Science and culture – Page 9

February 19, 2019January 8, 2022

Ed tech, napkin 2.0

If you cannot teach someone with no more than a napkin and a pen, or less, you should not teach.

A few reasons why the napkin and pen (or beach and a stick) method is superior to anything that requires electricity:

The nature of napkin ed requires one to one teaching. Both the teacher and the student are exposed, limits of knowledge tested. As uncomfortable as this may be, it’s the heart of education–the ledge of ignorance for both the student and the teacher is an integral part of the process.
It’s cheaper. I like cheap. I’m not blowing off mountaintops, damming rivers, or splitting atoms.
Any drawing used requires intimate knowledge by the teacher. Hand-made drawings matter more than any fancy illustration you can toss up on a Smartboard. The value of the process of etching a drawing live, with the student watching, cannot be overstated. It’s not an easy thing to do without an exquisite knowledge of the point you are making. Electric palettes cover a lot of ignorance. (Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had one illustration, a crude, hand-drawn picture of a branching “Tree of Life.”)

Most of us doing this gig for any length of time can wow our young charges with flashing lights. We are performers, entertainers, dragging bored children through curricula they see as pointless.

So long as our job is to instill a common cultural litany, well, high tech pizazz works just dandy.

If you want to teach a child how to think, though, be careful with the new tools. If you are letting an electronic third party make a point in your classroom, and it does a better job than you can, well, draw your own conclusion.

You can do better. It might take time, it might require more work, it might even cause you to burst out in tears now and again.

You wanted to be a teacher, no?

The first drawing above is by Francis Crick, a doodle of his impression of DNA, a concept he shared with his pub brethren.

The second is by Darwin.
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Ironically, neither is likely to be featured in a high school science class.

(Originally written in 2010–and the napkins still works.)

February 14, 2019January 8, 2022

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.

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.

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.