We keep time in class, as we do pretty much everywhere. We pretend that days are exactly 24 hours long, and that each hour is as well proscribed and linear as he next. An hour in December lasts exactly as long as an hour in June.

Kids know otherwise, of course, at least until we train them.

We start school here in Bloomfield next week. The daylight hours shrink dramatically this time of year. A week from now we'll have almost 20 minutes less daylight than we'll have today. In a month, we'll have an hour and 20 minutes more darkness. The light we do get will be more oblique, less intense.

Science teachers will make a big deal about this, explaining the seasons using globes and lamps, but if we've taught our children that sunlight does not matter, that the clock matters more than your hypothalamus, that we eat at noon, not when you're hungry, well, then, we should stop feigning shock when children really don't pay much attention to sunlight.

None of the adults around them do, either.

If college graduates do not know why seasons happen, or how trees accumulate mass, or what forces act on a basketball in flight, maybe it's not because our children refuse to learn.

Maybe it's because they internalized what we've been teaching them all along....

New leaf--if more than a few children are truly uninterested in a topic, and I have no good reason to push them, drop the topic.

READ MORE - Zeitgeber matters

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

Carl Sagan

I think clocks did as much to squash our spirits as anything else, but the history of time is fascinating, and surprisingly silent given its effects on our culture.

When the Prague Orloj astronomical clock was built, raw materials needed to be churned into the metal parts used to make the massive machine, some of which still exist today. People go to visit it, to take pictures, to, in a word, worship.

The beauty of the rhythm of the universe marked by the clock has been usurped by the idea of the clock itself. An abstract form that takes the concrete form of the clock has become another idol.

And we love idols.

***

What do we value in science classes? What does a child learn about the universe by Skyping with astronauts, by playing with remote telescopes via the internet, by doing simulations of labs on an iPad?

If a teacher does not have the wherewithal to teach about combustion using nothing more than a candle, a match, and a bell jar, an iPad will not help.

Teaching science simply can be stressful--there is simply no place to hide. I can teach about combustion using a chemical equation, balancing the reactants and products with flair, as though that's the point of chemistry, using animated demos to show various colorful molecules combining and breaking to form various new substances. And I used to do just that.

Now I start with water seemingly cast from a lit propane torch.

Which is the point, really--here is a piece of the universe, child, here's what we see. Let's figure out if we can find a pattern here.

Teaching combustion going to the equations first is like teaching someone how to look at a sunflower by analyzing Fibonacci spirals:

Until a child sees the beauty of the sunflower for itself, its powerful symmetry easily seen but not so easily defined without numbers, no sense pushing golden ratios.

The school awards the children who can manipulate the Fibonacci ratio. It's easily tested, and easily mastered even without seeing the symmetry in a flower head, should a child be so motivated. In school, we idolize the abstract.

A child could know the golden ratio without grasping the beauty seen in nature's symmetry, and do just fine in science class.

And so folks go to gawk at a clock in Europe, designed to reveal patterns discovered by humans hundreds of years ago, taking pictures of a machine with little machines, understanding how neither works, nor caring to. And they will show off their photos as we show off our clever students who spout off ratios, and wonder why we feel an ache in our chest as we drift to sleep, feeling that something is not quite right, that something is missing.

I keep a sundial by my classroom window.

Golden ratio image lifted from Sofluid here.
The sunflower is by lucapost released and borrowed under CC via Flickr.
Prague clock by Hector Zenil, via Wikipedia, used under CC.

READ MORE - A Clockwork Yellow

School beckons--this is a repeat from a couple of Augusts ago, a reminder to me.

Idleness is the enemy of the soul. And therefore, at fixed times, the brothers ought to be occupied in manual labor; and again, at fixed times, in sacred reading. ... there shall certainly be appointed one or two elders, who shall go round the monastery at the hours in which the brothers are engaged in reading, and see to it that no troublesome brother chance to be found who is open to idleness and trifling....

The Rule of St. Benedict, ca. 530, Medieval Sourcebook

Discussions of the soul in any context can be dicey, and discussing it as a science teacher in a public school could be grounds for dismissal, understandably so.

(I suppose could wander to the chasm's edge by asking if there's any empirical evidence supporting the myth that a soul weighs 21 grams, but I best save that for college sophomores in a coffee shop chat.)


This post is not about souls.
It's about idleness.

Science requires reflection: "free" time, wandering thoughts, curiosity.

Reflection does not, of course, always lead to science, but I'd wager that the Benedictine order recognized it could lead to bigger problems than hirsute palms and astigmatism. Free time, wandering thoughts, and curiosity can be just as disastrous in a classroom of humans metamorphosing into their adult forms.

Teaching content to a docile audience is easy. Here's the curriculum, here's the test. Do well often enough, and you will be successful.

A huge chunk of the Teaching for Dummies section at Barnes and Noble is dedicated to tips on inducing docility in students. /me waves to Mr. Wong. And I've eagerly read just about all of them.

Some of us are coarse enough to articulate the threat:

You need your diploma to get a job so you don't starve.
(Make sure you sneer contemptuously when you spit this out,
and make sure you don't add voice to its silent ending "...you ungrateful bastards.")

The bell rings. 48 minutes later, it will ring again. Little time for idleness.

I'm the elder in the classroom. I scan for idleness and trifling. There's not a whole lot of wiggle room.

Still, if one of my students (substitute "wackadoodle" for "troublesome brother") should happen to stumble on a spark that threatens order, a spark that has a real chance at lighting a relevant fire in the classroom, I've got a canister of propane sitting on the desk.

The picture on the bottom left is from the New York Times, which did, indeed, tackle science and the soul.

And I blame the Benedictines for a huge chunk of toaday's problems--they turned time into a commodity.

READ MORE - On idleness

Yep, same as last year--I like the rhythm of the year.

The sunlight diminishes perceptibly now. The plants know.

The past week we've eaten deep purple eggplants and bright pink brandywine tomatoes, yellow summer squash and green-and-red striped beans. Today we will pick basil for pesto, some for tonight, some for February. A bowl full of ripe blueberries waits for us, sunlight incarnate.

But the sunlight is dying, and the plants know.

We do not speak of religion in class, at least not formally, though students will occasionally ask religious questions, and I will deflect them. I explain that some things cannot be known through science, and that what I believe beyond the limits of science falls outside the province of class.

In class we talk of light and hormones, photoperiods and abscisic acids, to explain how plants know. We talk under the hum of fluorescent lights, time marked by defined blocks of time. In class, September light is exactly the same as February light, and class is always 48 minutes long, no matter where the sun sits.

Sunset today marks the start of Lammas, or Loaf Mass Day--joy for the harvests that are coming and regret for waning sunlight. Lammas used to be celebrated--the first wheat berries of the year were ground into flour and baked into bread offered in thanks, some used for Communion, some for the feast that followed.

We thank God (or Tailtiu or Lugh or some other forgotten gods)--harvest time reflects death and grace, whatever the culture. Death and grace feel foreign in the classroom, indeed foreign in our culture. We pretend, at our peril, that life is linear.

Lammas falls halfway between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox. The days are shortening, winter is coming. Until you feel the seasons in your bones, until you follow a grain of wheat from the ground to plant to bread to you then back to the ground again, the modern myths may be enough.

Science can explain why plants produce fruit when they do, and I can teach the steps. We can test whether a student learns what I present, and the students that do this best have access to all our culture offers.

You can become very powerful, very rich, without knowing grace. You can go far in life if blessed with intelligence and beauty, degrees and citations, without ever knowing what a wheat berry looks like, without ever kneading a lump of flour and water and yeast into glistening dough.

In the end, we don't know much, and may never know much. We can, however, recognize grace. We might not grasp it rationally, but we we can grasp it--a good reason to celebrate Lammas.

The Skeleton of Death dances every hour in Prague--photo of the Prague Astronomical Clock by Sandy Smith found on VirtualTourist.

READ MORE - Lammas again

High schools are ruled by bells, or rather, a variety of tones still called "bells."

In many classes, students jump out of their seats at the sound of the bell, eager to accomplish the many tasks adolescents perform between classes--flossing their teeth, calisthenics, philosophical study--whatever it is that students do before they saunter into their next class 5 minutes later.

In other classes, such as mine, students sit until they get their Pavlovian clue (Mondays through Thursdays--"have a great day" and on Friday, "What do we practice?" Safe Science!)


I have an ancient analog clock in my classroom, just a few feet from, the digital school-issued one. My clock has a second hand. I can tell when the bell is going to ring. I often count down.

Like many older clocks, my clock has not been scrubbed of error. A few seconds off each day adds up over weeks and months. No big deal, there's a little knob in the back for correction.

The state-prescribed science curriculum is sometimes boring (*gasp*), and I've gotten pretty good at spotting texting, so my clock becomes, at times, an object of inordinate interest.

Once a child becomes familiar with the second hand, the interminably long last minute becomes slightly less so.

The second hand creeps to the appointed dismissal moment--and nothing happens. The bell rings a few seconds later than expected.

"Hey, the school clock is wrong!"

And we are now set for a lesson in relativity.

The school clock, being the arbiter of school time, cannot be wrong. And I know my old clock has picked up a step or two over its digital cousin.

The school clock cannot be modified by me--somewhere in administration someone has the task of keeping time, but given computers and quartz, it might be decades before anyone has to make an adjustment.

I frequently adjust mine, even when it's fine. Just enough to make the second hand change in relation to the school bells.

Evil? Not sure. Sneaky? You bet. But my kids are watching it, and commenting, and thinking. They inadvertently form hypotheses, most of which assume my clock is as accurate as the NIST official US time.

Some days I spend 47 minutes teaching pseudoscience, teaching vocabulary or models as gospel. During the last minute, the kids get the real science, watching an ancient clock's wobbly second hand tick towards their predictions for the bell. I listen to the side conversations but do not interrupt.

"Geez, the bell was early! Dr. D, how come the school can't get its clocks straight?"

I shrug. They'll figure it out sooner or later.

READ MORE - A secondhand second hand

Leslie suggests, wisely I think, that I keep my vaccine opinions to myself.
My signal-to-noise ratio got knocked down a bit this month.
I am a teacher, no more, and, of course, no less.

Studies suggest that this disconnect between body time and clock time can result in restlessness, sleep disruption and shorter sleep duration. Other studies have suggested links between time change and increases in heart attacks, suicides and accidents, though scientists say more study is needed.

New York Times
March 10, 2009

But we do it anyway....

Blame the European monks--living by the clock is a very recent development. Before mechanical devices, we relied on the sun, the moon, the seasons. The monks regularly prayed together. Ironically, modern time-keeping has pulverized free time. Who has the time to pray anymore?

I do not have a watch or have a cell phone. Not a digital bone in my body. I am amazed that some people are amazed by that--we are surrounded by clocks.

I usually wake up a few minutes before the alarm goes off at 5:30 AM. Today I got jolted. I do not adapt well to folks screwing around with my clocks. Still, worse things can happen.

About 350 years ago, the British finally succumbed to the Catholic version of the calendar--despite its papal origin, the Gregorian calendar works better than the Julian. The Julian calendar adds about a day every 131 years--and this adds up.

As part of the changeover, September 2, 1752, became September 14th. The whole year was about 20% shorter than other years because of its late start (March 25) and the missing chunk of September.

Imagine if Rush Limbaugh controlled the pamphlet market back then.

So we "lost" an hour. We'll get it back in the fall.

And really, nothing happened. The mourning dove still called out as it does at dawn, the crocuses opened up as the sun rose, a few mayflies hatched out by the pond early this afternoon.

I got to walk in the dark to school, cranky and tired and feeling a little less superior than the sparrows who slept as they always do, guided by the sun.

A few of us will suffer heart attacks this week because of our addiction to artificial time. And you thought fluoride and milk were dangerous....

READ MORE - Time out!