Doyle

December 14, 2019January 8, 2022

November dusk

It’s mid-November and the shadows are long–the sun slips over the horizon less than 10 hours a day now here in these parts.

It’s near dark when I walk home, crossing our town green, as I do several hundred times a year.

There’s mystery in the shadows. Our ancestors saw spirits, and so will you if you lurk outside during dusk. The animals are aware of you, and so, I suspect, are the trees.

As winter looms, I watch the light change under my feet. (I look down a bit more now that I am getting older–the roots of the sycamore are determined to get me.)

But here is where words fail–when you walk at dusk over the fallen leaves, when it’s not quite light enough to see colors yet not so dark you cannot sense the colors, the edges of each leaf appear to glow as long as you keep moving.

No doubt there is some neuro-evolutionary advantage to this, some physiological explanation, some modern means of dispelling any reference to magic.

But there it is.

December 7, 2019January 8, 2022

Clamming in late autumn

They’re alive, just an hour or two after leaving the bay, and will be until they are cooked an hour or two later.

I am alive when I take this picture, and will be even after these particular clams are eaten.

Quahogs raked from the back bay in late November

The air is chilly in the shadows, but the water is still warm enough for sandals.

In a generation or two, different clams will fill the same basket, different hands will hold the same rake.

The shells of the clams above now sit under a maple tree outside, resting among the shards of so many other shells, all raked up alive, all eaten, all dead.

If you’re a high school teacher, here’s a macabre exercise that I think is worth doing once or twice a year. Wander out into the hallways in between the periods, when the kids are being kids, in varied kid positions, using kid slang.–walking/strutting/slouching/skipping/dancing/sliding with in your face vivaciousness .

Now imagine those same bodies a years after they are dead, their skeletal remains as lifeless as the ghostly white clam shells sitting under my maple tree.

And then ask yourself, what are you doing today with these children whose lives are as mortal as the clams.

(Mortality should influence your curriculum at least as much as capitalism does….)

August 21, 2019January 8, 2022

Flat world science

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

Richard Feynman

Sebastian Münster (1489 – 1552)

I do not believe in science. Nor do I believe in evolution, or climate change, or that the Earth is round.

The vast majority of kids in my classroom believe that the Earth is round. And it’s just that, a belief, fed by the adults around them, who also believe it, because they were told the same thing growing up.

It is part of the catechism of grade school science.

What is the evidence that the Earth is round?
What is the evidence that the word is not?

From a child’s view, which set of evidence is more compelling?
How about from your point of view?

If you want to teach science to a child, you need to stop feeding the beliefs. You need to work (and work and work) with the evidence, play with the models, the numbers, the data, the natural world.

And you must be ready to let go of everything you thought you knew.

(You can always teach Sunday school instead….)