The Toxic Effects of Either/Or

It's become a cliche to say the world is polarized.  Whether it is the divide between left and right, rich and poor, black and white, or old and young, we have become people who decide we are correct, and every other view is wrong.  "It's my way or nothing" has become our default position as though the world is really that simple.  Most things, however, boil down to balancing the perspective of many people, not just adopting the preference of the loudest person in the room.  The either/or mentality has toxic effects that we are only just beginning to experience.  It led to, among other things, the events of January 6.

A few days ago, I read this tweet from a teacher. "Classroom management is not about having the right rules.  It's about having the right relationships."  While I don't think this was a person who would advocate not having rules, there are people who think that way.  They believe that if they invest all of their time in personalized handshakes and playing the music their kids like and talking about popular television shows, their students will want to please them so much that they won't need rules.  If you think that sounds nuts, connect with some teachers online because they are out there, and they are super-passionate about it.  Both ends of this spectrum are damaging to you and your students, as I learned during my student teaching experiences.  The first teacher I was placed with had been teaching for 30 years, and he was burned out but didn't know it.  Structure was everything to him, right down to the fine-tipped black ballpoint pen he insisted I use to take attendance.  His students barely spoke in class, and, when they did, it was to answer a question with what they were certain was the right answer.  There was no joking; there was no curiosity.  His students were well-behaved, and they may have learned some physics; but I doubt any of them are out there right now telling their children about their amazing physics experience.  My second placement was with a pregnant, basic-skills-science teacher for whom "winging it" was a daily event.  She had a loose idea of what she wanted to cover, but there were no rules.  She spent most of her class time just chatting with students.  She knew everything about their lives, from who they were dating to who was on drugs.  While she probably helped a lot of her students through some personal decisions, they did not learn much about science; and no substitute ever wanted to be placed in her class because the kids were accustomed to bouncing off of the walls.  I had to reflect on both of these experiences as I entered my own classroom, and I recognized that I could not be either one of them.  While I want to build relationships with my students, my role in their lives should not be the same as their friends.  It is important that our relationship exists within proper professional boundaries and that they are confident that I am the authority in the room, but it is also important that my students feel free to show their individual personalities and that we laugh together.  That balance is how students feel intellectually and emotionally safe in my classroom.  It's not either rules or relationships.  It's both rules and relationships.  

I also see a lot of either/or mentality when it comes to curriculum and student choice.  There are schools in which standardized tests are so high-stakes that no one ever dares to stray from the curriculum.  Teachers exhaust themselves and their students, trying to stay on pace with the set curriculum.  They do not entertain student questions if they are not aligned with the curriculum.  They are not able to be creative about projects or labs or topics that might inspire their students because they must prepare their students for the test.  I cannot imagine being handcuffed in that way.  However, the backlash to this seems to be a trend toward not having a curriculum at all.  The theory is that students will decide what they should learn on their own and not be required to learn anything they don't want to.  This is, of course, as ridiculous as it sounds, and we would never attempt this in other areas of their life.  No parent would say to their child, "Oh, you are thirsty.  Any liquid will do.  You have an innate understanding of what would be good to drink."  If they did, we would have a lot of five-year-old alcoholics and kids who drink antifreeze because it is as sweet as Kool-Aid.  What a parent might do is give their child a choice between a bottle of water, a juice box, and carton of milk, providing them with choice within a safe and nutritious set of boundaries.  Education should be that way as well.  A teacher with professional judgment knows what is essential in the curriculum and what has inspired students in the past.  They also know what skills can be developed using different kinds of projects.  Why wouldn't they use all of that knowledge to set up a project in which students can choose either from a variety of topics or a variety of methods, allowing choice within a set of boundaries?  It doesn't have to be a strict adherence to a confining curriculum or a free-for-all with little content learning.  It can be helping students develop curiosity about topics they wouldn't have even known they could have chosen without your example.

It seems that the biggest controversy in America right now is the teaching of Critical Race Theory.  I confess that I know little about the theory itself.  I know that it was developed in the 1970s and has been taught most to college students, majoring in history or philosophy.  I have not spent enough time learning about it to know if the allegations that it is based on Marxism are true, but I also don't believe the majority of people screaming about it online have put in that time either.  But, here's the point.  If it turns out that CRT is a horrible thing to teach kids younger than college, that doesn't make the other alternative ignoring history and pretending that slavery, voter suppression, Jim Crow, and hate crimes never happened.  My fear is that completely appropriate teaching of American history, including our racial sins, will now be labeled CRT and protested because no one wants to take the time to find out what they are objecting to.  It doesn't have to be either CRT or nothing.  It can be a curriculum that acknowledges the good America has done in the world without turning our founders into demi-gods.   It can be teaching that includes our maltreatment of Native Americans, Japanese internment camps, and slavery without ignoring the progress that has been made.  You don't have to assume that every white American is a violent racist to recognize that some of our legislators were Klansmen.  Our country's history isn't either/or, and our instruction about it shouldn't be either.

Let's stop treating education as a simple thing.  It is a group of complex and flawed human beings being taught by a group of complex and flawed human beings about complex and flawed topics.  Let's start doing the intellectual work it takes to treat it that way.

Humans - Capable of More Than We Think

 My 8th-grade students have academic blogs.  This week, I asked them to look at the inventions of the time period since 1899 and explain which one they thought was the most important.  Of course, most students wrote about the internet and the smartphone.  A few got clever with things like chicken nuggets and chocolate chip cookies.  Several wrote about air conditioning.  One of the boys who wrote about air conditioning made this statement.   "If we didn't have air conditioning then I don't think that mankind would still be alive."  Now, he's in the 8th grade, and they are prone to exaggeration, but it got me wondering if he realized how recently the invention of the air conditioner is in relation to human history.  It was invented less than 120 years ago and wasn't used in the majority of homes until the late 1960s.  The human race had survived since Adam and Eve without it until about 55 years ago.  

Don't misunderstand, I am also very grateful for Willis Carrier's invention, but this middle school blog post got me thinking about how limited our perspective is on what we can endure.  It also reminded me of what I've been seeing on social media in the past six months from people who don't believe themselves capable of doing the things we need to do to get through the current pandemic.  I've seen so many words like "unsustainable" and "incapable" and "cannot possibly endure until May."  Repeating these words to ourselves and reading them over and over has a deleterious impact on our brains because they fail to put human capabilities in perspective.  Let's do that.

My grandparents grew up in the Great Depression and fought World War II.  Depending on the criteria used, the Great Depression is calculated to have lasted between nine and eleven years.  The average deployment length for an army soldier in World War II was around ten months, but many served more than one deployment.  They endured 24 hours per day without a break (and, I might remind you, no air conditioning) away from family under the constant threat of death.  We are being asked to work longer hours with more duties, but we go home at the end of the day in our cars to climate-controlled homes.  

Their grandparents, by the way, fought World War I and endured the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which killed from 2.7% to 5% of the world's population.  Those fighting in the trenches experienced or observed multiple diseases, from cholera to typhoid.  They slept in dirt, sometimes surrounded by their fallen brothers.  When supply lines were blocked, they survived on food rations that we wouldn't think enough food to survive, much less do an important job with. We were asked to sit on our sofas, watching Netflix and eating food that was delivered to our house two hours after we ordered it.

Perhaps it isn't fair that I've focused on the conditions of war since they aren't representative of everyday life.  Let's continue this historical tour of human endurance.  Those born in the 1850s came of age during the time of the Civil War, but thanks to The Homestead Act, many took on the challenge of settling the West.  Traveling in covered wagons, they endured bitterly cold winters and risk of diseases in frequency we cannot imagine today (in spite of kids rediscovering the video game Oregon Trail).  When they finally arrived in the West, they had to clear land for farming and ranching, build their homes, and sew clothes.  Should I remind you that they didn't have air conditioning or running water for that matter?  Their version of self-care was . . . nope, I can't finish that sentence because self-care was a concept not yet invented.

We could keep going.  There's the generation that literally formed America by writing a constitution after fighting a revolution.  There are those who spent months on boats, traveling the oceans.  Before that, there were those who got on boats, not knowing their destination or even if there was a destination because they believed it was possible they would fall off the edge of the earth.  We can go all the way back to those who literally lived in caves.  People who did not know where their next meal was coming from established civilization for the generations that followed, and we have staged protests over the closing of restaurants while eating food that was put in our car at the curb.  

I'm not saying this year hasn't been difficult.  Of course, it has been.  But it is not unsustainable.  Our responsibilities have increased, but they are not beyond human capability.  People have endured conditions far worse than these for far longer than a school year.  Repeat after me.  WE CAN DO THIS!

The Periodic Table's Sesquicentennial

Before you read any farther, just say sesquicentennial out loud.  It's a pretty fun word.  It can't quite top antepenultimate as my favorite, but it's up there.

Okay, moving on.  Sesquicentennial means 150th anniversary, and this year is the 150th anniversary of the Periodic Table of the Elements.  If you went to high school, you've seen one, but that isn't quite the same as appreciating it in all its glory.  I'm not sure I fully appreciated it until I had been teaching it for a few years.  Ready to nerd out with me a little.  Here we go.

Dmitri Mendeleev knew of only about sixty-seven elements and their masses.  The proton had not yet been discovered, so the number we now arrange the table by (thanks to Henry Mosley) did not yet exist.  Mendeleev wasn't the first to attempt to develop an organizational method for the elements.  He was just the first to be successful.  Your chemistry teacher may have told you that he dreamed the periodic table, and that's true.  People really like to focus on that part.  What you may not know was that he been working for three days with insomnia before a snowstorm forced him to stay home, which was when he finally fell asleep his unconscious brain was able to put the pieces together.

If you had a mean chemistry teacher that made you memorize the numbers on the periodic table (I'm sorry they didn't understand the stupidity of that), you may think the two numbers are the only information the table gives you.  While the atomic number (number of protons) and the atomic mass (items in the nucleus for individual atoms, the weight of a mole for samples) are important, they still don't tell you how amazing the arrangement of the table is.  Let's talk about families and periods.

Families are the vertical columns on the periodic table.  Everyone in the same family has similar characteristics.  Sodium, lithium, and potassium, all strip hydrogen from water molecules and then ignite the hydrogen.  They all bond with chlorine in a dramatic reaction.  All members of a representative family give away or take the same number of electrons when making an ionic bond, so you can know what charge it will have just be looking at the family it is in.  Helium, neon, and argon don't bond at all.  So if you know about one element in a family, you know a little something about all the elements in the family.  Periods are the horizontal rows of elements.  Every element in a row has the same number of energy levels for the electrons it holds.  As you go across a period, certain properties increase or decrease predictably.  Then, that property starts over again when you get to the next row.  So just by looking at whether an element is on the left or the right of a row, you know something about its size, its attraction for electrons, its metallic quality, even how much energy it would take to take an electron away from it.

If you have ever thought the shape of the periodic table was a bit strange, you might not have learned about the orbital arrangement of electrons.  See if this gives you any flashbacks:

The first two columns on the table represent the s orbital in each energy level, which can only hold two electrons.  The six columns on the far right represent the p orbitals in each energy level, which can hold six electrons.  Those ten short columns in the middle represent d orbitals, which you may have guessed, hold ten electrons.  Even those two weird rows on the bottom that we pulled out of position to save space.  Have you ever noticed there are fourteen elements in each of those rows?  Well, that's because f-orbitals hold 14 electrons.  Neither Mendeleev nor Moseley knew about energy levels, and yet it lines up perfectly.  Even alternative shapes to the table would reflect this because the periodic nature is what matters, not the specific shape.  Imagine these on the wall of your science classroom.

There are a lot more things that I won't bore you with, so let me put it this way.  If you had to write out the information you get about an element from the periodic table, you would need a book.  You couldn't write it all in one book.  You would need several books just to hold it all.  As my colleague, Jenny Bomgardner once said, "It's like all the world's knowledge on a sheet of paper."  We both know it's not ALL the world's knowledge, but it is an awful lot about every single element.

Mendeleev's greatest contribution was letting us know that we didn't know everything.  As I said earlier, the world only had knowledge of about 67 elements.  There are 92 elements in nature, so he was playing with only about two-thirds of the cards.  And, it wasn't like he knew about numbers 1 through 67.   The world had known gold (72) and mercury (80) for a long time, but they had not yet discovered silicon (14).  As Mendeleev was arranging the table, he left blanks where things didn't fit the pattern they should in a family.  He then predicted that an element would be discovered to fill that blank and predicted what's properties would be.  Most of his predictions were spot on.  Before you start thinking too highly of him, he was wrong about a lot of things.  He also predicted an element lighter than hydrogen (although to be fair that's because he didn't know about protons.  His story ends tragically; he lost his mind near the end and stopped believing in atoms altogether.  That doesn't change, however, the contribution he made.  We are still adding to the table today as we synthesize new elements, and the pattern he established means we know exactly where to place them.  The fact that the pattern still works even with elements that don't exist in nature shows just how well designed the table is.

Book Recommendation - Two Sides of The Moon

I haven't had nearly as much time to read this summer as I read last summer.  As I spent time writing a book for my physics class (more on that later), I realized it was taking a lot more time than I had planned, so I put my reading books to the side.  That said, I did complete a few other than my required reading for school, and I want to share one of them with you.

Two years ago, I read Michael Collins' Carrying the Fire because my students often ask whether he was upset that he didn't get to walk on the moon after traveling all the way there.  I had owned the book for several years in a set including books by Armstrong and Aldrin as well but had not yet read it, so I did.  (For the record, he doesn't seem to hold any resentment about being the guy to stay in the capsule even though he acknowledges that anyone would have liked to have been in the other position.)  This year, it occurred to me that other astronauts of that time had probably written books as well.

As all of my students know, my favorite astronaut is Dave Scott, so I began my search with his name.  I'm so glad that I did because Amazon returned with this little gem.  It is called Two Sides of the Moon.  If you are an average consumer of NASA history, these two names may not mean much to you.  Dave Scott was a Gemini astronaut; he and Neil Armstrong performed the first docking in space.  He was also the commander of Apollo 15, and by then America had become bored with the moon (I do not understand that at all).  Alexei Leonov was a Russian cosmonaut, and I'm not sure any American can name one of those (maybe, maybe Yuri Gagarin, but I doubt most would know him).

This book is written by both men separately.  It alternates back and forth from the child of Alexei to the childhood of Dave.  Then it tells about Alexei's pilot training days, then Dave's.  You get the idea.  What I found compelling was that these were just guys doing their jobs.  They weren't political figures engaged in a global chess match, and they didn't see themselves that way.  They were guys who found jobs that they loved and wanted to do them well.

In reading this book, I also learned a few things I didn't know before.  Alexei trained as an artist and wanted to pursue that as a career, but he couldn't afford the school he got into.  He never gave it up and took crayons with him into space because he knew there would be moments words could not capture.  I learned the Yuri Gagarin died in a plane crash.  I learned the Dave Scott left a falcon feather, a clover, and Bible on the moon to represent the fauna, flora, and culture of Earth.  I learned that several American astronauts met and had drinks with several Russian cosmonauts on several occasions.  I knew already about the Apollo Soyuz joint mission, but I was delighted to learn the Deke Slayton actually finally got to fly on it.  (That will only matter to hard core space geeks; so if you don't know what I'm talking about, don't feel bad.)

Both men write in the very straightforward style you might expect from military men telling a story.  They don't get flowery with vocabulary or make any attempt to present themselves as the final word on anything.  They touch on the politics of the Cold War, but they don't dwell on it.  Both speak with a lot of respect for the program in the other country and what they were able to accomplish.  They tell you what happened and what they thought about it.  That's it.

If you are a space nerd, like me, you should read this book.  If you like learning about history from a first person perspective, you should read this book.  If you want to know more about the Apollo program that we landed once (some of my students are surprised to learn we landed six times), you should read this book.  You will walk away with more respect for the people of the Russian program and may find the Dave Scott is also your favorite astronaut.

The Experience of a Non-Oppressed Woman

I had a different plan for this week's blog, but in light of the Women's March and the things I have seen on my Twitter feed the last few days, I decided to change the topic.  Next week, I'll write about matching your college aspirations to your goals.

If aliens had visited earth for the first time on Saturday, they might have thought there were only two kinds of people on this planet that exist in monolithic, homogenous groups.  They would have thought of men as evil morons who, in spite of the apparent idiocy, managed to rise to power over the other, clearly superior group.  If those aliens managed to look at a Twitter feed, they might have divided the world differently, but still into two groups - those in favor of abortion and those against it.  If they only read the tweets of one of my more liberal friends, they might have thought the two groups were those who are open-minded and socially aware (read that "woke" on Twitter) and those who are close-minded and deluded.

We are not aliens, so we can be more aware than they would be.  We can recognize that there are more than two kinds of people on earth.  There are seven billion individuals on earth.  Each of them has their own story, and that story is only partially based on their gender, their view on a given social issue, their race, their level of political involvement, etc.  We, as individuals are shaped by all of those things, not just one of them at a time.  I would like to tell one of those seven billion stories - my own.  (NOTE:  This does not negate the story of any other woman or minimize their experience.)

I was born forty years ago in Raleigh, NC.  That makes me a Southerner, a Generation X-er, and a city dweller.  I was raised in a largely conservative home, and I attended both private and public schools.  I earned excellent grades, not because I have a superior intellect, but because I worked hard in school and loved learning.  I particularly enjoyed and excelled in science, and not one of my teachers asked how it was possible that a girl was doing that.  I grew up wanting to be an astronaut, and no one told me that a woman couldn't do that - even though I was five before the first U.S. woman was sent into space.

From the first time I learned the word abortion, I chose to be Pro-Life and worked for the NC Right to Life organization when I was thirteen years old.  I have marched for Sanctity of Human Life Day because it is my right as an American citizen to do so.  At seventeen, I became a blood donor, not because someone told me to, but because I made a choice at school one day.  When I registered to vote on the morning of my 18th birthday, I got to choose how I wanted to register, and I chose to be a Republican.  I have voted without coercion for twenty-two years, usually with my party but sometimes not because I have the freedom to vote however I choose.  I voted against Donald Trump's election because I am allowed to do that.  I am not oppressed or told how to vote by anyone.

I chose to take physics, and my female chemistry teacher insisted that I take honors physics, not because I was a girl but because she said it would be a waste of my skills for me not to.  I fell in love with physics and decided I wanted to teach it.  No one ever said to me that a woman couldn't teach physics, and I have been hired to do so in three different schools.

I earned my degree through both the school of education and the school of arts and science at Oral Roberts University.  I took classes in which I was the only female, and I also took classes in which there were no males.  I was held to the same standards in physics, chemistry, biology, and geology as my male counterparts, and I worked just as hard to earn good grades in calculus as the boys.  I never once had a conversation with a professor in which I as discouraged from pursuing my degree.  In fact, it was just the opposite.  I was highly encouraged by all of my professors at ORU, especially those I knew well in the physics and engineering department.  They even hired me to teach earth science labs while the regular professor was on sabbatical the year after I graduated.

I have taught science in three different schools, and in all three of them, my department chair was female.  I have worked under 14 principals and assistant principals, 8 of whom were women.  I don't discuss salary with my co-workers because there is no positive outcome to that, but when I look at my own paycheck, it reflects exactly what was on the contract I signed.  I have heard enough conversations about pay to be certain I am not paid thirty percent less than my equally qualified male counterparts.  I don't believe that anything I have done (or not done) in life is because of or in spite of my gender.

I am single because I believe that is God's plan for me.  One hundred years ago, that would have made me either scandalous or pitiful.  Now, it results in a few questions from my students, little more.  I don't feel unsafe at home or anywhere else without a man by my side, but I'm not reckless about my safety.  If I'd been alive at the turn of the 20th century, I'd have been a suffragette; but by 2017 standards, I am practically a chauvinist.

My blog is generally supposed to be about education, so here's my call to female teachers.  Don't complain to your students that you are treated as unequal.  Show them that you are not.  Modeling equality will always mean more than talking about it.

It is just as sexist to believe that all women believe the same way as it is to believe they are less than men.  In fact, because it is a more subtle form of sexism, it may be even more dangerous.  I am more complex than my gender, and so are you.  Women, feel free to march.  It is your right, earned for you by the blood, sweat, and tears of those women at the turn of the last century.  March for equality but not sameness.  March for your beliefs, but recognize that the woman next to you might believe differently than you do.  Recognize that if there are five hundred thousand women at a march, there are five hundred thousand DIFFERENT stories, not just one story.

CBL - My First Attempt - Epic Fail (Post 1 of 2)

Last year, I had the interesting experience of experimenting for the first time with a Challenge Based Learning project, also known as a CBL.  My experience was, to put it mildly, an epic failure.  We accomplished little, and my students learned little.  I hope that I learned a lot because I am about to try it again.

For those who don't know, a CBL is a project in which students solve a real-world problem.  They are required to communicate, collaborate, think critically, and think creatively.  My experience last year was a failure on every level.  Let me start at the beginning.

Step 1: Present the Challenge - I already had a physics project related to our chapter on electricity, so I thought I would replace it with a CBL about electricity.  I brought in a guest speaker, our IT director.  He had lived in Haiti for several years, and he shared his experiences with them about inconsistent power delivery.  He shared how it was really important for a family to keep their refrigerator running to avoid food spoilage and to keep fans running to blow off disease-carrying insects.  I only had nine students, so I kept them as one group.  I told them we would split into two groups if there were two viable ideas that came out during the brainstorming time.

Step 2:  Begin Brainstorming - Houston, we have a problem.  As my students began to make suggestions, I heard things like:
- "Steal electricity from the Dominican Republic"
- "Go to war with Cuba, and take electricity from them."
- "Let America solve it."
- "Electric eel tank" (I thought he was joking when he brought it up, but he was quite serious.)
- "Tap into a volcano for geothermal energy."

I had hoped that we were just getting the silliness out of the way, so I set a deadline for some serious guiding questions (part of CBL) and suggestions for real plans during the following week.  Then I began hearing from other teachers.  One of them said that a physics student had come to her, distressed that Miss Hawks was trying to get them to "solve the energy crisis."  Huh?

Step 3:  Reboot - Apparently, what I had thought was clear was not clear.  I sent the following e-mail.













Hoping we were at least now clear on the problem, I reset some dates.  We started over.

Step 4:  Communication and Collaboration
Our school schedule is different on Wednesdays because we have chapel services.  For that reason, I have physics the last period of the day.  Since it is harder for them to pay attention to me, I try to make project presentations, work days, and videos on Wednesdays.  For seven weeks, every Wednesday was a project work day.  They could use it for research, collaboration, figuring out timelines, or actually building something.  For the first three weeks, it was silent in my room.  I don't mean it was kind of quiet.  I mean it was exam-time-graveyard-is anyone here today quiet.  These were nine people who were supposed to be collaborating.  At the end of the third week, I asked them about it.  "You want us to talk in class?" was their response.  I told them that most people, when given a project work day, did talk about what they were doing and what they were going to do.  It got a little better.  I started hearing some murmurings about something with a lawn mower motor, so I considered that progress - until the following Wednesday.  One of my students showed up with a bag full of lemons and a pile of wires.  He sat at the table, stripping the insulation off of the wires.  When asked what he was doing, he said, "stripping wires."  Some of the others were baffled because they had a plan with a lawn mower motor that had nothing to do with lemons.  Some were baffled because they hadn't even known there was that plan.

As a teacher, it was naturally my first instinct to jump in and solve this for them.  I knew that wouldn't be best for them and that they needed to have this bizarre conversation, so I wrote a blog post about not helping just to keep myself from getting involved.

Step 5:  Execute Your Plan
As we got further along in the project, I asked the students what their plan was for building this generator device.  "Wait, what?  We have to build it?"  I reminded them that while we were having the electric eel tank / war with Cuba discussion, I had said several times that I didn't think we could do that as a class.  I had told them we would be building their idea, not just having an idea.  They collected some money as a group.  On the last day of the project, one of them had attached a two-inch solar panel to the world's smallest fan.  Another brought in a handheld steam generator, which lit a 10W light bulb.  Needless, to say, I felt like my experiment with CBL was a bit of a failure.

Step 6:  How to I Grade This?
Despite the obvious failure of this attempt, I didn't feel like I could just chuck the entire experience.  I needed to give them some kind of credit for what they did do and, more importantly, require them to reflect on the experience.  I created a list of questions based on those four C's I mentioned earlier - Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking, and Creativity. (Apparently, I can't attach a document to this post, so comment if you would like my list of questions.)  They had to take a hard look at themselves.  If they gave it some honest, deep thought, I gave them credit.  If they gave the answer they thought I wanted, they lost points.  I don't know how this will impact them in the future, but I know that John Dewey said, "We do not learn from experience.  We learn from reflecting on experience."

My next post will be more hopeful.  It will tell you what I learned from this experience so that it can go better this year.  We start on Friday, so I will keep you updated.

It's All Related

My favorite middle school history teacher, Danny Watkins, used to say, "You thought we were off the subject, but we've never been more on the subject in our - what - lives.  Everything relates to history."  Aside from just loving to hear him talk like that, I'm not sure I truly understood what he meant until much later in my life.

Like most middle school students, I did not yet have the ability to see the intertwined relationships of all the subjects I had at school.  Your life exists in 50 minute segments at that point, and it is hard to see past that.  It seemed like math was math and science was science and history was history.  It was probably when I started taking chemistry in high school that I started seeing the relationships between science and math.  When I was in college, taking the required humanities courses, I began to see the connection  between art and literature and history (which I now realize is the reason they require these courses).

It wasn't until I began teaching, however, that I realized how related all the subjects are to each other and to truly understand Mr. Watkins assertion that "everything relates to history."  This week, I took my physics students (in conjunction with the math club and an art class) on a field trip to the art museum.  Why? Because they have an exhibit on MC Escher and one on Leonardo DaVinci.  If not for space restrictions on the numbers, we could have totally included Latin and history classes on this trip.  Art reflects the thinking of the artist, and Escher's schooling (small though it was) was in architecture.  Is it any surprise that his art work often involved impossible structures, building architects could dream of but not build?  DaVinci is often referred to as a Renaissance man, meaning he was good at a lot of things.  While we are not all as gifted as Leonardo, shouldn't we all be Renaissance in our thinking?  Shouldn't we be interested in a lot of things?  If we were, wouldn't we all be able to better view the created world as a whole, instead of the specialized niches we operate in these days?


Why does it matter?  You may be wondering.  Seeing the relationships won't change the price of milk or change my gas mileage.  Why should I care enough to see the world as a whole when doing so does little to affect my daily life?  I think there are at least two good reasons.

First, it applies more to your daily life than you probably realize.  When I am teaching about physics, I may not consciously be thinking about art work of Isaac Newton's time or the fact that the periodic table was invented in Russia around the same time that the civil war was happening in America.  However, it is in my subconscious.  It does inform the depth of my understanding of what I am looking at.  You may not think consciously about whether the Mayans or the Babylonians came up with the concept of zero when looking at your bank statement, but their understanding of the concept IS why you have a bank statement.  A Facebook friend of mine recently posted that he had not diagramed a sentence in his adult life.  Neither have I, but I do know when to properly use who and whom (and I'm pretty sure that my understanding of that came from sentence diagraming even though I HATED doing it).  I know I'm not going to convince you of this, so let me move on to reason number two.

Second, and more importantly, God's work reflects God's nature.  If he has created both beauty and function, we should care about both art and engineering.  If His patience is reflected by the erosion of the Grand Canyon, we should absolutely want to understand that erosion.  If his dependability is reflected through the consistency of mathematical relationships, then we cannot fully understand how to depend on him without caring about those relationships.  Having a deep and full relationship with God should mean caring about the things He has made, whether or not they apply to our career.  When did our career become the measure of importance?  You would never say to your spouse that you don't care what he does during the day, except for the parts that impact what you do during the day.  You would never ignore your child's drawing because it has nothing to do with the price of groceries.  No, you hang it on the very refrigerator that holds those groceries.  Why, then, do we do that to so many aspects of God's work?  We have allowed ourselves to be deceived into believing that education is about getting a job and being prepared for that job.  I may have to write a separate post on this some time because it is difficult to convey briefly.  Education is about repairing something that was fractured by the fall.  It's nice that we are able to use some of what we learn in our education for our jobs, but we must let go of the utilitarian philosophy that makes us think that is all we need to learn.  I teach physics, but I would be the world's most horrifyingly dull person if that was all I could talk about.  I also love art and literature and music and television and film and dance and theater and theology and the unit circle.  I can hold a conversation on just about anything because I am interested in everything God has put for us to enjoy.  It is part of being what He created me to be as a WHOLE PERSON, not just as a physics teacher.

Mr. Watkins was right (as he usually was).  It is all related.

Our Shared History

Yesterday was World Photography Day.   You didn't get a long weekend, and there were no fireworks to mark the occasion.  Photography has become so much a part of our normal lives that we don't even think about them any more.  Most of us have thousands of photographs stored on a phone or computer.  They are as normal to us as our speech.  I want to take a moment to reflect on why photography matters.

No one who is alive today remembers a time when there was no photography.  This is because usable photography was developed in the 1820's.  There was image capture earlier than that, but it took too long to be usable.  If you are interested, here is a good summary of the history of photography.  People over the age of 30 will, however, remember when it wasn't as easy to see your photos as it is today.

Remember film?  My father and I are both shutter bugs.  We would go on family vacations and take about 8 rolls of film each.  At 36 frames per roll that meant, we were taking over 280 pictures each, not knowing until we got home whether any of those were worth having.  We took our rolls of precious film to Eckerd Drugs and put them in envelopes that were dropped into a slot and sent to "the lab."  Four days and a hundred dollars later, we would pick up our prints.  After sorting out the blurry, the overexposed, the underexposed, the finger in frame, and other such errors, we often found two or three pictures that were really worth enlarging to 8 x 12 (that's right) and hanging on the wall. In an interview, a National Geographic photographer said he took 300 rolls of film to get enough for a spread (usually 8-10 photos), so I didn't feel so bad.

That little walk down memory lane is not what I want to write about.  I want to write about the meaning of photography.  Our history as a people was once passed down by oral tradition.  Then came writing.  The ability to capture an image is just a progression in sharing history.  Photography gives all of us a shared history.  Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong are the only people to see each other on the moon with their own eyes, but we share that historic moment because they took photos.  When the concentration camps were liberated, the instruction was given to take as many pictures as possible.  Otherwise, no one could believe how bad it was.  Unless you were in New York City on September 11, your memories are shaped entirely by the pictures taken by those who were.

These events all took place when photography was the realm of professionals and hobbyists.  Even on 9/11, phones with cameras were not as ubiquitous as they are now.   The people who took the photos of those historic moments meant to capture something big.  Now, almost everyone can capture what is happening in front of them at the moment it happens.  They can also share it almost instantly with everyone in the world.  This may or may not be a good thing.  On the one hand, ease leads to lack of thought.  Twitter doesn't require that you think before you post.  Instagram never asks if you are sure about what you are sharing with the world.  When film had to be developed, no one would have wasted that frame on a shot of their lunch.  Also, more people doing something hasn't always made us better at it.  People post a lot of blurry shots.  On the other hand, the shared history of photographs means that we now have a visual record of more things than we have ever had before.  What the printing press did for writing, cameras on phones will do for imaging.  It is too soon to know what this will one day mean, but I feel like it will mean something.

The next time you are looking through a history book or an old National Geographic and see a familiar image, think about the connectedness that image brings.  Everyone else who see that image shares it with you.