Posted on

Teach death

Dead hare curled up on leaves, a gash in its abdomen.
A dead hare in a copse in North Cape May, yards from the bay.

Homeostasis is a big concept, reduced to a few meaningless words in biology class.

Shelf fungus on a dying tree trunk

If you want to be cognizant of how things work, focus on how they fail.

Death is rarely pretty (however lovely the swirls of pathogens on a Petri dish look). I have seen many people die, have felt the heat of life slip away as a corpse, moments before a body, no longer fights the inevitable heat death of the universe.

Horseshoe crab spine

Biology in high school can be immensely boring. Death less so. Especially one’s own.

Posted on

Teaching science: I

High school lab set up for fermentation demo showing flasks, bottles and air locks.
Making ethanol in the classroom looks “sciency” but….

I am leading a new course this fall, the Nature of Science (NOS).

Much, perhaps most, of what passes for science in high school is dogma. The NGSS tried to fix this, but so long as we diminish “matter” and “energy” to a few paragraphs in September, so long as we let children believe the world is round without letting them challenge us with “obvious” evidence to the contrary, and so long as science teachers continue to “believe in” [gravity/evolution/heliocentrism/plate tectonics/etc.] high school science remains a fairy tale.

Science is, to be fair, nothing but fairy tales, but fairy tales anchored in the natural world. This is a tad problematic at times, as the border between natural and supernatural, what’s real and what’s not, gets fuzzy, especially at the quantum level.

So in September I am getting a class of bright young humans and we’re going to explore our natural world.

I may be asking you for help….

Posted on

Snowdrops in a human wasteland

We live in north Jersey, not far from landfills made famous locally by made families, and nationally by The Sopranos.

Part of the landfill has been reclaimed as DeKorte Park, and while folks around here pretend that the wetlands have been reclaimed, the chemical undertones at low tide expose its damage.

(I clam. I know the fecund smell of a healthy mudflat. It’s getting there, but the hint of halocarbons under the fecundity betray the spin of those paid to fool us.)

And here amidst the human damage bloom some snowdrops, a reminder that spring is coming and that renewal is possible.

But it’s late January and the snowdrops come too early now.