Doyle

February 13, 2019January 8, 2022

Dear New Science Teacher

Yes, that’s me.
Yes, that’s my tin foil hat.
Yes, I posted this one before.
You’re going to get lots of advice, too much really, much of it self-contradictory. Let me add to your growing pile of nonsense.

Children are innately curious; students, however, are not.

Unless you’re getting a fresh crop of toddlers, most children learned long ago that questioning in a classroom leads to all kinds of problems. If your kids do not rise like flies to the wonderful poop you bring to class, don’t get all sour-pussy about it.

If your enthusiasm lasts until November–which it will if you stop expecting the kids to care how much you spend out of class “for their benefit”–they’ll start spilling out their curious guts, which leads to a different kind of problem.

My recommendations:

Treat your students as you would human beings that have been traumatized by years of schooling. Because they have.
If a child wants to know what happens if… let her try it (provided it’s safe to do so). Memorize the state standards that pay lip service to exploring science, and be ready to rattle one off should an administrator wander in just as Brian attempts to see how long he can stand shocking himself with a hand-cranked generator.

(In New Jersey, it’s NJCCCS 5.1.12.B.1 “Design investigations, collect evidence, analyze data, and evaluate evidence to determine measures of central tendencies, causal/correlational relationships, and anomalous data.” This covers pretty much everything.)

What you tell them: It’s a fermentation demo
What they’re telling their folks: WE’RE MAKING BOOZE!

Demos usually suck.

Why? Half the kids can’t really see what’s going on, and traditionally demos are followed by some inane worksheet, quiz, or some kind of assessment that just sucks all the cool out. Even if you don’t zap them with a quiz, their response is Pavlovian. I’m not saying don’t–just don’t expect the students to fawn over you like the Pied Piper.

My recommendations:

Do ’em anyway. If you singe an eyebrow or two (preferably your own), you’ll be an instant legend.
Accidentally trigger the smoke alarm during a chilly rainstorm in November–your fame will spread beyond your classroom.

I’ve seen dozens of tiny roly polies come out of one mama roly poly in the span of 10 minutes.

Live critters reproduce.

And poop. Your lovely tank of cute roly-polies will become a teeming mass of stink by the time Thanksgiving rolls around, and you won’t have time to clean them.

My recommendations:

Do it anyway, and let ’em stink, tell them it’s the natural world, and keep a butterfly net around so that when some horribly fierce looking critter breaks out and buzzes around the room, you can non-chalantly catch it as you meander through tables of differentiated groupwork. Kids learn more from these tiny reeking cesspools of life than they’ll ever grasp from a PowerPoint.
Forget using filters in fish tanks–they’re loud and need maintenance. Just use water plants–they’ll take up the nitrogen, then scrape the algae off the sides every month or two with a microscope slide.
If something stings you, smile, pretend it doesn’t hurt, and keep the EpiPen handy.
Never, ever bring in spiders. You’ll get a few thousand anyway wandering in to eat the various flying critters erupting from your terrariums, and you can honestly tell your principal you didn’t bring them in.

Science teachers stay late…

So what? We do what we love! We get the big rooms! We blow things up! We have showers in our rooms!

My recommendations:

If you’d rather be streaming out the door at 2:45 PM like a lost lemming, go take a few courses and get certified in…well, email me privately, I don’t need to get into a pissing match with about 4 other departments. Just stand by the door and see who streams out first. (Be careful, though–those English folks carry out enough papers to fuel the Netherlands for a week in December. They may work more than we do.)
Squirrel away a lot of granola bars, power drinks, and a toothbrush.
Quit. This isn’t for you.

Stop reading advice and go teach!

Bust your butt, enjoy the good moments, move on past the bad–the children know who’s in this for real, and who’s mailing it in. You’ll find your way if you fundamentally like kids, and you stick with it.

No shame if you don’t. This profession breaks a lot of people. The kids are here because they have to be. They deserve teachers who are there because they want to be.

I suspect a few veteran teachers could use this, too….

February 7, 2019January 8, 2022

Winter radishes

That’s my hand a few weeks ago, well into winter. My hand is holding a few radishes I planted in the fall and, well, forgot about.

I poked a few seeds into the ground on a warmish September afternoon when the shadows were longer than they were a week before. And I forgot about them.

They grew anyway.

They were not the best radishes I’ve eaten , but they’re the best I’ve pulled out of the ground in winter.

Less than a mile away, a yearling horseshoe crab rests under the mud, unaware of the dim light above.

Just a reminder to myself.

February 1, 2019January 15, 2023

Imbolc, again

An Cailleach Bhearra wandered around back in the 10th century in western Ireland, eating “seaweed, salmon, and wild garlic” (my kind of appetite), looking for firewood.
If the day was bright and sunny, beware–she had gathered plenty of wood and was set for many cold days ahead.

If the day was gray, she didn’t bother, and she will make the days warm up again. Sound familiar?

Imbolc again.
Words shrink as the sunlight grows.

A few years ago in late January I watched a crow at the ferry jetty caw caw caw at a gull sharing a light post. The gull did not respond.

The crow swooped down to the pavement, picked up a piece of paper, then returned to its perch near the gull.

The crow carefully ripped up the paper, piece by piece, dropping each piece, one by one, watching each piece until it hit the ground, looking at the gull between pieces as if to say Hey!

When done, the crow cawed once more, and this time the gull squawked back. The crow, now seemingly satisfied, nodded, and then flew to a trash can and cawed at a few human folk, one of whom cawed back.

Dandelion flower reflecting late January light

I have no idea what that was about, nor could I justify discussing it in my classroom. So I don’t.
Curriculum stops at the point where humans are besides the point.

That makes sense if you live in a world of words. It makes less sense at the water’s edge. If we keep ignoring things where humans are besides the point, we will become just that.

With the return of the sun comes the return of my sanity, when I feel comfortable letting go of the words again, learning (again) that what I thought was besides the point is the point.

This happens whether we’re present or not.

The darkest 12 weeks of the year have ended, again and for now.