The Science Goddess recently wrote a powerful post pointing out that we're not going to get far with the wolves running the show unless we put on some wolf's clothing.

I save that kind of entertainment for Bleeker Street late October. I got snowpeas to harvest, clams to rake. But she makes a good point. What we're doing isn't going to work.

If more than a few of us get really good at what we do, and our lambs learn to think critically, we're going to be OK. If not, we're toast.

If it's testing the Feds want, let's give it to them:

Test teachers every two months for content knowledge. Heck, test them every two weeks if it keeps the bean counters happy. Most of us will do just fine. The few of us that don't know our stuff, well, time to go.

Put cameras and microphones in our rooms. Put them in the hallways. Install a toilet-cam for all I care. Watch what we do. If you have a better plan, let me hear it. If I'm not reciting state standards while washing my hands in the bathroom, dock me an hour's pay and give to Pearson or ETS or whomever--as long as you leave me alone when I get it right.

Let's make the student testing truly high stakes--if a child fails, off to the gallows! Everyone wins! The district sheds the stragglers, the parents shed a lifetime of debt owed to child's college, and the child does not face a life of shame knowing he let the United States down because some child in Burma kicked his arse.

I doubt Arne's been paying attention, but the obsjay have been ippedshay overseasay. Maybe we can get export Arne's job over to Finland.

This song's been ripping through my head, not sure why, my cortex hasn't caught up with my amygdala, but I suspect The Science Goddess' post has something to do with it:

Joe Strummer's dead, and will be for a bit.
I'm not, not yet, and hopefully won't be for a bit.

I'll take truth wherever I can find it these days.

Truth will out.

READ MORE - A modest proposal

When you get down to it, this is what matters in our class.

We grew plants, using nothing more than our hands, a little peat moss, some dirt, and light.

This might not seem like much in a culture that rewards style over substance, words over efforts.

Our national Secretary of Education thinks little of promoting untruths. He's too bright to plead ignorance. I'm too polite to call him a liar.

A child who grows a head of wheat from a single wheat berry learns a powerful lesson. The stuff that matters most, the stuff that keeps us alive, the stuff of sustenance, comes from a little work and a lot of grace.

The picture above came from our windowsill--that's a gray sky behind it. I used to babble on about this matters. After doing this 5 years, I've learned that 15 year old humans recognize what matters, when they get a chance.

So I give them a chance. Despite Arne.

So I'm going to Washington, D.C., on July 30th. I might some wheat berries along for anyone who wants some.

Jose Vilson will be delivering a speech, reason enough to go. If you're going, let me know. I want to meet you.

READ MORE - I'll bring the wheat berries....

"The lenses o' his eyes, wi' so much divin' intae the water, get hardened, an' he loses his sight" said John Turner MacCrindle.

from The Gannet (Bryan Nelson), via Bookworm on the Net

I spent yesterday's gray afternoon with an old and a new friend, both Real Life Scientists®, wandering around Sandy Hook, climbing bunkers, skipping stones, and sharing stories. A couple of ospreys eyed us from their new nest. Once you get past the debris that floats over from the Staten Island landfills, the Hook is stunningly beautiful.

Offshore dozens of gannets were diving, their white wings reflecting light, seemingly fluorescent against the gray skies. Gannets crash into water headfirst when feeding, sending up plumes of spray.

I shared some local shore lore--gannets eventually go blind from diving, which, of course, kills them.

It makes for a great story. Turns out it's plain wrong.

***

Myths define us, more than most realize. Not so long ago, we survived by our senses, and by our wits. Oral language swirls as our perception of truth swirls. Stories got passed down through our clans, back when stars still mattered, when rivers were still filled with fish, forests with trees. We needed each other, but we needed the Earth's grace more.

Just a few thousand years ago, long after we became human, we developed the written word. Language, already powerful,  now had  the power of permanence. Oral language reflects truth, and waivers, imperceptibly, through generations.

We worship the written word, granting it powers far beyond the first vague firing of neurons that generated the thought that preceded (and transcends) the word.

I saw it in a book...I read it somewhere...it's published science...you can look it up.....

The strength of our belief in the written word has fueled beliefs in the the inerrancy of the Bible or of the Qur'an or, no doubt, of other religious texts. These beliefs are not universal, of course, even among followers, and at least one major religion (Judaism) cherishes oral tradition.


I am not a religious scholar, nor do I care to engage in a discussion of inerrancy or infallibility except to mention that huge swaths of modern culture will bend perceptions of the natural world to fit a fixed ideology, with often disastrous results.

Less extreme examples of word fixation may be harming us as much as the obvious religious ones. I let my gannet myth blind me to the more likely truth. I probably do this several times a day, without awareness.

***

Much, maybe most, of what I do is pierce through the misconceptions of our students--only after I kill this worship of "I know it as a fact" can I hope to teach children to think. If you cannot accept the possibility  of error, you cannot make rational choices. 

Public education is in the dogfight of its life, getting peppered with myth after myth, most blatantly (and certifiably) false stories accepted as truth.

So here are some words to ponder:

• NCLB does not work--we have a decade of evidence showing such.
• Poverty matters, above and beyond whatever happens in the classroom--we have decades of evidence showing such.
• "Zip code is not destiny" makes for a catchy slogan, aimed at the mantra that poverty matters, but solves nothing--it's a contrived (and ugly) attempt to deflect the fact that poverty matters.
• Our current republic faces a huge threat within our borders, and it's not some caricature of a bomb-wielding Bedouin, or Mother Earth LiberAL, or Willie Horton, or Che Guevara, or the Latin Kings, or yet another child snatcher hiding in your bushes--it's the deliberate shifting of monies and power from public spaces to the private, from the "bottom" 90% to the political (and, sadly, cultural) elite.

It hardly matters if anyone says it aloud, so few folks bother to wrestle with the incongruities between reality and words.

Matters to me--it's why I teach. I want to teach kids how to think. Who knows where that might lead?

 ***

Bryan Nelson himself, despite the myth, knows his gannets. In a letter to the The Observer he gently corrects Richard Dawkins: "I have concrete evidence from marked individuals that gannets can survive more than 30 years with perfect eyesight. The blindness myth probably arose because gannets and boobies have an opaque 'third eyelid' which they can draw across the eye to protect it from the impact of diving."

Where does our blindness come from? Who controls your opaque 'third eyelid'?

Hah! Four scientists mentioned in one post about myths.

I am not anti-religion, not by any stretch. I am anti-anti-thinking.

The 3rd picture is of one of yesterday's scientists, Joseph Mastroianni, 
taken by the other, Kristan Hutchinson,while in Antarctica--it's NSF, so I figure it's PD.

READ MORE - On spreading myths

At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.

Charles Darwin, letter to J.D. Hooker, January 11, 1844

***

Gallup poll, December, 2010

40% of Americans believe that God created humans "pretty much in their present form at one time" within the last 10,000 years.

As in 4 out of 10.

Another 38%, again about 4 in 10, agreed that "human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process."

***

The sheer terror Darwin faced when he developed his theory was not that God did not exist, but that He did not need to, at least not to explain human beings.

From a science standpoint, a guiding hand is not needed once life starts. (How life started remains, of course, a mystery.)

There is comfort in rejecting Darwin's conclusions, as there is comfort in good whiskey and Harry Potter stories.

When I teach biology well, I alter worlds, and wake children to the terrible and wonderful beauty that lies beyond human imagination.

I hope to help children become rational adults. It's why I teach.

I am not sure some of us who support Darwin's ideas grasp the profound way they shake a child's universe.

Like confessing a murder indeed....

READ MORE - "Like confessing a murder"

These words started as a visceral response to a friend who coined "The One-Boobed Systyrs of the Apocalypse." She's still fighting.




I remember the first breast I saw no longer attached to the body it once helped define. I had seen body parts in various forms before, but this one was fresh. A flap of sallow skin with a wizened nipple defining it, a long trail of fibrous fatty tissue trailing off the slab.

The pathologist, smoking as he dictated, handled the breast like a butcher handles meat about to be weighed, though not as kindly.

The breast had been part of a man who probably did not survive his bout with breast cancer. Most people back then did not fare well, and men fared worse than women.

Incidences of breast cancer change in populations as people migrate from one area of the world to another, suggesting that environmental factors contribute to this disease. There is a continuing effort at the NIEHS to identify these environmental factors and the role that exposures to specific chemicals could play in this disease.

National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, NIH

I shaved my mother's head when the cancer recurred--bony metastases in her skull made the shaving more difficult. She walked like a marionette with tangled strings the weeks before she died. In a radiology reading room, we'd call them "goobers." Goobers on the brain.

Unless it was one of our mothers, our sisters, our daughters--then they were metastases.

***

Since 1985, Zeneca Pharmaceuticals has been the sole funder of October's National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM). Zeneca has promoted a blame-the-victim strategy to explain away escalating breast cancer rates, which ignores the role of avoidable carcinogens. Zeneca's parent company, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), is one of the world's largest manufacturers of petrochemical and chlorinated [organic] products -- including the plastic ingredient, vinyl chloride -- which has been directly linked to breast cancer, and the pesticide Acetochlor.

In addition, Zeneca is the sole manufacturer of Tamoxifen, the world's top-selling cancer drug used for breast cancer. In return for funding the "awareness" campaign, ICI/Zeneca has control and veto power over every poster, pamphlet and commercial produced by NBCAM.

" A decade-old multi-million dollar deal between National Breast Cancer Awareness Month sponsors and Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) has produced reckless misinformation on breast cancer," said Dr. Epstein.

"Chemical Industry Funds Breast Cancer Campaign"

Cancer Prevention Coalition

The media focuses on the strength of cancer survivors, and I have seen tremendously strong women live and die graciously through months and years of chemotherapy and radiation and surgery. The magazines will show glossy pictures of proud women, and these things matter, of course. Avon will sell "Kiss Goodbye to Breast Cancer Lipsticks," Mars, Inc., will sell you pink and white M&M's, and General Electric will sell you a Senographe 2000D mammographer.

They do not show a mother cowering in her bathroom, her bald head bare, blood all over the toilet from a nosebleed that will not stop, her teen-age son standing awkwardly, bravely holding her head.

They do not show the vomiting, the pain, the fear. They do not show a mother with her arm in a machine trying to squish out the fluid building up from lymphedema. They do not show the bony protuberances on a skull, the smell of dying cells.

They do not show a child wiping her mother clean because she is too proud to use a bedpan and too weak to use a toilet.

***

dichlorodiphenyl-dichloroethene
polychlorinated biphenyls

dieldrin
chlordane

heptachlor
polychlorinated dibenzodioxins.

In 1991, these were the 6 most common carcinogens found in breast milk. The news has gotten worse since then. We are at the top of the food chain--toxins accumulate.

It has been known that breastfeeding reduces your chance of getting breast cancer. The longer you breastfeed your babies, the lower the risk. This has been attributed to hormonal changes related to breastfeeding--breastfeeding women cycle less, and had less exposure to estrogen.

There has been speculation (and it is only speculation), that breastfeeding may help reduce the chemical pollutant load on the mother. Guess who gets the chemicals.

***

The lifetime risk of a woman developing breast cancer was just less than 10% in the 1970's, or 1 in 10; it is now 13.4%, or almost 1 in 7 (NCI, 2005). In the 1940's, the risk was 1 in 22. Breast cancer is the leading cause of death in women 34 to 54 years of age.

Until recently, the incidence of breast cancer had gone up about a percentage point every year since 1940.

***

Janet Jackson flashes a breast, and our Federal Government now rushes to redefine obscene. Certain words and phrases will cost lots of money; Howard Stern has opted to put his voice into orbit.

Here's an obscene phrase that won't cost anything--in fact, in past Octobers you have might hear it dozens of times:

Early Detection is the Best Protection.

This makes no sense--once detected, you already have it. The best protection is prevention which, admittedly, would require massive, radical changes in the way we live. The NBCAM folks got wise--they now say "Early Detection Saves Lives"--if you go to their website, they pretend that this is what they have always said.

So it must be true.

I wrote this several years ago for a friend, who is still fighting, and for my mother, who lost.

READ MORE - "Breast Cancer Awareness Month" is obscene

So what do you do?

What do you do when major sources of information provided to children come from corrupt human sources?

What do you do when the adults around them believe whatever lights up their amygdalas the most?

What do you say when the actions of those in power, those with money, those that command the messages, no longer work in the best interests of our children, all of our children?

I work for the government. I get that.
I also work for your children, and others get that.
The two interests are becoming less and less compatible.

***

I overstated that.

I work for the people of Bloomfield--they pay most of my salary, and if I could remove the yoke of Arne and the Governor by rejecting the small percent of my salary covered by New Jersey and D.C., I would.

I would be a better teacher for it, I would have more class hours dedicated to sharing science with my charges, and my students would be better prepared to care for their children when the time comes.

Maybe my lambs won't act like the sheep who are training them, and will act in the best interests of their children when tough decisions are made.

Maybe they will refuse to proctor exams that ultimately harm their charges instead of just grumbling in the teacher's lounge or on Twitter.

***

What am I going to do?

I am going to teach science.

I trust the natural world, I trust my senses, I trust logic, and I trust the intelligence of my lambs. I let them know these things.

I do not hope (nor would want) to influence their "beliefs," whatever they may be. I do not proselytize, which would be near impossible anyway, since I know nothing. I do not take sides in many of the silly "science" either/or debates raging in the media, because there are no sides to take.

I want my children to think. I want my children to see. I want my children to trust themselves when they know "two and two is four," even when others scream it's "FIVE!"

The ones I reach, and I reach a few, will see the world differently when they leave in June. I leave them with power, they leave me with hope.

***

The natural world exceeds our imaginations, but our imagination exceeds its limits. Our cultural inability to grasp this leads to hubris, to dreams of infinite growth, ultimately to annihilation.

I am not going to tell children an economy dependent on ever-increasing consumption cannot be sustained for more than a few generations. I will talk about primary productivity and limits imposed by the finite sunlight that bathes the Earth.

I am not going to tell them that a lot of what they believe to be true is bunk. I will drop a huge textbook and a paper clip from the ceiling and let them see which one hits the floor first. It surprises me every time I do it.

I am not going to tell them that school is important because they're competing with the Chinese or Indians or Icelanders for the same jobs and America needs an educated work force to keep our economy strong. I will share my love of life, of the local, of the edges of knowledge we can never truly grasp. We'll study bugs and daphnia and radishes.

We occasionally have moments of joy, even in a classroom.

***

Here's the secret--once a child trusts her senses, trusts the joy she feels when exploring a world that is as much hers as Bill Gates' or Rupert Murdoch's or any of tens of thousands of strangers who want to shape her life, she becomes her own master.

She becomes autonomous in a world of automation.

She might even dance to her own tune in a culture of technique, a culture that worships men like those pictured above. See their smiles? Trust them?

I don't either.

The Bill Gates photo is from the UK Telegraph here;
the Rupert Murdoch photo is from What's Nextt: Innovations in Newspapers website.

READ MORE - Teach truth, joy follows

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp?....
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Duke Senior, As You Like It
Shakespeare, natch

***

Tweet:

I'm diddling away my mortal coil here instead of staring at stars. Which reminds me--I need to go stare at some stars....

And then I hung around for another 15 minutes before I got out.

I'm glad I got out--a golden meteor streaked across the sky as though painted with glitter, sparks flying off the tail, a tail that extended more than half the sky. It shook me up.

I have never regretted a single moment spent outside. I've regretted plenty inside. If I believed in signs, I'd toss this machine off the kayak....

***

In the past couple of days I've heard two croakers complain as I wrestled hooks out of their jaws, squinched a few dozen cabbage worms, burned my feet on a hot jetty, cooled those same feet in the bay, picked tomatoes and beans, sliced open my finger, dared a harlequin stink bug to stink, stared at Vega and Venus, sank ankle deep into sand at the sea's edge, and watched tiny fish break the surface in an explosion of red light reflected from the setting sun.

***

My fledgling story:

I went into the garage just after supper yesterday to fetch the paddles. Some critter was flapping around noisily, but I was too busy running away to see it. (Yes, I'm a coward....)

A few minutes later, Leslie (much braver than me) found it--a fledgling robin, now exhausted, its beak gaping open, its chest billowing. The fledgling found a window--it could see the outside world, and it kept beating against the glass, its wings sprawled open against the pane.

Just a few feet away, the open garage door beckoned, but the bird was too frightened to see anything but its view from the window. It would die waiting for the pane to dissolve.


With the help of a crab net, I managed to get the bird out onto a juniper bush by the garage. I feared it would collapse from exhaustion. I cooed (ridiculous, I know) and slowly brought a hose to its mouth.

The robin drank. Then it drank some more.

In a few minutes it was gone.

***

As one who has trouble believing anything, not sure now's a good time to start putting trust in "signs"--but I do know this much. This computer screen is my garage window. I keep staring into it, looking at a world through glass, glass that cannot be broken, glass that will not magically dissolve.

No matter how much I tweet like the desperate fledgling.

Photos are ours, and we gave ourselves permission to use them.

READ MORE - This life more 'tweet....

What do you teach a young adolescent? How much of the truth do you dare bare?

We are in the midst of the Sixth Great Extinction. Technology got us here, and I have my doubts it will get us out.

I have faith in life--creatures live in the deepest depths of the oceans, in scalding hot springs, deep within the Earth's crusts will survive whatever we might do in the next few generations.

I have faith in the sun--it will continue to beam on us for a good few more billion years.

I have faith in love--not that it will save us, but that we're redeemable, all of us.

I do not, however, have faith that the current culture has any inclination towards self-preservation. A bumper sticker on a Prius will not save us, no matter how near zero its emissions may be.




And here on the Fourth of July, in a land blessed with water and soil and a temperate climate, on a day marking the signing of the Declaration of Independence, most of us would starve to death without some sort of cash flow.

The man credited with writing the Declaration of Independence also wrote these words:

The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be provided to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not, the fundamental right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed... It is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.

Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1785

What do you suppose he would say in my classroom today? In your classroom?

Photo from Poplicks here.

READ MORE - 6th Great Extinction? (Don't scare the kids....)

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

Captain Paul Chadwick died today. He was, and will remain, my next door neighbor.

Tossing electrons across unimaginably (for humans, anyway) vast spaces in unimaginably (for mammals, anyway) quick pulses to the few strangers who wander here makes no sense.

I could nap. I could drink. I could walk on the beach, and should. I could pray. I could go take a bath, or do lesson plans, or plant a Brussel sprout.

Paul died just after I finished my last post about wasting children's time in public education.

Paul was a retired Coast Guard Captain. He piloted ships in remote places. He solved problems. He fixed things. He rescued people.

Captain Paul could do what I want my students to do--he could figure things out on the fly.

I have no idea what kind of student Paul was in high school. I do know this, though. At least among my friends, there is no correlation between high school success and ability to solve problems.

And that's a problem.

I need to work harder to help kids become good neighbors like Paul Chadwick. He came from a time when parents mattered more than schooling.

That we forget this in a culture that makes education the task of a "professional" class, a class that would, for the most part, starve to death on forty fertile acres, perturbs me.

Captain Chadwick helped maintain the lighthouse above back in 1967. That he and I crossed paths has been one of the highlights of my life.

I have work to do.

I am all kinds of shook up now.
I don't need sympathy from strangers, but I may need less time on this machine.

The photo is Nubble Lighthouse, from US Pictures.

READ MORE -

The back bay's warming up--the quahogs are feeding again.

The sun's rays are no longer just glancing off the Earth around here--we're warming up. Algae grow, fusing carbon dioxide and water into sugars, bound by sunlight. A bed of clams lies just under Richardson Sound, a few of them tossed back by my hand last summer, eating the algae.

Eating is a religious act--we eat other creatures, other creatures feed on us. We pretend otherwise at our peril.

I teach biology--we use words like adenosine triphosphate synthase and nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide--and none of my students know how a clam grows.

Few know why we breathe.

Should I ever become a competent teacher (as opposed to the "highly qualified," tenured educator that I am), a child will grasp why our economy cannot be sustained, why declines in phytoplankton matters, why our words and abstract reduction of an incredibly complex (and ultimately incomprehensible) universe threaten our survival.

And that child would worry.

But should I become a good teacher, better than competent, a child will feel joy knowing she is part of the mystery, and she will act in good faith and good conscience to change what she can, and dance and breathe and sing and eat and live until she dies, knowing as she lives that she will die.

***

The crocuses are blooming again. The clams are rising again. The sun is climbing the sky again. I'm in my 6th decade.

Time to get the clam rake out. Again.

READ MORE - Time for quahogs

Leslie and I took a walk along the edge of our world, as we do most Saturdays. The tide was out.

At the edge of our universe, we witness miracles. Today we saw a 1" horseshoe crab the color of sand, not quite a yearling, making the universal horseshoe crab tracking pattern. I rescued an older one, at least a decade old, flipped upside down, a gull nearby eying its gills.

The beach is littered with blue crabs recently dead, their murderers betrayed by the tracks of webbed feet.


The February wind whipped through our coats.
It's still winter here.



And then I stumbled on this:




Its earthy marine aroma seduces me, and repulses Leslie.

I think I've found a good chunk of ambergris, worth something back in the days before chemists played gods. A decade or two ago, a sperm whale wrestled with a giant squid, perhaps a mile deep, and won. The squid's beak took one last stab at the whale's gut, which formed a protective coating of, well, whale excrement around the squid's last charge.

The beak was eventually expelled, either as poop or vomit, neither method particularly charming, and after years in the sea was tossed up on our beach.

If anyone wants to buy it, let me know. In the meantime, I'll keep sniffing it, drawing up images of death and delight in the deepest recesses of my hind brain.

It was 2 years ago February that I tossed a whale's tooth back in the drink.
I wish I held onto that. Far more interesting than a piece of poop.

Horseshoe crab photo by Leslie, of course.

READ MORE - Ambergris

I just read a fun post tweeted by dtitle, "Five amazing inventions that will doom us all!"

Why wait for the future, though? We already have all kinds of technological doo-dads that have doomed humanity (if not humans):

(Runners-up: Automobiles, telephones, and the incandescent lamp. And record players (recommended by John Spencer).)


Number Five: Television (and other forms of e-media)

Very few folks control television, and very few appreciate how this medium has altered our minds. Democracy depends on discourse, and folks who spend hours a day "consuming" visions produced by very wealthy people with very narrow objectives effectively remove themselves as true citizens (though they can, alas, still vote).

Democracy is essentially dead in the States, and hasn't flourished in most parts of the world anyway, so as influential as televison is, I relegated it to fifth place here.




Number Four: The Haber Process

Prometheus gave us fire, Fritz Haber gave us nitrogen fixation. We were now one with the gods.

Before the Haber process, only bacteria and bolts of lightning made nitrogen available for life. Without nitrogen, we have no proteins, no nucleic acids. Haber gave humans control of the nitrogen cycle. We are gods now, able to make ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen.

We no longer had to rely on poop for fertilizer. Our huge human population depends on fertilizer made possible by the Haber process. Ammonia can also be used to make lots of explosives.

Why is this on the list (aside from my innnate hatred of golf courses)? Haber's process created industrialized agriculture. We disconnected ourselves from the mystery (or so we think), and now believe we can continue to grow food relentlessly, without thought.

Haber helped trigger the Green Revolution. In the end, it will only mean that many more carcasses to burn when our fossil fuels are depleted, and artificial fertilizers become too expensive for all but the elite.

Fritz Haber also developed chlorine gas for use in warfare, and personally oversaw its use in France.




Number Three: The written word

Yep, I use them. I read, I write, I even (*gasp*) blog. I'm a hypocrite.

Words are abstract. They freeze moments. Our collective oral memory evolves through generations, tailoring the needs of the clan with the needs of the community. The written word changes all this.

NONE of any of the rest of this list happens with oral tradition alone. The written Bible does not happen, nor the written Koran. Old conflicts dissolve with time in the oral tradition. The written word keeps grudges alive forever.

In my best moments, words disappear.

I'm OK with burning books, as long as we burn all of them.




Number Two: Computers

We can now process thought faster than we can think. Every one of you reading this post can be traced. Databases record your keystrokes. There is no longer privacy for anyone committed to living the 21st century life.

I'd like to pick my nose and maybe even savor the results without anyone knowing. (That was allegorical, folks.)

Computers allow telecommunications, allow nuclear weaponry, allow large hadron colliders, allow genomic typing, allow pretty much every foray into risky high tech hi-jinks without an iota of thought.

OK, they allow Zelda, too, so it's almost a wash.





And number one:
Nuclear weapons

We got 'em, lots of them. So does Russia, and China. The Brits. The cozy buddies India and Pakistan. Did I mention France? France!?

Well that's OK, no rogues states, eh. (Ooops...almost forgot. NORTH KOREA!)

Maybe Israel. And soon, perhaps, Iran.

But it's OK, we all love each other, and would never use them, right?







Yoshihiro, the baby died 11 days later.
Tanaka Kio, the mother, lived until December 9, 2006.

Their story, our story, is here.

Television pic from https://ishcmcwiki.wikispaces.com, via CC 3.0
Fritz is from wikipedia
The open Bible is from wikipedia, too
Univac via Georgia Gwinnett College
Yoshihiro and Tanaka's photo was taken by Yamahata Yosuke.

Am I serious about this list?
Yes.

I'd love to hear your opinions....

READ MORE - Five inventions that have doomed humanity

"This is the biggest erasure problem I've ever seen."

Professor Gregory J. Cizek
University of North Carolina Cheating Expert

The poor have been accused of a lot of things, but this one takes Marie Antoinette's bakery to a whole new level.

Georgia has an erasure problem--a closer look at Atlanta's results in Georgia's version of state testing reveals that a lot of the tests had incorrect answers erased and changed to correct answers at a far higher rate than can be reasonably expected.

"The amount of cheating is staggering."

Ben Scafidi, Director
Center for an Educated Georgia

I have not seen the data, so I've no way to assess the accusations, though clearly this warrants investigation. That districts are cheating to meet the NCLB requirements is hardly news these days.

Here's the news--apparently Atlanta has an erasure problem because of its disadvantaged children, at least according to APS spokesman Keith Bromery. In an explanation that makes Rose Mary Wood's explanation for the 18 minute gap in Nixon's tapes seem plausible, Mr. Bromery explains that disadvantaged kids "might easily stall on a question and fail to finish a test...They were told, 'Feel free to erase and change your answer because there's no penalty for that.'"

Oh, reeeaaaalllly....those darn pesky poor kids, erasing away and stealing answers, just like they steal Food Stamps and TANF funds.

Oh, it gets worse--each and every school on The Journal-Constitution list of schools that had extraordinary test gains show an erasure problem.

All quotes and information relating to the inquiry were lifted from the New York Times today,
"Georgia Schools Inquiry Finds Signs of Cheating,"page A14

And yes, I know Marie Antoinette never said "Let them eat cake." Doh. She spoke French.

READ MORE - Rose Mary Woods and the "Erasure Problem"

We are awash in strings of vague capital letters--and it's easy, so easy, to gloss over them like names in a Russian novel.

BPAs, PCBs, PBDEs--yawn....

The PBDEs get the stage this week--flame retardants found in just about everything. Now while I am (mostly) rational, and while I frown on babies in flaming pajamas, seems that the PBDEs designed to protect the little people may prevent the little people from ever arriving.

Looks like PBDEs are fecundability busters.

My sister knew PBDEs were a problem years ago, worked hard to get them banned in Michigan, and she (with many others) did just that.

"The Mary Beth Doyle PBDE Act" got two forms of PBDE banned in Michigan back in 2004, not long after she was run off the road by a devout Christian missionary, who later assured me her death was all part of God's plan; this week the Michigan assembly added a third form of PBDE to the act.

Mary Beth was not a professional scientist, but she was a keen observer. She danced through life. If I could teach anything in science class, it would be how to open your senses to the world. She did just that.



So here's a Mary Beth story, lifted word for word from a friend of hers, Darrin Gunkel. She changed a small corner of the world by her sheer will and her fearlessness, and this story serves her memory well.

Twenty years ago today, Mary Beth and I arrived in the fabled Hunza Valley, the model for Shangri-La, in northern Pakistan. We stayed in a town on a cliff 4,000 feet above the valley floor, in a hotel that cost about 5 bucks with a view of 4-mile-tall Himalayan peaks. The poplars lining irrigation canals – brimming with pearly and opalescent glacier runoff, feeding stone terraces of apricot wheat, mulberry, grapes – had just come to full flame. An orange and yellow hearth fire lapping at the feet of the mountains 18,000 feet high, capped in blue glaciers.The altitude started getting to me. So, Mary Beth took a walk.

A few hours later, she came back, her fancy scarf from the Sindh – the one with real silver threads, presented to her by relatives of the mayor of the town of Khaipur – traded in for one of the rough cotton veils Hunza women wear working their terraced fields.

“I traded my scarf! And got some presents!!” She was carrying a huge bunch of grapes and a loaf of bread that smelled like a fire place and was so dense, huge, and nutritious it took us a week to finish off.

“I met some farmers! Check it out!” She’d spent the afternoon in the compound of a Hunza family, a rare privilege. “They all thought I was insane once I got them to understand I wasn’t lost. Kept asking ‘where’s your husband? (in this medieval world, it was just easier, and more sensible, to claim we were married) Why did he let you come here alone?’ How the fuck am I supposed to explain I’m the one who dragged my ‘husband’ to Pakistan.” (Coming here was Mary Beth’s idea. That’s another story.)

She was glowing from the encounter. Not a lot of people are served tea in the kitchens of Hunzakot matriarchs. Not a lot of people are like Mary Beth. Travel is like being a rock star in that to succeed, it takes a certain talent – the kind Mary Beth possessed in spades, wheel barrows, truck loads full.

Later, we shared this experience: that evening, Hunza was celebrating an Ismaili Muslim festival. After sundown, people scaled the surrounding mountains and set bonfires. As the peaks faded into the night, the whole valley – dozens of miles long, and thousands of feet deep – came alive with bonfires. The sight left even MB speechless. Unforgettable stuff like this made Pakistan her favorite location of the whole year we spent in Asia.

Mary Beth, who I miss more than life itself, was thrilled I decided to become a teacher.

She was no Pollyanna, and knew as well as anyone where we're headed in our current madness, but she danced easily knowing she was part of this wonderful whatever were living through, and she did what she could to make it better.

A terrible landslide devastated the Hunza Valley earlier this month; you probably did not hear of this, no reason to.

We have been bombing tribal villages using drones, aircraft without faces.

If one student of mine wanders happily around this planet because of something that happens in Room B362, I'd say I've done good. I'm not Mary Beth, but I was her big brother.

Who knows who I may be shepherding in class....

"Who's That Girl" was written by Dick Seigel for Mary Beth.
And I'll be poking Darrin for permission when I get roundtuit,

READ MORE - PBDE's and the Mary Beth Doyle Act

One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.

Alvin Toffler

In two seemingly unrelated news items, we learn that kids spend about 7 1/2 hours plugged into media every day, and that corporations, blessed with the same rights of more corporeal citizens, will be allowed to run ads directly influencing federal races.

Alexis Tocqueville, the data is in, and the experiment has ended.

Draw your own conclusions.

READ MORE - It was a good run....

(I've been running a fever the past couple of days...we'll return to our regularly scheduled programming once my complement system wakes up and starts kicking some H1N1 ass.)

Despite whatever virus is playing tootsies with my hypothalamus (or maybe because of this), I found myself in thigh deep water on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean at dusk, trying to catch a striped bass. I spent the evening shivering under a blanket.

The waters here are about 62 degrees, still plenty warm for wading. The air temperature wasn't bad, either, and the wind didn't bother me until the sun set. In my feverish napping, I realized that for all my training and prepping and struggling as a science teacher, a student can learn far more about life on the edge of the Hallowe'en sea than she ever will in the classroom.

As the sunlight recedes on Samhain, the dead walk among us.

***

This morning I noticed a drop of water on the shower curtain. Light rays were bent by the drop of water clinging to the curtain, and the threads of the curtain loomed larger than life. At least that's how I perceived it.

If I had not been there to catch the bent rays of light, the light rays still would have been bent for whatever light-sensing creature might pause to look at it, or so I believe. Faith, really.

This past week we have been talking about diffusion in biology class. I started the year off with a mini-history of the universe, talking about two huge articles of faith in science:

1) Whatever rules apply here at this moment apply everywhere in the known universe (given, of course, the same conditions), and
2)Whatever rules apply now (at this given spot) applied throughout the past and will continue to apply in the future.

If we're going to tackle issues of faith in the classroom, may as well tackle them head on. Science requires a special kind of faith.

***

Like the drop of water visible only to me, or the fin of the striped bass cutting through the surf while I stood alone at the beach, most moments only happen once. We see patterns in our moments, and some patterns, particularly those based on the natural world, become predictable. (This borders on tautologous--if a moment defies observable patterns, we toss it out of the science realm.)

The dead among us walk among us. My mother, my father, my sister, my grandparents, and great aunts and uncles and the hundreds, thousands of my clan that preceded me still live in the common spirit our clan shares, carried by me and others, passed to our children.

We ask children to study the complement system in the face of viremia, something none of them will see in a lifetime, yet deny the ghosts they see in the shadows, as real as the refracted light on my shower curtain. I know that the shower curtain threads did not magically enlarge, and I know that ghosts do not lurk in the shadows.

What I know and what I believe, however, do not always mesh. On the edge of the ocean at night, I am afraid. Perhaps without reason.

We try to bend them to a scientific view of the world in a place where science rarely happens, in a classroom, on a forced time schedule, in order to educate them "to a better economy."

We teach models as though they are real. Science is useful, but it is based on models, a special way of looking at the universe, a way that has resulted in all kinds of wonderfulness, but not real.

Or rather, no more real than the shadows lurking under the early November moon, reminding us that we, too, will walk among the dead, no matter how education we have. If I did not believe this I would not fear the night, even though I know better.

Photo by Immanuel Giel, no permission needed

READ MORE - Samhain

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 not my job, nor my inclination, to convince children that descent with modification (evolution) serves as the linchpin of biology. It is my job, though, to present it competently, and I have faith that my students will (eventually) start to see how completely evolution explains what we know in biology.

If I present it as the truth, though, I'm going to lose my few students vehemently opposed to the idea. Most students, however, don't seem agitated one way or the other, and find my enthusiasm mildly entertaining, and hey, look only 11 minutes left before we go to art class.

There is no place for truth in science; there is no place for dogma. Humans observe the natural world, often indirectly, and create models to help grasp what they see. It is a wonderful way of thinking, and results in lots of useful predictions, and will continue to do so as long as the natural world continues to consistently follow laws.

***

I have a small blueberry bush just outside my front door, laden with fruit. The deep blue excites my eyes, the sugary, blueberry flavor excites my my tongue. The plant creates desire, and I succumb to it. I get calories and joy, the blueberry bush wraps its seeds in my shite, we both increase our chances of passing our alleles ("genes") to the next generation.

My desire is real, and I know that the blueberry bush created the fruit for me (and other mammals) to eat. The bush is not conscious of this, nor need it be, for evolution to work.

The bush created the fruit for me misleads the student--if I have a strong desire (and I do) to eat the berries, and the bush has a good reason to encourage me to eat it, I've created a semblance of mutual desires. The thinking child may reason that if the bush is not conscious, then something must be helping the bush figure out what I want, and so we create a being from nothingness, a god, or rather, God.

If the child sees this line of reasoning (and this is a huge leap), then, paradoxically, that child has a chance to develop a deep understanding of evolution. No consciousness is needed to see how a particular set of characteristics in a particular environment might lead to a better chance of reproducing.

So long as there is variation between organisms that causes differential reproduction, and so long as some of these variations are inherited, no consciousness is needed. None.

This upsets people, as it should. Most of us are irrational some of the time.

Too many students come to my class "believing" in evolution, and tell me so, perhaps thinking that will impress me. It does not.

I don't believe in evolution, I accept it as a powerful and useful explanation for the explosion of the variety of life on our planet.

I do believe in things supernatural, but these matter not in my classroom. I could believe in יהוה, in Thor, in Lugh, or in 天児屋命; I could believe in elves and faeries; I could believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I need none of them to explain what we know in biology, nor does my belief in any or all of them affect my ability to teach descent with modification.

(And it's going to take a lot more than science to get me to give up my Easter Bunny.)
The photo has been released to the public.

READ MORE - Why I don't believe in evolution

Teachers in various departments had a rare chance to sit together at a conference at Bloomfield High School this week.

We are diving into "Understanding by Design"--Dr. Grant Wiggins has developed a nice cottage industry for himself called Authentic Education. He's managed to grab the state's ear (and a good chunk of its money), and he put the sexay back into the synthesis/evaluation steps in Bloom's taxonomy. I'm not sure he's created anything spectacularly new, but it's a well-crafted program that gives teachers some control over lesson design, and our district has bought (psychically and fiscally) into the program.

During the workshop, different departments were asked to develop essential questions. The language arts crew came out with a question I misheard as "What makes a story true?"

I don't remember the original question, but I like my mangled version, and I'm running with it.

***

High schools have fiefdoms called departments--our kids spend 48" a day in each fiefdom. Exactly 48 minutes.

We teach our units in chunks, each fiefdom on a schedule independent of the others.

The kids get that literature requires imagination, but they do not get that truly great fiction is always true. To be fair, there is no way to understand most of what matters when you're just a few years beyond embryohood.

Science also requires imagination, and more importantly, is a special kind of fiction. The kids see science as the Truth. More than once I have heard a high school junior scientist type sniff "I love science because it's real, unlike fiction," often a child with a poor grasp of his native tongue.

"Truth" in science is squirrely--it never quite stays in the same place. A great work of literature remains true for as long as a culture exists (and even beyond); a scientific truth changes over time. Turns out science is a special kind of story-telling.

Scientists (attempt to) explain why things in the natural world behave as they do. "Natural world" is the world we can sense directly or indirectly, and requires the faith that what happens here and now would happen then and there if the conditions are the same. (Miracles are excluded by definition.) Science gives us tremendous power because it allows us to predict and manipulate natural events.

Take the story of the electron. You cannot see an electron. We have indirect evidence for its existence, but any visual image for it falls short. Scientists create sophisticated models helping us to understand why the electron (itself a slippery concept) behaves as it does, but understanding an electron beyond the story makes no sense. It does not exist. (This is not to say something does not exist--clearly something does--but our concept of the electron is just that--a concept, not the electron itself.)

Ask a child to draw an atom--she will draw the Bohr model, the one that looks like planets spinning around the sun. Her parents will draw the same model. Quite a few teachers will also do the same. It's a cultural icon, though it's almost useless now in science.

Electrons exist, but not as "things". Atoms exist but not as particles, at least not in the solid sense. An atom is almost completely empty space.

Electrons have no dimensions. At least that's how we understand them today. How we understand them today is more "true" than how we understood them yesterday; tomorrow we will have a more "true" understanding than we do today.

Most of our culture does not get this--we worship science because it gives us neat stuff; many of us avoid great literature because it gives us pain.

What makes anything true? Not sure I can find it in science. Not sure I can find it in literature, either, but I bet I have a better shot at it there.

I love Robert Frost. Here's a piece of "The Black Cottage"--should souls survive independent of their bodies (and in Genesis it says otherwise), I hope Mr. Frost can forgive me for slicing his work.

For, dear me, why abandon a belief

Merely because it ceases to be true.

Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt

It will turn true again, for so it goes.

Most of the change we think we see in life

Is due to truths being in and out of favour.

As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish

I could be monarch of a desert land

I could devote and dedicate forever

To the truths we keep coming back and back to.

(Hey, I love Beethoven, too--I'm a ragged collection of clichéd loves. What do you expect from a science teacher?)

READ MORE - What makes science true?