I wonder

. . . if the Woods Hole conference of 1959 would find an equivalent in an online (2nd life?) conference in 2009.

. . . if Bruner would attend a conference, either in 1st or 2nd life, in 2009? Apparently one could simply give him a phone call or drop him a line.

. . . if anyone could get away with funding their own conference with funds from the organization they headed, without scandal or lots of red tape in 2009.

. . . if Woods Hole is the same as it used to be.

. . . if you could host a conference or smaller meeting on a train.

. . . if we ever might follow through on the notion of meeting in terminal D, gate 42, of the Las Vegas airport.

. . . who we'd invite. Bruner's conference included physicists, psychologists, educators, and cinematographers. I didn't understand the latter until I figured out the importance of film clips for education -- the technological fad of the time. Would we invite bloggers? 2nd lifers? Tips on creating a Facebook page?

. . . if you could write a book from a 10 day conference anymore. Or, would you need to have the 10 day conference if you had other ways of continually communicating?

. . . if a 3 day conference is enough. Why don't we have 10-day meetings anymore? What would happen if we did?

. . . if I've already forgotten what it was like to be away at conferences for 10 days.

. . . what Woods Hole was really like. (Skinner gave a talk on a teaching machine -- ooh, I should look that up. Lectures were probably the main mode of official communication. Where did the work get done?)

. . . what we still need to wonder about.

sense of place

A few people I know in environmental education and a few things I've read (Terry Tempest Williams, Edward Abbey, but also Steinbeck . . . reminding me I want to read Cannery Row again, a bi-annual desire) talk about "place" as being not just the concept of where to put your feet. "Place" is an ethereal sense of the surroundings, both physical and extrasensory (holy shit it is a word!). I don't have the words to describe my own senses and experiences of place -- perhaps it's extralingual (not a word, but should be) -- but it's a very real and important experience for me. Moving into our current home, I would tear up on the approach to this new place on the toe of the mountains looking down on us. Each of our Crossroads conferences have had a flavor and a memory that is tied to locations, generally very specific and focused not on the state or coast, but on the particular venue within a town. My excursions to mountain ridges or southern Utah canyons produce pictures that give an underwhelming sense of what there is to see, but they don't give the place justice. They give me, though, just enough of a trigger to recall the place, the emotion, and the experience. It's more than a memory for me, it's a spiritual reawakening in many cases.

John's been triggered to think about places to meet in the summer of 2009, given a potential need to debrief the Crossroads trajectory and the fact that we can't seem to spend money ridiculously enough in two years time. It seems like a great idea. It's also more to do, something my body -- slow on a Monday morning after a weekend filled with a lot of work, and little progress, and a grand celebration for Karyn's birthday -- is not accepting right now, even though the coffee mug is almost emptied. But it wouldn't really be that much work, and in the long run it would save us work and frustration later.

But where? Woods Hole, John suggests, as it would be the 50th anniversary of a pivotal conference hosted by Bruner that "everyone in science education has heard of," according to John. (I wonder if that's really true?) I wonder if trying to recreate this sense of place is brilliant or folly. There are other places, and currently my only requirements (that could be changed quickly) are to find salty air and perhaps good scallops and clams. So Old Mystic comes to mind. Bar Harbor. Then I remember a friend suggesting a visit to North Carolina, a place I've yet to visit but feel a need to. And then I think of those other places that would be great in completely different ways, even without the scallops. Moab, a bit off the more beaten path but an incredible retreat in late May, immediately comes to mind. Or Jackson . . . or Portland(s), Oregon or Maine.

The funny thing is how I can't even begin to think about the meeting itself until I've figured out the place and begin to feel and imagine a sense of it. It's completely backwards and unexplainable, but necessary to me.

tags

I've finally given up on my battle with "tags" on blogs. How the hell am I supposed to know the categories before I've composed all of the blog entries? What theoretical framework am I working from? How am I supposed to qualitatively code all of these? I have training/experience/expertise in this kind of stuff, and I know that this tagging thing is completely messed up. Or I can't be creative enough to come up with those clever little identifiers that will forever place this particular entry into its special little bin.

If I knew how to "tag" and otherwise organize all of these ideas, I wouldn't need to be writing this stuff down in the first place.

"my mom just walked in my office" and other nightmares

I was talking to Heidi this morning about various projects and Crossroads proposals, and just as we were getting started with the phone conversation she cut quickly to this: "Hang on a second -- my mom just walked in my office."

So there, on the other end of the phone, was my own personal nightmare, acting itself out in eastern daylight time, but in a completely different world.

It's funny how what is "normal" for some people is completely bizarre to another. Heidi's mom in her office was completely routine: "Want to meet for lunch at 12:30?" My mom walking into my office (or a conference presentation, a class, etc.) really is exactly the thing that compares to those show-up-to-school-without-pants-and-need-to-be-quarterback-for-the-football-team dreams. My own "normal," however, consisted of my daughter walking into my classroom this afternoon. Probably someone else's nightmare. Or being a physics professor, definitely someone else's nightmare. Or hosting a couple hundred kids to play with oobleck.

Grace and I finished up cleaning my mess left over from visiting with a few high school students. Then I "packed up," which is the ritual that consists of checking email, checking notes, checking the mess on my desk, moving the packets of ketchup to the lab where they could be used for Cartesian divers, checking the 150 baggies of Elmer's glue and water readied for tomorrow. It's not any less bizarre than those recurring nightmares I had in my youth, typically starring Dick Clark and a dinosaur. I imagine that all of these realities, dreams, and nightmares may be a unique (defining?) piece of my identity.

therapy, polymers and my mother

I just read that blogging is actually being recommended by psychologists as therapy. If so, here starts my session.

My mother called and left a message to tell me that:

1. "this message is for Adam"
2. she was watching T.V. and saw something that she thought the kids in my parks program would really "get a kick out of"
3. it was about polymers

My most immediate response was something along the lines of, "oh Christ help me."

I called my mom back because, well, I didn't have a choice. She went on to tell me that she'd seen this on Jeopardy, it involved a guy sticking a large needle all the way through a balloon ("and it didn't even deflate!") and that it was all explained using "polymers."

She spelled it for me: "P-O-L-Y-M-E-R-S. Have you heard of those?" she asked me.

I'm not a chemist, but I have heard of polymers. I told her I had, that they're long chains of molecules, and that they're really useful in plastic materials. She went on to try to describe to me how these allowed the balloon to stay intact. But it didn't really make any sense. I didn't argue, either.

What was more entertaining was her idea of what I do and, in this case, what it is that we have children -- small ones, hundreds of them -- doing all at the same time. Giving them each a balloon and a "long barbeque skewer" (as she described it) is not something we do. We're nervous enough giving them scissors with blunt ends. But the image of lots of children running around with balloons and long sharp objects does make me smile. Between the repeated popping sound of failure and the puncture wounds experienced by children and staff alike, it sounded like the perfect recipe. Funny that I just thought of building paper copters (careful with the scissors) and bringing a swimming pool full of bubble solution. Oh, and the rockets and the solar balloon and the other flying things. But the swimming pool of bubbles really is where it's at for me.

I feel better now, just having written this.

lost in translation

In a blunder-ridden cross-cultural exchange, I've found that I'm incapable of responding to the obviously important questions of an emailer named "mina".

I would tell you more about "mina," except that my Junk Mail filter seems to always limit all of the necessary information. However, my university's spam filter lets mina's message come straight through. I suspect that this is an indication of how important this message must be, in addition to the fact that mina sends me multiple emails a day. Certainly, I've had important things filtered by a spam gauntlet before, including reviews of papers attached to an email as an encrypted pdf file. So this email, based on the fact that it's getting through, must actually be important.

Or, it could be that it skates through all email prophylactics because the entirety of the message is composed in Japanese fonts. And this is exactly the great blunder, the communication error that I'm forever stuck with. Mina is clearly trying to tell me something, but all I see are these really neat looking picture characters. Even though I don't read a smidge of Japanese, I can tell that there is a cry for help embedded into the short paragraphs and smooth strokes of the text, only interrupted by a webpage link at the bottom of the message. And the subject line, which generally says this:

無視しないで下さい

Seems to translate to something like "please do not ignore".

So, mina, if you're out there, know that I'm not ignoring you. In fact, I'm trying to answer whatever question you might have. I can tell you a few things that I generally tell others emailing me with questions, such as:

私の物理学クラスのための前提条件は三角法である。

or

公園プログラムの科学はすべての年齢に開いている。

I hope that answers your question.

in which I attempt to buy a keg with a university credit card

Today I bought 20 pounds of corn starch and 11 2-liter bottles of club soda, 1000 straws and 80 dollars worth of Mentos mint candies, and other assorted ingredients. The most notable transaction I tried to make was a full kegging system at the local homebrew shop. "This will be fun to explain," remarked the owner, referring to my use of my state university's credit card to purchase that which is normally used for the production, storage, and dispensing of malted beverages. To be honest, half of my pursuit with the purchase may have been driven by this very notion, and maybe even a desire to see their faces (or imagine the other end of the phone) while I explained the legitimate use: This enables us to carbonate large quantities of water for our use of experiments in the park. Sure, they used to throw a fit with the corn starch, and I can only imagine the eyebrows when they see the seven pounds of mints I'm having shipped via 2-day.* Now I'll really give them something to fret about. And it's all on the level. We'd be tapping the keg to dispense gallons of bubbly water that kids could dump salt, sugar, raisins, and candies into to see what would happen. Maybe we'd make rockets out this carbonated fuel. It was all just too fun to imagine.

And imagine is all I'm doing right now. Apparently there's some 'code' that the credit card machine at the local brewing store kept asking for. Neither of us knew what it could be, especially after trying to obvious things like the digits on the back of the card, my mailbox number, and even leaving it blank. (I've used the same credit card to buy everything from craft sticks to catering, books to read and booking travel, and I've never run into this before.) Have they already flagged this possibility? I wouldn't think so, but I'll be figuring it out on Monday. It could be a sign for me to pull back on the throttle and worry a little bit more about the budget.

I'd decided to worry less once I figured out more about how I was paying myself for the entire parks project. In getting the two grants -- small ones, really, but still necessary -- I placed into the budget a stipend for myself. It makes sense, especially because grantors want to see that someone is actually responsible for being in charge. Or maybe they wanted to see what a schmuck I am and what a good deal they were getting. When I calculated out my time committed to the project after all is said and done, I realized that I'm making less, per hour, than the students I've hired. That actually didn't bother me; in fact, I was a bit tickled. And, I realized that if I payed myself out of that money I'd just be bitter after I got the money, post taxes and benefits (that I'd have to take out of my own budget). So, instead, I asked if I could update my computer before it died. And could I add an iPod Touch**, to keep track of my calendar and to-do's since my Palm had died last year, and I've never fully recuperated. And a case. Is that okay? Sure, of course it's okay. And, the schmuck I am, I thought I was getting away with something, until I thought again: I'm getting to use money I budgeted for myself to buy university equipment that I will use to do more work. Yes, Adam, you can do this. We'll let you.

So, maybe with the remainder I'll continue to pursue the purchase of a keg. Or two. Think of the fun we'll have with 10 gallons of carbonated water.

____

*Mentos mints in carbonated water or other carbonated beverages makes such a foaming release of carbon dioxide that it produces fantastic fountains. It's overdone in a lot of videos and online science supply catalogs, but it's still fantastic.

**I realize how unoriginal I must seem, in light of my friend's latest acquisition. But I swear I thought of it first. And that's probably the difference between me and John: I'll think about for three weeks what he will pounce on in three minutes. I wonder if he told Sue any sooner than I told Karyn. That is, I wonder if Sue had to read about it in his blog like Karyn probably is doing right now.

camping

I hadn't coordinated the two things: proposing to Grace that we could "camp" in the backyard while Karyn and Anna were away at Girl Scout Camp, and the number of things I need to get done for tomorrow. Sleeping in the tent with a 5-year-old is a polar opposite to staying up and reading, writing, organizing.

Tomorrow we kick off the Parks program with a staff lunch, coordination of schedules, introduction to each other and the curricula. A reporter is stopping by, hopefully to get the news right that people do not need to call me to register, and that they don't all need to show up this Monday. We're running this repeatedly over six weeks.

Maybe I'll see a thousand people on Monday. On the other hand, the fact that people were told to register might be a good sign that they won't all creep out of the woodwork. Still, I returned six phonecalls today and have been regularly responding to emails for the last two weeks. The word's out.

But tonight I'm camping. Grace has been so cute about the whole thing, pushing forward when we start the barbeque, getting her pajamas on right after dinner, getting the sleeping bag . . . now she's here with books. We're heading out 40 feet into our backyard.

shopping

Over the years I've become comfortable with my science education related shopping trips. I know that I'll often need to show I.D. to buy dry ice. I have learned that the method by which I get exempted from paying sales tax is a little different at each store, and each clerk understands the process to lesser or even lesser extents. I'm used to scouring aisles of craft shops, hardware stores, and toy merchants to assemble a potpourri of items that the clerk can only imagine a coherent theme for.

"Hosting a birthday party?" one woman asked as I was purchasing bubble solution, candles, plastic cups, and likely other random items in bulk quantities years ago.

"No . . . " I paused, realizing this might not go over well. "I teach physics."

There was a smile, but the conversation pretty much ended there.

With the parks program last year and now starting again next week, my shopping excursions have been lifted to a whole new level. I went to the sporting goods store to get BBs, fishing line, and a sun shade. I buy vinegar, corn syrup, vegetable oil, baking soda, and seltzer tablets in bulk quantities at Costco. I left a grocery store with four bottles of concentrated dish detergent, 600 water balloons, and 1000 (10 boxes) snack sized bags for mixing silly putty in. After navigating those aisles of the craft store I had several hundred multicolored pipe cleaners and 3000 craft sticks in my basket.

I simultaneously loathe and delight in this. For part of this I dragged Grace along, who was a great sport. All she got was some water color paper (on a separate ticket, taxes paid) and some A&W root beer. We had to drive out on a construction riddled, congested parkway in the heat of the afternoon. But we also got to play in the hardware store with PVC and corrugated drain pipe. "What can I help you with today?" was the joyous call of a customer service representative as I inspected a 100-foot reel of black tubing. I tried to explain to him, Grace looking on, that I was finding two sets of pipe whose inner diameter (of one) and outer diameter (of the other) meshed, so that they could be telescoped like a trombone. For the kids. To play. In the parks. He looked at me like I was crazy and began to explain how it was impossible.

"Oh, but last year I used ___ and ___ and it worked great . . . "

He stopped me and shook his head. "Well, you're on your own for that one," and he walked off. I had this hope (for a brief moment) that I was about to entice him to engage in one of the more entertaining customer helps of his day. But he didn't.

So Grace and I each grabbed a reel of tubing -- Grace's was as tall and about as massive as her self. And then we walked about five steps before we started playing with the corrugated drain pipe. Talk into one end and the ear at the other end will hear your whisper. Put both ends on your ears and beat the middle on the cement floor and you hear a loud bass reverb. Swirl the entire ten feet of pipe around your head (hint: you need twenty feet of open space!) and the tube resonates an eerie "oooooooooooh" sound, changing to a higher harmonic if you can whirl it faster. All that for five dollars. Tax exempt.

Tomorrow I need to go through a grocery line with an amount of corn starch (for Oobleck) and glue (for slime putty) that could make people fear I'm insane or in on some price gouging scheme, removing all corn starch from the nation's shelves so that the price of corn skyrockets. (Ethanol production is already doing this, I gather.) Or they'll just know I am engaging our youth in scientific enterprise. It's a pretty good job.

judging a book by its cover

For most things I demonstrate a pretty good amount of patience. But there are a few things that get me riled. The dog, for instance, for as much as I love him, makes my blood boil when he leaps up on the door to bark, bang, and scratch. I think there's some evolutionary trait that turns up the rage control when my home is being destroyed from the outside.

[a few students in the past have suggested I "look like that guy in Fight Club." Brad Pitt? I ask. "No . . . " they respond with some embarrassment for me, "Ed Norton." Of course. Now that Norton is playing Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk, I've wondered if students might begin to fear sending me into a rage. I can only hope for such an image.]

Today in the book aisle I picked up a book that was supposed to be a refresher in all things cultural and important. It promised to give you a briefing that would allow you to be conversational in those things that are relevant to modern society. The idea is that, if you read the book, you'll get enough bits and pieces of information on history, philosophy, science, and the like that you'll be a better member of the democracy.

I'm always interested in these kinds of books and their claims, because I simultaneously drawn to them -- like a chalice offering clairvoyance -- and at the same time feel my bias rising up. I abhor the notion that if we just understand more facts, dates, definitions, and the like, we'll be smarter and even better thinkers. I think this is short sighted and simple minded. True, I also did worst in classes and other challenges where knowing names, dates, and facts were imperative. A couple of history classes and I never quite got along. I can't tell you the names and places important to the history of the Vietnam War, but I can tell you that each side was fighting for two different kinds of things, just as if I argued that we eat tofu because I'm hungry and a companion suggested we

I opened this particular book and found immediately a section entitled "Gravity." It then went on to describe a few things about gravity, that we don't understand it, that it attracts bodies in proportion to their mass and inversely proportional to the distance between them. (It didn't say anything about this being an inverse square law, but that didn't both me.) A few other pieces of information were floated about in the brief paragraphs on the single page, and then it got to the Hulk inducing, patience losing part that went something like this: "astronauts in space aren't completely weightless, in fact they're in what is technically known as 'microgravity.'" That is, this and many other descriptions of astronauts in the space station or space shuttle or other orbiting vehicles about Earth suggest that the astronauts still feel a micro amount of gravity. Sure, they're in space, but gravity is still there. A little bit. The problem is that this is completely wrong. There is gravity there, and there's still a lot of it. The astronauts and their surroundings aren't weightless at all, in fact they're falling along the orbital path that's caused by the gravity. The experience an apparent weightlessness because gravity is pulling them, along with everything in which they're contained, all at the same rate. So the term "micro" is completely misleading. It isn't that they've sacrificed a bunhc of gravity, but instead they're experiencing it in a different scenario that actually isn't any different than if you were falling in an elevator whose cable (I always picture a very small thread) had just dropped from the 67th floor of the Empire State Building. While falling, you'd feel weightless, but the falling itself is caused by gravity. You'd only wish you could experience such a thing as "microgravity."

But this isn't supposed to be a physics lesson. Rather, the fact of the matter is that upon seeing something like this, I immediately close the book and discredit the usefulness of the rest of it. If they mislead the reader with their own ignorance on the one page that I open to randomly, what kinds of things will they mislead me with on the pages that I don't already understand so well?

Back at home I've been reading, a little at a time, a variety of books. Slowly. The easiest book to understand, er, read quickly, is The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science. The reviews of the book are bipolar and bimodal, reflecting the two views of either science or two backgrounds in critical thinking. (Both believe they're critical thinkers and have the corner on truth, which makes a coherent argument not only difficult, but impossible.) It's a terrible and fascinating book, and by knowing only a little bit about science (frightening to admit, having a PhD in science ed) makes it possible to discredit easily certain pieces, and then question everything else by association. For example, there's a claim that perhaps a little bit of ionizing radiation from nuclear sources is actually good for you. After all, we get radiation from all kinds of sources all the time, and people who live in Denver (where there's more natural background) live longer than those in Gulf States. This is, at best, taking some statistics and doing a little speculation. But then the author throws in the fact that radiation must be safe since it's used all the time, and in fact we used to even x-ray people's feet to fit them for shoes. He says this like it was no big deal. He doesn't talk about the high cancer rates of shoe salesmen, though.

I don't lose patience with ignorance. I lose patience with lazy explanations with a presumption of "this must be right," as in the case of microgravity; and I lose patience with "I need to be right and I'll not think about things that might make me wrong." The problem is that I don't always know when these are each the case, and I especially have a hard time figuring out how to get others (e.g., students) to realize when either of these are the case. That's the big challenge. There are people out there writing books and blogs, policies and legislation, and it's hard to sort out the good stuff from the rest. On the outside, they all look the same.

balancing acts

Yesterday I was driving home from the grocery store when I saw a most genuine balancing act. On an old, elegant 3-speed bicycle, a man was turning through the intersection in front of me. He steered with one hand. He held in his other hand a grass trimmer -- a long handled device with a two-stroke engine on one side, and a string trimming apparatus on the other. It balanced in his left hand as the bike navigated smoothly through the turn.

It was ironic first, to be riding a bike but carrying a smoke spewing device alongside. But more than this it was impressive that pedaling, steering, and transporting all three objects (man, bike, and tool) went as smoothly as it did. The practice of steering was clearly hindered. The balance was surely out of whack. And yet still he rode onward.

I still wonder where he was going.

Today I've been going through the list that Charla has of remaining items for the parks program, which starts next week. I've been wondering if I should upgrade an consolidate my phone and calendar technologies into a Palm Centro (a device apparently being marketed to 15-year-old girls . . . sigh). I emailed the staff about driver training. I need to fix the sprinklers. I have a curriculum to describe to some teachers. We now want water bottles for the trips to the park, and that reminded me that I still want water bottles for Crossroads. (BPA free? I don't know.) The sprinklers aren't fixing themselves. I still am looking for a better pen -- surely the topic of another entry here sometime. I've got reviews still to do. Oh! And I keep forgetting about that professional file I need to evaluate; August used to seem like a long time away. Karyn's birthday is sooner. And the sprinklers need to work before we leave for Maine.*

But I do have the tickets, the hotel, the car, the car seats, and the GPS ready for Maine. And I did get the sprinklers to turn on. And now that I've met with Charla we're both confident that being ready for Monday is completely within our sights. And the reviews are getting done and they're enjoyable to do . . . unless I think of that other article I still didn't finished, and then feel really glad that those two chapter proposals still haven't received any feedback.

So the bike tips this way, I adjust the other way, and the navigation continues. For some reason -- a reason only I can really explain to myself -- I need that grass trimmer in one hand and I need that handlebar in the other. And feel free to hand me something else, as long as it's a BPA free water bottle that I need, that will fit in the holder right here in the bike's frame. I still need to steer.

-----

*Flashing back to that paragraph a few minutes later, I realized how incriminating it was. Not in all the things I mention, but in the things I did not mention that were slipping my mind. Aren't you supposed to be writing a book, for example? I guess that's the nature of the distraction and the balancing, the weed wacker I'm carrying along with me.

everybody dance

Tonight Karyn and Jenn (my sister) left me with Anna & Grace and Peter, my 21-month-old nephew. They went to a "baby shower" they said, with the knitting group, they told me. They left at 6:00 PM. Now, it's twenty past ten and they're not home yet. Clearly this is more evidence that there's no such thing as a "baby shower" with the knitting group. They're out drinking, smoking, and heaven knows what. I'm fine. We're fine. Everyone else is asleep, including the dog.

We, Peter and Anna and Grace and me, rocked. We started listening to music, and the drums and slide whistles and tambourine (oh yeah) were all already out, and then we started to dance. It's Still Rock and Roll To Me, when turned up sufficiently, is still one of the world's greatest anthems for all ages. The 36-year-old, the almost 6-year-old, and 8-year-old, and the not quite-2-year-old were all dancing and playing air guitar (especially Grace) and beating on various percussive surfaces (especially Peter). And then we needed a new song, so we switched to Alive by Pete Yorn, followed by I Will Follow by U2, followed by something else and something again . . . and then it was eventually time for bed.

Funny they didn't go to sleep right away.

solipsism

solipsism |ˈsälipˌsizəm|

nounthe view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.DERIVATIVESsolipsist |ˈsoʊləpsəst| |ˈsɑləpsəst| |səˈlɪps1st| nounsolipsistic |ˌsälipˈsistik| |ˈˈsoʊləpˈsɪstɪk| |ˈˈsɑləpˈsɪstɪk| |-ˈsɪstɪk| adjectivesolipsistically |ˌsälipˈsistik(ə)lē| |ˈˈsoʊləpˈsɪstək(ə)li| |ˈˈsɑləpˈsɪstək(ə)li| |-ˈsɪstɪk(ə)li| adverbORIGIN late 19th cent.: from Latin solus ‘alone’ + ipse ‘self’ + -ism ._____I came across this word yesterday and was reminded that every time I come across this noun, or its daughter, "solipsist," I pause and remember that I always forget what the word means. I always remember that I don't want to be one, I just can't remember exactly which vice, sin, habit, or other foible I might be giving in to if I were to subscribe to solipsism. Writing in general, and writing any kind of journal especially, I suppose takes this potential out of the philosophical and into a very practical risk category. More importantly, I see lots of academics practice solipsism while adamantly denying its philosophy. We say, as academics, that we're contributing to a font of knowledge that is greater than any individual, that is refining the details of some truth outside of ourselves. Yet we also get trained, in graduate school and in the hallways of our ivory towers, to become so focused on our own research agenda and our own specialized knowledge that we tend to disregard a greater context, or even the work that's been done before us. Interesting for me, I think that the natural sciences (the field in which I'm housed) does a great job on the whole of avoiding this pitfall. However, in the field where I practice (education), I think we do a particularly poor job of figuring out what everyone else is doing, not to mention what everyone has done before us. Ironically, we advocate integration of multiple subjects and cooperative groups in our classrooms, but in our own research pursuits we are the isms of self-centeredness. And those of us who can't admit this and see outside of ourselves are probably those most guilty of this.

dear john letter

Dear John,

I wanted to thank you for checking my blog recently and being so diligent as to help me find the word that had escaped my psyche. Yes, "heresy," exactly the word I was looking for, as you verified by supplying the full definition and appropriate link.

Really: thank you. I say this again in all sincerity, and I hope this will numb the sting of the following paragraph.

What you've made me realize is that I really don't need to talk to you anymore. Not on the telephone, not via email, nor even through iChat. Sigh. Yes, we had some good times. But now I realize that my every thought and whim can be dumped, unfiltered and unfettered, into this space. Not only does it make me feel self important, but you actually read and pay attention to this shit, the drivel, the mundane. I no longer need to send you pointed and specifically themed emails about our work. Instead, I will just use this place as a dumping ground of all of my thoughts, and you will no doubt respond to them. You won't be able to help yourself. Your addiction to my blog will be . . . what's the word? Oh, no problem. I'm sure you'll tell me.

For example, I've just had the thought that the idea to bring digital recorders to conference sessions as a service to attendees is an idea worth trying. I don't think it could do any harm. I was tempted to use this as data collection, and I still am, but this might require too much IRB for us and, more importantly, it could get in the way of natural discourse. However, if each participant had their own sessions to refer back to, they may themselves have better reflection on how the conference helps them. I think we should encourage this. In fact, we don't even have to burn the CD's. We could just place the files on the server for them to download.

See, you just read that. I didn't even have to type your email address. My work is done.

The only piece missing is that you don't have for yourself a blog, which would no doubt addict me. Remember the days when we were planning spoof conference sessions and emailed ideas back and forth? Those days almost destroyed any possibility of me finishing my dissertation on time (or ever), I was so engaged in the back-and-forth and addicted to the coffee-spitting laughter that we'd induce upon each other. Good times. What the future holds, on the day that you initiate your own dumping of first draft, second rate ideas onto a blog, will be far worse and better than those days. We'll be completely stuck in consuming and dumping new ideas, all in response to one another but without ever really responding to one another. In that future, we'd never talk to or even see one another again. No need. What would we talk about?

I just read a piece of our campus propaganda, disguised as an alumni magazine, touting the 10 year anniversary of our online class offerings. What a great day. Lots of online instructors took time out of their busy virtual schedules to talk to reporters in university relations . . . probably through their blogs, I'm guessing. What was pointed out by the director was that performance of students taking online courses was as good or better than those taking traditional (what I'd call "real") courses.* A professor who had taught in both arenas reaffirmed the notion, that her students do better taking the online course than when they interact with her in person. This, I suppose, was supposed to be a celebration of how great our online instruction is; but what I think it really tells us is that these people are such potentially bad teachers that they could be replaced by an impersonal, mass produced piece of technology. How delightful.

Interesting paragraph, that was. Wonder what made me think of that?

Anyway, it's been nice having real conversations with you, and I'll miss writing the emails to you. I always liked how I could type "Jo" and email would go ahead and finish the rest of your address. It was cute, as if you were completing my sentences even before I'd had a chance to address the envelope. I'll miss this, but of course there's no longer a need. I'll also miss your beer debt . . . oh. Yes, your personal belief that you need to buy for others more beers than you receive, just as Jesus instructed in the sermon on the mount. That is an attribute I have a hard time imagining finding its way onto your blog, not to mention onto mine.

So . . .

Nevermind.

I'll talk to you soon.

Have a good weekend!

Cheers,

Adam

_____

*Yeah, they said this. But I'm pretty sure it's a lie that they're telling themselves and/or everyone else. What's worse is that the university propaganda artists think this is good advertising: come to a university where our online courses are better than interacting interpersonally with our real live faculty!

in which I pay for a barbeque grate with my university credit card

Or, more aptly titled, "in which I thought for a moment I'd accidentally charged the purchase of a barbeque grate to my university credit card."

But I double checked, and I didn't actually do that. The last four digits of one credit card look very similar to the last four digits of another credit card. They both, for example, have a '6' in them. And, they both have exactly four digits. What are the chances?

This non-incident is perhaps a good example of my psyche, my wondering if I can do something to my office that will put not only my books but also my head in proper order. So far I've moved the computer monitor slightly to the left and cleared the right side of my desk. Based on the fact that I still have after-the-fact on-shit moments that I did something improper and illegal (albeit accidental) even when I didn't probably speaks to the fact that I need to do something more. I have some pictures I should put up, and a bigger dry erase board that is begging to be placed on the wall where the computer monitor was evacuated.

The good news is that the barbeque grate should be on my front step within the week. It was also half the price as the other one I got previously. That would be the one that didn't actually fit my grill.

I had a phone conversation with a relatively newfound colleague back east today. He is the kind of person who gives out advice that's about half as useful as he may think it is, but twice as useful as I need it to be. It's good conversation for half an hour. I was particularly interested in his assessment of recent (i.e., 20-year-old) calls for reform in science education, the kind of things that we all cite in our work and use to backup various initiatives. He described these variously "a mess," "a monster," and as something that "has done more damage than any other [science education document]". Somewhere in there I realized that I was interested in his justification for this bit of academic ____ [um, what's the word for it? when one speaks out adamantly against an establishment, usually a religion or specific church? it just escaped me] that I believed his general thesis to a large degree. After all, these documents were written by various expertise from various places and various egos, all assembled together in what is known as a committee. That has to be the worst way to write something useful and coherent and meaningful. Yet, when I first started graduate school I was handed these reform documents and I read them. They seemed new, and they were certainly new to me. And, more than this, they were all that I had to describe what science education should aim to be. Since then, I've never come to know anything different, and I never knew anything from before. Taking these documents away, or questioning them, leaves me without a platform to stand on. I'm not sure if I can do that. If there are a few hundred others out there like me, then they do will be left to drown.

Or we learn to swim, struggling to stay afloat. That's familiar territory. I've been reading and reviewing proposals for Crossroads and have found that the general theme is structured upon the premise of I-have-too-much-to-do-already-but-I'm-confused-with-where-I'm-going-with-all-of-this. I wonder if we're really ready to question and problematize what little structure we have. Oh, look; there's my copy of "Ready, Set, SCIENCE! Putting Research to Work in K-8 Science Classrooms." By the National Research Council. I'm sure that has all the answers.

the nature of my job

When I was growing up, a friend and I would play this game called "everything job." A couple of clarifying points: we were eight years old or so, and we lived in a pretty remote place. So, riding our bikes around, finding a couple of giant Douglas Firs in front of my house (which recently got cut down -- the folks were worried they were going to topple on the house) we had a pair of all-purpose computer/communicator/thingies. Basically, imagine an 8-year-old running up to a tree, a bike lying on its side in the background, small fingers punching imaginary buttons on the bark of the tree to reveal an imaginary screen with an image to tell us what we were going to do that day. We had important, but varied, employment opportunities. Sometimes firefighters, sometime astronauts, sometimes defenders of society from all evils. Actually, most of the time we were defending society and/or the universe from all evils. That's the kind of thing you can do if you're eight, you have a bicycle, and you're not afraid to use a stick as a laser.

Dialing up our communicator/computer, the jobs we were assigned were dangerous, adventurous, exciting. Maybe once in a while we got assigned something like "surveyor", or something familiar to us in an everyday kind of way. But the play value didn't offer much, and I don't remember how any of these actually turned out. I'm guessing that we didn't pursue these much. "Firefighter" seemed more important than "accountant."

The computer never assigned me the job of "university professor." My very own imagination -- a fairly rich one -- could never imagine what that that could entail, could never imagine that such a thing could even exist.

So here I am, living the dream that never was.

The irony is that my "job" now is not that much different from my "everything job" scenario of my childhood. I don't exactly go to the Dean's office on a daily basis and ask what I should occupy myself with. Really, it's become quite the opposite. On a day-to-day basis, I get to slowly shape the nature of my job, left with "just enough rope to hang myself with" (the eloquent description Eric gives to the tenure-track faculty line). I teach classes, maybe more than others, but when I think even a little about the flexibility and independence I'm afforded I'm always a bit astonished, and more than a little guilty.

The rub is that I should be somehow responsible not only to the students in the classroom, but to the taxpayers, to society. A plumber shows up to your house and, assuming you pay him to do a job, is responsible for fixing the drain that's leaking water from your upstairs bathroom into your downstairs kitchen. His job produces a clear and clearly beneficial outcome. And you gladly pay him for it. My job is quite a bit more abstract. I teach some stuff, and I do some stuff, and I study some stuff, and I report on this, and then I keep doing more of the same. What leak did I fix today? Can I guarantee that I didn't create a new leak, or worse? No, not really.

And if the economy really turned upside down, the plumber was out of work and the farmer couldn't make ends meet, could I justify what I'm doing? Would they still pay me? Would I still be contributing to, as the retirement fund commercials say, "the greater good?" Am I really doing anything comparable to fixing the leak that's threatening to tear down the whole structure of your house? Or am I just teaching your kid some bits of trivia that he'll likely forget in a few months and move on to get a degree anyway. Maybe he'll become my plumber someday.

I think the fundamental difference between what I do and what most other people do is that I have to rely on myself to make work. I have to create the very problems I set out to solve, or at least I have to find the problems. Frankly, that's a pretty fucked up kind of job.

On the other hand, if you could imagine a best case scenario for a job, it might be the one in which an individual is empowered to go out and look for problems and try to solve/fix/interrogate them in a general and fundamental way. The plumber who sought out and fixed all leaks. The electrician who studied all faulty wiring. The advocate for all those who didn't understand Newton's 2nd law (pretty much everybody, it turns out) or the person who identified the atrocity of subtle racism, or the revolutionary who refined the purpose of education towards effecting social equity. I'm not sure if we always do these things so well. We get filled by our own egos and our own research lines and our own problems -- the very ones we create. But in a lot of cases there are those who document global warming trends, there are those who can discover a fundamental structure of matter, and maybe there will be those who will understand and communicate clearly a purpose for education. And the reason we need university professors.

roller coaster

Strapping yourself into the roller coaster, a bar is lowered across your lap to give you the sense that you're taken care of as you're about to launch down a predetermined track. As you sit and as the ride ensues, you experience the initial jolt, the gentle rolling, the steep climbs, the hard corners, the loops. Your stomach is thrown around within your depths and the scenes blur behind you faster than your mind can keep up with them.

It's a bit like taking a class. Maybe mine.

The thing about a roller coaster is that the experience of the individual rider and the design of the ride itself are completely linked, but also completely unaware of one another in most cases. To experience the ride -- the twists and throws and climbs and wind -- you don't have to have any understanding of the overall design of the ride, the physics of gravity and motion, the engineering of the steel structures. And maybe, for an amusement park, this is just as well.

I often find that when I'm flying I get nervous as the various bumps and sways take place, noises that are unfamiliar whir in the guts of the metal hull. But if I understand certain sounds or maneuvers -- the whining of the flaps being extended* and the stomach lurching change in ascent for cruising altitude -- I feel more at ease. If I could see the pilots sitting there in the cockpit and observe their comfort and perhaps even hear their exchanges of normalcy, maybe I'd feel even better about things.

That kind of scenario would take all the excitement out of roller coaster riding, but maybe it would better enable a student to understand a classroom. If we did a better job of showing the design of the class (or of the professional development for teachers; or the curriculum of a state';s public education plan; or the organization of a professional group), perhaps the whirring and blurrings would make more sense to students. Perhaps they could anticipate these twists and turns. The trick would be to make them still just as exciting, but also anticipate them and understand why they're so designed.

On the other hand, I've recently argued that Crossroads (or any other professional development) can have overarching philosophy and guidelines, but that these don't necessarily have to be made explicit to all in attendance. Maybe there are multiple levels. Some are foundational and guiding to the practice; some are the framework and the existing structure of the conference/class/curriculum, and these need to be made more explicit to those on the ride. Then there's the directly observable, maybe the pictures on the wall or the fan hanging from the ceiling. Not a perfect analogy, but in general a lot of what we reveal in our professional development and course designs are very superficial. We need to both think about the more general foundations of what we do, that which is inherently hidden but requisitely in existence; and the nuts and bolts of how things operate and how we make these clear. There's usually an Oz behind a curtain, and we'd do well to remove the obscurity. Otherwise we just have this fear of the unknown and the unexpected.

____

*I think that's what that whining is. Maybe it's the elevators. Or maybe something else.

with a little help from my friends

I've been thinking about this essay for a long time, and every time I'm not thinking about it I soon find more reason to write it. The gist of it is this:

I can't do anything alone.

This isn't exactly and completely true. I did write a book review once that was completely independent and which had no external input ... well, except for the column's editor. So never mind; I stand corrected. Even the things I think are simple and independent and completely "on my own" have the hands of others acting on them.

So back to my original thesis: I can't do anything alone. Nor do I really want to anymore. I used to imagine myself creating a lot of independent pieces, and as I fit myself into a department with the lone "science education researcher" role, I guess it wasn't a crazy idea to think that I'd be doing a lot of work on my own. But I've had this funny evolution from expecting and wanting to do everything independently and without input from anyone else to now realizing -- joyfully -- that all of my successes have come when I'm working with others.

There are many examples:

• I do research with Eric, stuff that I could never do alone, or at least I could never complete the bigger picture. Not only do we bring together two research lines, Eric helps me to understand what it really means. Plus, sitting down and talking through things makes all the work make sense and have real purpose. We realize every time we have a meeting that we need to have meetings more often. I need to meet with Eric soon.
• One of the best courses I teach is with Carl. We have students figure out what it means to "know" something and what "truth" is. I get to do a lot of science and philosophy of science, and Carl gets to do a lot of literature and comparisons of fiction and non-fiction, and eventually we're both leading things on culture and where its pieces come from. The thing is, I like going to this class not only for the things I get to do, but for the things I get to see Carl do, and then seeing them mix together.
• Carl also initiated the gig with Billy Collins, calling me up on his cell phone one day as he was driving through a convenience store drive-up to order a pack (maybe a case?) of Pabst Blue Ribbon. (That detail has always been one of my favorite parts of the story.) And Carl made this connection because of my work with poets before, and my efforts to bring them to my conference along with partnerships with Ogden School Foundation when we had Jimmy Santiago Baca in town. Jimmy gave a presentation for us, but also worked in workshops with high school students. He came back a few times to continue the work.
• When I started doing the science in the parks stuff, it was to extend the efforts of the planetarium beyond its dome. This was Stacy's long term want. She had the resources and students and culture in the planetarium to pull this off. I just had to show up with a plan. And then I had the freedom to nix the first plan before it ever got started (an on-campus camp) and instead do something that neither of us had thought of before -- go visit kids where they're already hanging out for lunch. She needed this done, and I needed the planetarium to do it. And we both needed an established, federally funded lunch program to draw the students there in the first place. Amazing how well these things work when all the pieces are there.
• And all the stuff I've done with John. Some things I just got roped into, back when I was a graduate student. My ability to play piano was taken advantage of. But later we did things more substantive, more generative. Crossroads and various grants and papers would not have been written were it not for him. (I think that's true of several other of my co-authored papers: I just wouldn't have finished them if there weren't a group of us taking on different roles, or even just pushing things hard enough to see them come to fruition.) Running a conference is something that I wouldn't have even considered if it weren't for him and the collaborative energy. I couldn't even imagine putting the pieces together; nor would it be nearly as much fun.

And the list could go on and on. I'm supported in lots of ways, ranging from a faculty who lets me leave campus for a sabbatical to a family that lets me stay at home for a sabbatical.

There are a few exceptions. While there are a few cases of collaboration in my teaching, like with Carl, I generally keep to myself when thinking about what I'm going to do in a classroom. Some of it is almost this secret -- a funny kind of privacy since I'm getting ready to share it with up to 100 other people in a lecture hall. I'm funny like this when I'm preparing a talk, too. I have an easier time getting ready to give the talk to 350 people than I do rehearsing the talk in front of a couple of people. Teaching and presenting is something I really really like and prefer to do inside my own head, or inside a small room, or while sitting on a bus and letting a vision of a teaching episode play out.

But those exceptions are, obviously, exceptions. I'm initially surprised at this point in my "career" (whatever that means) that I'm not more independent. I never really imagined so much of what I'm doing to be so reliant on others. I also never ever imagined that so much of what I do is so much better because I work with other people. And I've been really really lucky to have found so many good people to work with.

showering

For some reason there are ideas that occur to us in the shower. I don't know what's so generative about taking a shower, but sometimes that's where the idea hits us. Maybe for people in a family, it's one of the few places that you're actually alone, and it's one of the few moments that you break away from other trains of thought.

Tonight I got this idea, sometime in the midst of taking a shower. So, yes, I was naked most of the time while thinking about this for the first time. I don't think that detracts from the credibility of the idea.

OttReach "Science in the Parks" is something I got to come up with and do last summer, piloted for 3 weeks. This summer I have more formal funding, though maybe a few more restrictions, and 6 weeks. Basically, I take a crew of college students to parks where free lunches are served to kids, and we set up a camp of stuff to play with: bubbles, PVC pipe for making trumpets, lenses for building telescopes, tubs of Oobleck, etc. There was a short development of this with a complicated backdrop, but the basic theme was that we should go do science with kids in the parks where they eat, play, and live close to. And it was great. Now we have twice as many places to go, and I've got a great staff. I have to figure out a few things like how I'm going to pay for gas, but it will work out.

The problem that I may always run into is how to fund the project for the duration. At the same time, Weber State is developing more community outreach and courses and is particularly hip on this of late. Originally, there was some push for me to do OttReach as a summer camp, in which kids showed up to campus instead of me going to them. I eventually balked at this, realizing that there are 100's of kids who we'd never see. But, there is a contingent of kids who want day camps and would not only come to campus for a week, but would pay money for the privilege. There are similar camps at other local universities and hosted by private businesses. One nice thing about it is that the curriculum could be different than what we bring to the parks -- we wouldn't have to load all of our shit into a van and put it under tents.

So, the shower idea was this: If I hosted a summer camp for one week, one group in the morning and one in the afternoon, I could imagine having 60 kids enrolled. I could imagine having them each pay about $200 for such a camp. And 60 times $200 is $12,000. My budget right now for OttReach -- all six weeks -- is about $15,000. So, wouldn't it be great if I could subsidize the six week program with the one week program? And at the same time start a new program?

I get caught up in this quickly. Three weeks became six weeks which could become an entire camp plus six weeks of parks visits. My summer would be really gone, I'd have more to do and think about and distract myself . . . but it could be great, and it could lead towards other things entirely . . . and still more to do. But maybe, if I've learned anything from sabbatical, I can't resist the doing more and continually stirring up new ventures. They don't always pan out, they don't always even get started, but some of them do. And, once in a while, an OttReach or a Crossroads comes out of it, and this simply encourages more of the same.

Maybe this is a terrible idea. Maybe I should stop thinking about these new things. Maybe I should stop showering.