012, mostly out of convenience.

They won't, however, question much, at least not in school. And that's our fault.

And again I scream "STOP THINKING LIKE SOPHOMORES AND START THINKING LIKE KIDNEYGARTENERS!"

(Yes, I really say "kidneygarteners"--I am lousy at German....)

***

Children like their myths written in stone. We all do. It's why science can suck big time when we pay attention.

Less than 100 years ago, Edwin Hubble made a pretty convincing story that Andromeda is not part of our galaxy, that stuff existed beyond our own Milky Way.

This was (and remains) a big deal.

And yet we teach the Big Bang like we teach The Great Gatsby, which, coincidentally, was published the same year Hubble made his move.

According to the Big Bang model (or myth or theory), something happened about 14 billion years ago.

The state of New Jersey states that I must teach that "according to the Big Bang theory, the universe has been expanding since its beginning, explaining the apparent movement of galaxies away from one another."

Read that again.

It's religion. I say as much in class. And I'm done with it.

***

That we even pretend to separate biology from physics from chemistry at the adolescent level just shows how confused we are.

Most of my kids have no idea how to generate electricity. This week I will bring in a hand-cranked generator, and the boys will shock themselves as the girls wonder how humans ever reproduced at all.

I'm not supposed to do this. I am supposed to teach biology. I can't teach biology if the kids have no idea about the First and Second Laws of thermodynamics. If cranking a magnet in a coil of wire hard enough to transform kinetic energy into the electrical sort strong enough to make sophomore boys squeal makes no impression, no sense pretending we can teach science.

But it will make an impression. It always has. Not for everyone, not all the time, but for most.

Because we're human, and innately curious.

And so long as we remain human and innately curious, I will enjoy teaching, at least until the 2^nd Law does me in, as it will.

READ MORE - "Think like kidneygartners...."

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

Theology alert--feel free to jump in....
This was inspired by Father Sean and Brother John and Reverend Scott.

Balance.

We need balance in our lives. Overwhelmed? Seek balance.

An innocuous philosophy--who could possibly be against balance?

A madman in the back wildy waves hand--and (again) I get sent out of the classroom.

***

The light is failing. Local carbon dioxide levels will rise until late May now, when resurrected plants start reconstructing the molecules back into something we can use again next winter. CO₂ and H₂O, carefully bonded back together into strawberries in June, peaches in July, corn in August, wheat in the September...little left now but the kale and the Brussels sprouts.



Breathe on your hand--you can feel the moisture, the breeze of molecules brushing your hand.

If God can be found, She will be found in the chloroplast, Her heart made of rubisco, the enzyme that puts us together, the most common protein in our known universe. She carefully holds a tiny molecule of carbon dioxide, three atoms of nothing, and glues them to life.

Heart of God?

She takes her life, her energy from the sun. Three times a second, another molecule of CO2 pressed together to a molecule of life, over and over and over again.



Rubisco is everywhere, in every green leaf, and as the leaves of summer fade into fall's glory, She leaves us. We start to drown in our own CO2, waiting for Her return, as She has, as She will. (That's called faith.)

***

You cannot balance a lifetime. You can dance, jump for joy, cringe in fear, curl up, scream, love or hate. There is no balance for love, for fear.

A well lived life is not one where you've balanced your fears with your joys, your love with your hate.

A "well lived" life makes no sense. You cannot "lived"--you can only live, now, this moment. Either the amygdala or the cortex rules a moment. We pretend we can string together moments, we hold on to memories, to words, to pictures, to myths of eternity, and we miss the obvious.

The here and now.

And we wonder why it's hard to teach children in a classroom....

***

A couple of soldier flies erupted from our class terrarium last week. Unexpected. Large critters crawled out of the thin litter layering the glass bottom. The yellow bar splashed on their legs with their waspish wings and fluttering antennae screamed danger. My cortex knows they're harmless, my amygdala makes my fingers stutter when I pick one up.

The last few days a half dozen more came from the same dirt.

When I opened the top to feed my sowbugs yesterday, two flew out and headed for the window. They only live a day or two as adults, and they had been trapped for hours in the terrarium. They flew fiercely, full of desire, and crashed right into the glass.

Instinct, true. Fixed action patterns with proximate and ultimate causes. Memorize this, children, pay $87, and earn your AP Biology credit.

We never speak of desire in other creatures. Of wants. Of needs.

The soldier fly carcasses will sit on the sill until my students return on Monday. I will ask them how they got there. Then I will ask why.

We all need what rubisco gets us--we all feel desire. It's why we burn our energy even though we know December's coming.

***

וייצר יהוה אלהים את האדם עפר מן האדמה ויפח באפיו נשמת חיים ויהי האדם לנפש חיה׃

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;
and man became a living soul.

We think we're sophisticated and learned and (the worst conceit of the three) immortal. We gorge on the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and forget that we are closer to the soldier flies than we are to rubisco.

I do not know who wrote the Hebrew Bible, and I do not know which of the 47 men chosen by King James translated Genesis 2:7, but there's been a huge misinterpretation of "soul" in the last few hundred years.


The soul, at least according to the Words allegedly governing the actions of the dangerously powerful here in the States, is not separate from the dirt. Our "stuff," the polymers of proteins, our layers of lipids, our DNA, our essence, is our soul.

We are mortal and finite. We are living souls, dependent on rubisco, dependent on unimaginable events in the heart of the sun, hydrogen to fusion, mass to light.

You want your children ready for the world of humans, raise them under artificial light. Keep them planted in front of monitors. Feed them impossibly perfect fruit. Keep them shod. Pump them full of music made by machines. Surround them with images of the "perfect" human, and demand they become one.

Don't talk to me about balance.

We are training our children to avoid the window pane, to stay safe, to gaze at the world outside, to create stronger panes. We don't want to see them hurt. We cannot imagine their last agonal breaths.

Me? I want my children to crash into the glass, and if they're bloodied lying on the sill, to get up and crash into it again. Again and again and again.

3 billion years of desire got us to here; a few hundred years of playing God has reduced us chasing photons on screens, practicing religion disconnected from the wiser elders who wrote texts we refuse to read, to believing we are in control.

I may be unhinged, but I am not as unbalanced as anyone who believes in balance.

The sun that sustains me has been dropping lower into the sky day by day, the plants that feed me have lost their leaves, the bees I adore have gone. I am a man of science, I have a good idea why this is so.

I am also a man of faith--faith that the sunlight will return, and that rubisco will return with it come spring.

Photos are mine and Leslie's.
The rubisco model is from Wikipedia, and is in the public domain.

READ MORE - On balance