Future ready?

This is a totally reactive piece dashed off without much thought early on a Sunday morning triggered by yet another piece telling us what in blazes we can do to help kids in the future.

OK, I wasn’t triggered by the piece–I didn’t get past the title: “10 things teachers can do today to prepare students for the future.”

So reactionary (and mortal) as I am, I came up with an off-the-cuff list to prepare kids for the now, for the immediate, for the tenth of a second our brain needs to process the moment. This moment. And always and only this moment.

A bean created from the collective breaths of the classroom.
  • Let a child plant a seed and watch it grow–each day provide enough time for the child to take care of her plant.

Let her water it, let her decide how much light it needs, let her put some pieces of her inside of it as she talks and breathes on it.

My pinkie ball.
  • Let a child roam a bit your classroom space; if your space cannot hold the interest of a roaming child, change your space.

History teachers could have fort and awful toy versions of tools of war. Science teachers could have magnets and lenses and springs and live critters. English teachers could have poems strewn on the floor, tiny libraries on the walls, physical education teachers could have Frisbees and spaldeen pinkies and a full-sized parachute. Music teachers could have kazoos and harmonicas and cheap drums.

  • Let a child read what she wants to read when she wants to read.

Reading is one of the greatest gifts we can give a child (and one of the primary aims of public schooling)–why is this so fookin’ hard to grasp?

  • Remind a child, daily, that she is mortal, but not in ways that are frightening.

We spend too much time telling children not to do things because bad things will happen without sharing the larger context that, well, death is going to happen anyway.

I have spent a lot of time with children who were dying, and who knew that they were dying. And everybody around us pretended otherwise.

Spine of a dead horseshoe crab, just another reminder.
  • Let a child roam outside, alone or with other children, but with no adults, for long periods of time.

Sitting inside shaves far more years off our lives than the very occasional meteor that falls from the sky and strikes our children dead. At any rate, the adults in their lives cannot stop the meteors. (Yes, the meteor is metaphorical, but so are so many other fears we feed our children.)

  • Let children make joyful noise.

Share your joyful noise. Know that mot of the time we have no more to say than the grackles chuttering just outside the window.

While you’re at it, if a child sees two birds “fighting” during the March madness of increasing light and fertility, please explain that they’re not fighting, but rather sharing their joy. No more need to be said.

And yes, farting sounds are joyful noises–I have no idea why, but you only have to toot once in a class to see how much the young folk love the sound.

  • Let them stand instead of sit, let them slouch, let them put their hands wherever is socially acceptable in this culture in this year.

The whole “If you can control their hands, their minds/spirits/souls will acquiesce” mentality in schools is damaging.

“Baby Sees The iPad Magic” by Steven Paine, CC
  • Let them disconnect.

Kids are not plugged in to the alternate universe because it gives them joy. They are (mostly) in that world to avoid the one we have mandated for them.

I do not know what it will take for parents and teachers and administrators to realize just how damaging prolonged screen-time is, both emotionally and physically. The evidence is out there.

Hey, did you even her what I just said? HELLO?! [Those fookin’ airpods again…]

  • Stop with the fookin’ lists.

Who needs lists in the moment? Lists mean nothing when a child is immersed deeply in a moment.

So I’ll stop here. =)

On particles

Particles are the “here” of the herenow. (Waves are the “now” but that’s for another day.) We know particles through touch–there is no other way. (We can see the effects of particles, of course, but we need waves to do that).

We think we know what it means to touch–our skin makes contact with a large collection of particles (the pen in your hand, say). I am, it seems, stating the obvious.

Still, touch extends beyond the skin.

Humans are not the only ones to what it feels to hold something close.

When you smell the rank aroma of the mud at low tide, pieces from the mud kiss receptors in your nose. It’s physical, it’s intimate, it’s touch.

The particles trigger nerve impulses that run directly from your nose through the cribriform plate in your sphenoid bone, straight to your amygdala, the seat of your deepest, rawest fears and desires.

Walking on top of a small mountain of dredge spoils

I cannot get enough of it. Not everyone reacts the same way. But pretty much everyone reacts.

Not every particle that triggers your sense of smell gets registered by your conscious self. You cannot “smell” pheromones, but your body may plunge into love just the same. We are animals who followed the four Fs well enough for us to be here now: feeding, fighting, fleeing, or fucking.

Clams I raked up, scrubbed, killed, and ate.

We glamorize the first, pay good money to see athletes fighting and fleeing, and relegate the last to our private spaces.

Parfumiers once used ambergris as the base of their finest perfumes, whale shit made of bile triggered by the sharp beak of a swallowed squid. The aroma keeps a hint of the fecal, of the sea, and of unconscious desires.

(How do I know this? I found a good hunk of one years ago, and kept it around. I must have smelled it a thousand times, and will keep doing so untl I can no longer smell. My kids can keep it, sell it, or toss it back into the Delaware Bay.)

Once in the gut of a sperm whale, found along the Delaware Bay

We taste through particles the same way–tiny pieces of food (or other matter) snuggling into tiny spaces with similar shapes, like kindergartners fitting triangles and squares into shape sorting cubes, an intimate touching of tongue to organic matter, sorting that which sustains us from that which kills.

If a particle is too large to fit into a receptor, we cannot taste it. Cotton is a sugar, but chewing on my sweater does not eleicit the sweetness of smaller sugars.

We know particles by touch, by smell, by taste, the only way we tangibly sense evidence of the universe beyond ourselves.

I trust my tongue more than I trust my eyes.

Vibrating through life

Delaware Bay vibrating under a June sunset.

If the story is true, and it’s as true as we can know at the level where particles can still be called particles, everything is vibrating.

Everything.

I walk to school on a February dawn, where the grays around me look beautiful against the impossibly white snow under my boots. My steps trace the steps I made yesterday–not many people trod through the Green in the mid-February snow.

I have been walking for almost six decades now, past the age my mother walked, and close to the age of my Dad’s last stable steps. Remembering this makes each step matter.

Foot over Irish cliff

So my vibrating feet are walking on vibrating water molecules held in a beautiful crystal lattice reflecting light from the sun and no one truly knows why any of this is happening.

But we’re pretty sure it is happening, and we’re pretty sure it will keep happening for a long, long time after any of us reading these words are long gone, whether we’re conscious or not. I’m most conscious when I am least aware of anything but now, step after step after step after step, the snow and ice yielding slightly with a slight crunch, more felt than heard, and I leave another footprint and then another.

February light, before the snow came (photo by Leslie)

We live by our stories, our stories make us who we are, and too few of our modern stories extend beyond the tiny bubble of culture we find ourselves immersed in, drowning in words with little meaning.

Meanwhile the particles keep moving–vibrating, swirling, more nothingness than matter–for reasons no one can fathom.

So ask me if I believe in God or miracles or Heaven or Hell, and I cannot help myself, I laugh, not derisively but in joy, thinking of my particles, inside and out, vibrating like music, forever vibrating, for no reason at all.

And if particles vibrate for no reason at all, well, then this collection of particles hardly needs a reason to do the same.

So I do.