Author: datadan

A trip to the coastal redwoods in Humboldt

datadan Outdoor Education , , , ,

I must admit that I’m a bit of a tree-huger.   In a recent visit to the coastal redwood forests in Redwood National Park, Humboldt State Park, and…. I witnessed many spectacular natural phenomenon from big trees, to Roosevelt Elk, marbled murrelets, spotted owls, the tailed pacific frog, the Pacific Giant Salamander, and others.

I love trees!
I love trees!

2015_summer1 443

 

Raised on books like the giving tree and the Lorax trees hold a special and magical spot in my heart.   However, I learned some facts that really made me question my view of people who log trees.

Many people, including the people I met, acknowledge that their past practices 1800-1970s were pretty reprehensible.  However they are using dramatically different methods.

Fact 1: Most are concerned with the long term longevity of the forest.  They consider it a crop and do not want it to expire.  In speaking  with a small hobbyist, his forest in 1970 was 1.7 million board feet of lumber.  He’s sold 1.9 million of board feet since then (2015), and current estimates put his stock at 2.5 million of board feet on his property.  Larger commercial enterprises (Green Diamond, HRC,) also have similar calculations.

Fact 2: The above fact points to the fact that Nature Bats Last.  While images of a clear cut, or of the logging practices showing a scared land as late as the 1970s, surprisingly, the forests are back and more dense.  They recover.  While they are not “old growth” they are thriving and practices are in place for sustainability.

Fact 3: Most people harvesting timber practice Silviculture, that is managing their forest to sustain diversity of growth, bio-diversity, and sustainability.  They take time to evaluate each tree in a particular stand that they will harvest.  The evaluate the effect of wildlife, surrounding vegetation, the watershed, and the overall feel of the forest …tree-by-tree and stand-by-stand.  There is advanced modeling larger companies use to preserve the health of the forest and those dependent on it.

What do we want?  This is the overriding question.  In the 1800s they wanted to eradicate forests in favor of farm and  pastureland.   The early Yurok and Hupa Native Americans routinely burned the forest…keeping it at bay, in order to encourage the growth of Bear Grass (essential for basket weaving), and keep meadoes in place to encourage wildlife for hunting.   Currently we have a love-hate relationship with nature.  We want to visit it and revel in its wonder.  Yet we also want to control it.  We want to control fire.  We want to control when and were it can go.  We want to use it for recreation and save it for our posterity.  We try to remove invasive species that choke out local natives (Such as Ivy, scotch broom, and barred owls…), but we won’t remove ourselves as perhaps the most invasive species of all.   We fear too much what will happen if we let nature run its course…because that would undeniable mean things we want to look at today would be destroyed and not pristine until perhaps 100-200 years from now. Our wants as a society are as diverse as mother natures equation.

So we “manage” nature to guarantee it will be what we want, while allowing nature to be what we (with our best intentions and science) understand it to be.  Of the many concerns I have about this, two primary concerns come to the fore.

1: The cost and energy required for such an undertaking are immense.  We do so because we currently are rich.  What is the total energy footprint of this management I wonder.  Is it really cost-effective?  What will happen when we become poor.  This is a “rich white value” and I’m wondering how will we sustain it when things change.

2: Mother Nature’s equation is way to complex for us to understand.  Our history is one of doing something today, without fully understanding what the effect will be to other species or over time.  We keep figuring it out. We’ll just introduce a toad here, or a snake there, or plant there, and before we know it, we’ve destabilized an entire region.  Moreover, mother nature is a killer.  There is a constant battle of species dominance and infinite cycles of life and death.  When we intervene, we take sides…this interrupts cycles and erodes various species ability to adapt. Rather they adapt to our intermediate habits, and when we change, they fail to change in step.  In short we meddle with a system that is beyond our capability of understanding (yet?).  The cost has been and will continue to be the destruction of that which we want to save.

 

 

Death

datadan Uncategorized ,

I went to a funeral today.  It was for an uncle who had few people in his life.  He was survived by a wife, a brother, two sisters, a mother, and some cousins.  He had a stroke at an early age.  Some of the relatives state it was because of too much alcohol as a child.  He walked with a limp and lost most functionality of his left arm for as long as I knew him (and for all of his adult life his sister told me.).  He didn’t go anywhere.  He didn’t have any friends.  He had no hobbies.  he rarely went to family get-functions.  In fact his own mother frequently criticized him for only showing up when there was free food available.    Near the end he had cancer.  He laid alone often in and out of consciousness of a nursing home.  The wife wanted the the sisters and brother to take care of him.  This caused much in-fighting.  In the end, he died alone hours after his sister and niece visited him.  He was unconscious when the visited.  The niece asked: “How is he still alive?  No one is feeding him.”

In the funeral hall there were 8 family members present.  The wife of his brother invited her family to fill the hall out (this added 7).  The wife invited some of her family (5 showed up).  In the end, 20 people was all that was there to remember his life and times.

At the mortuary, no one know what traditions to apply.  The females wore a white yarn bow in their hair, the mails work a black ribbon on their sleeve.  There was confusion about when to view the body.  6 layers of brightly colored satin cloth were put on his body.  After sitting around and saying very little the Buddhist monks showed up.  They laid out food, incense, pictures of Buddha.  A senior monk (Sefu) spoke at length to the family explaining what was going to happen when.  For a while the monks were addressing a cousin instead of the wife until it was pointed out to her who the wife was.

The monks brought a cadre of helpers (6) that were to direct people on when to bow, sit, kneel, chant, or pray.  The chanted a sutra as we walked around the coffin, lit incense, bowed, knelt, followed along in a sutra by phonetics book.  The sutra was about the great Buddhas of the past and the divinity of their wisdom and how everyone ought believe it. Then sefu spoke at length about life and hereafter.

Lucky money slips were distributed to all who helped.  Special lucky money envelopes were given to Sefu by family members.  The monks packed up and left.  There were some more incense offerings and viewings.   The “From” ribbons on all the funeral bouquets were cut and saved.  The flowers were packed into a car along with the body of uncle.  We drove to the cemetery were his body was interred.  The black sleeve ribbons were put on the coffin along with the white yarn bows and flowers.   The family burned incense and paper money.  Then everyone left and went to lunch.

Nobody said anything about his life.  Nobody talked about him at lunch.  Even in the time before his funeral in the time after no one recounted “good times and bad times.”  The funeral home made oil painting of him from a picture of him when he was young.  The only comment I heard about him the whole day was: “That was a nice picture.”

The day was ceremony and ritual without depth.  He had no legacy.  He accomplished nothing and did little with his life.  He will not be remembered except as a footnote of family tree conversations.

What will the sum total of your life be?

Lock Down – part 2

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Two different people called the police from a classroom phone and stated that there was someone waving a gun around in their classroom at my school.  Upon listening the dispatch, the administrator was pretty sure he recognized the voices, and was also fairly certain that the call was a prank.  The end result of the police action also showed that calls were untrue.  However, due the nature of the threat, the heightened sense of fear around school shooters, and the proximity of our school to a child care center, the police moved prior to affording the principle the ability to listen to the dispatch.

This lockdown was unlike others.   There were teachers who we not happy with administrative stewardship in a time of crisis.  Two students now face criminal and school district consequences for there roll.  A teacher, in from whose room the students called, is also facing an uncertain future.   And, there are students whose opinion of law enforcement was reinforced by this display of force.

Most students intellectually understood the danger of the situation and the need to stay in their room.  However, many students still let their feeling inform their interpretation of the events rather than their intellectual self.    Some students still blame police rather than individuals who made the call.

Many students have brushed off the events as early as the day after with an “Meh….”  How many of these students draw connections with actions and consequents – long term or short term? What will happen to a veteran teacher, who cares about their students?  Do the students who love them, even make a connection?

A question that arose in a discussion with another teacher is about how to “take the lockdown seriously.”   A particular teacher had their students on the floor in the corner for the 90 minute lockdown.   This was how they took it serious.  I tried to keep my students calm by keeping their focus on their work.  They were engaged with learning activities instead of huddled, on the floor in one place.  I was unsuccessful in keeping them from their phones; however many of them were using their phones for the projects they were working on.  While I do not regret having them clustered under our red dot for 90 minutes, I have two big regrets.  Firstly, I did not ensure they were off their phones and attentive to me or the sounds around.   While using their electronics kept nearly all of the same calm and passive, it did keep them from hearing what was happening outside and could have been a problem if the nature of the danger was different.  Second, I did not prepare students for police entry.  I should have informed them about how the police may enter the room.  Not to make sudden movements, and stay in one spot.   A quick hands up and “Don’t shoot” may look different to an officer primed for engagement.   I feel like I did when my daughter was nearly hit by a car, but wasn’t – bizarre mix of thankfulness and anger.   It could have ended very differently, I’m thankful it did not.

As part of the restorative process, I think it is important for the officers and students to meet again in different circumstances.  Both parties ned to see each other in a different light.  Both parties need to ask each other questions like: “How did you feel when you entered our room?”  “What did you feel like when you saw us?”  “What were you thinking during the lockdown?” “Were you afraid?” “How do you feel now about what had happened?”

Fence mending is important.  Seeing each other as something other than our role is also important.

Lockdown

datadan Uncategorized

The other day my school was locked down.  “We’re going in lockdown now.”  My immediate response:  I closed the windows and blinds.  I told the students we are going in lockdown. I told them to keep away from the window.   I was in the computer lab, so I allowed them to continue work on their resumes, and projects they were working on.    Internally, I wanted to keep my students calm and focused on the something positive.  The room was hot.  I kept the lights off.  My students were occupied and focused on something else, as the drama continued to unfold.

Some perspective: This was not my first lockdown.  Laster year we had four lockdowns,   two the year before that, and some here and there for the last eight years.  Some were drills, some were real threats.  (Shots fired, reports of a person with a gun near school, gang threats, and reports of a student bringing a weapon to school.)  I’m aware of the polices, the red-dot protocol, and research on active shooters on a school campus.  For example some research says it’s best to barricade in a room.  Some research says it’s best to get away from the danger.

Near the 90 minute mark of the lock down I heard noises outside.  I asked my students to quiet down as I heard thumping and pounding outside.  I heard “Police….keep the door shut.”  My student became more agitated they wanted to know what was happening.  I heard keys in the door and: “Police coming in.”  In came Four officers.  The first entered with an assault rifle drawn, muzzle down, but finger near the trigger.  Two police entered behind him with pistols drawn at the ready.   A student at the computer put her hands in the air: “Oh my god, don’t shoot me.”   A fourth officer approached me:

“Are the teacher?”

“Yes.”

“Are all these people in this room your students?”

“Yes.”

“Is anyone behaving erratically or dangerously?”

“No”

“Has anyone entered or left the room?”

“No and no.”

“Keep the door secure, do not leave until we give the all clear.”

I answered the officer’s questions, but my attention was on my students and the other officers.  I watched as the other officers moved about the room looking each student over carefully.  One student remained with her hands up and was shaking.  Other students froze in place.

After leaving, many students were agitated.  The room was hot, many felt violated, and several wanted to leave.  Some students were pacing throwing the backpacks.  Other students stated: “I don’t give a F***, I don’t trust the police at all!”  Another student said: “All we see on the news all we hear about are police shooting people who look like us, I thought I was going to die.”  That last student cried for a while after words.    Other students had the opinion: “That the way it is. Whatever.”

Police came in much harder than they ever have before.  During other lockdowns, an officer would poke their head in the room for a quick check.  This was a full entry. It was much more intrusive and in our face.

I was upset.  I wanted to get off campus as soon as possible. So did the students.

They gave the all clear and my students bolted off campus. There was an officer outside our room and looked closely again at each student as they left.  As I left campus the press, superintendent, and various rubberneckers were crowed in our parking lot.

A new year

datadan Uncategorized ,

Another school year is about to being and it has been teaching training and get ready week.  There are new faces, new protocols, and new plans to implement.  Yet while some teachers enter with guarded anticipation and varying levels of excitement, other teachers bring a load of negativity.

Make no mistake, teaching is hard business.  If it is not the students who are trying to get to you, its idea-foisting administration, or coworkers who are not possibly doing as good as they could be doing that use up what little time there is to prepare.  Making it especially hard, was a physical move our school did.   In addition, everyone got new computers, which should have been a boon.

Instead of gratitude, people grumbled, because they couldn’t figure out the new Microsoft Office products, their printers didn’t work, their short cuts didn’t work.   Wifi?….”Why can’t this stuff just work!”  (More of a comment, then a real question).  I spent most of my time helping fellow staff through these problems, they were grateful, but mostly aggravated towards administration for making them suffer through this.

Part of me wanted to say: “Do you really want to spend your emotional and psychological energy into being angry?”  I choose not to.  Nor did I have the heart to say, adapt or fail.  We ask are students to adapt to new learning situations regularly.  What makes humans special is our ability to adapt.  Most of the complaints revolved around requirements on adapting to new software, hardware, and policies.  Sure, there are some legitimate concerns on whether those policies will benefit our students.  I wonder if deep down, the concern comes from there, or from a fear of change and an unwillingness to truly evaluate if existing protocols were best practices or not.  Certainly many teachers believe they do great work, and if not, it’s certainly better then the teacher next door.

In dealing with my angrier colleagues, I chose to give them space.  They connect well with students, but choose not to participate in how to make things better from a organizational or structural standpoint (except for: leave me be and let me do what I want).  They want to point out all things wrong with change, but don’t propose improvements or collaborate on how to make it better.  They want the status quo.

As for me, I’m hopeful about the upcoming year.  New plans, new ideas, and refined older ones await my students.     One…Two…Three…Go!

The biggest and the oldest!

datadan Outdoor Education , ,

Another treat this summer was the first time 10 years I got a week to myself.  I took myself to Sequoia to see some the of the largest single living organisms in the world: The great sequoias.  Capturing the size and majesty of these enormous trees in photograph or a words is impossible.  They are huge. They are old. And they are resilient.

Here you can see General Sherman with some ant-like people next to it.

Sequoia_2014 106

Some General Sherman facts (courtesy of wikipedia):

  • Circumference at ground: 102 feet
  • Circumference at base: 36.5 feet
  • Height above base: 275 feet
  • Estimated bole mass:  2,472,000 lb

A truly massive tree.  But what some of the things that make sequoia interesting is their resiliency:

Sequoia_2014 016

You can see that this tree has been burned.  Want to know what the base looks like?

sequoia_base

 

Less than 1/4 of the this tree’s base remains.  Yet it supports a massive amount of heft.

sequoia_face

 

Some of the sequoias had faces.  This tree was at the end of the Redwood Canyon Trail.

 

Later in this trip, I ventured to the Bristlecone Forest.  Where the oldest living organisms live: The Bristlecone Pine trees.  At about 9,000 feet in a very punishing environment, these trees grow on rocky slopes, where vegetation has no reason to exist, yet these trees thrive and persevere over many millennia.  Walking through the Methuselah grove, trees dating as old as 4900 years old still grew nearby.  Like the sequoias, these trees are survivors.  In some cases less that 40% of their bark remains, and the tree continues to grow.  In other cases, all but a single branch of the tree would be dead.  Here are some of my favorite photographs.

bristlecone_pine_root  bristleconepine_2

bristlecone_pine_3 moonbow

 

The wood is dense and smooth.  The air is clean.  The area is quiet.  On my six am hike I ran into two other hikers taking pictures.  I heard them long before  I even saw them.  At night I camped at the Grandview campground and was treated to a moonbow.  Although spectacular it made constellation viewing impossible.

 

There were some awesome learning opportunities here:

Manazanar National Park, The Sequoia Institute, and an extremely supportive ranger staff committed to project based education.  I drove all the way home trying to figure out how to get my family and students down there.

 

 

 

Alaska

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I just came back from great excursion to Alaska.   Before going a friend told me it rained a lot there, and if he had to pick one word to describe it, it would be “wild”.

I visited:

Alaska is indeed  big place.  It is full of natural wonders both living and geological.   To put some perspective on this fact Alaska is comprised of 663,268 square miles with a population of 731,4449 (1.1 people per square mile), while California is 163,696 square miles (a fourth the size) with a population of 38 million (232 people per square mile).   To put it another way more people live in San Francisco (805,000) than live in all of Alaska.  Or to put it another way cities the size of Fort Worth (741,206), Charlotte (731,424), or Detroit (713,777) have a population equivalent to that of Alaska.  (All numbers correspond to 2010 census data from wikipedia).

Because everything is so big I had trouble estimating sizes and distances.  Glaciers for example.

How tall is the face of this glacier?

alaska_2014_1 964    another view same boat when we caught up with it.      alaska_2014_1 972

 

The boat is 1/4 mile away from the glacier by regulation and according to the captain we are about 1/2 mile away from the Blackstone glacier.

Climate change is evident in in many ways in Alaska.

In this article the Susan Huse documents the retreat of the Exit Glacier.

 

Date
(Year A.D.)
Distance of Retreat
ft (m)
Retreat Rate
ft/yr (m/yr)
1815 – 1889
230 (70)
3 (1)
1889 – 1891
299 (91)
151 (46)
1891 – 1894
446 (136)
147 (45)
1894 – 1899
935 (285)
187 (57)
1899 – 1914
630 (192)
43 (13)
1914 – 1917
909 (277)
302 (92)
1917 – 1926
974 (297)
108 (33)
1926 – 1950
469 (143)
23 (7
1950 – 1961
692 (211)
62 (19)
1961 – 1968
794 (242)
115 (35)
1968 – 1973
171 (52)
33 (10)
Total Retreat
6549 (1996)
43 (13)

View the table on the right and you can get an appreciation for the numerical distance of retreat over a brief time.  The question remains: What is the quantity of retreat since 1973? This map by Katie Bauman indicates about a 30-100 foot retreat depending on where you measure from 1973 t0 1985.

 

 

 

 

We could visually see the retreat from 1998 to 2015 here.  I took the picture at the point where in 1998 visitors could stand and touch the glacier.

Exit_glacier if you look hard you can see the people about 1/4 of mile up on a net path to get visitors closer to the glacier.

exit_glacier_s2

 

In the Mendanhall glacier the retreat has also been dramatic:

Figure showing the terminus of mendenhall glacier (study area) at different times

Below is a 350 look at the Mendanhall glacier (imaged above).

 

As I pondered these great shift I was reminded in Yukon Beringia Interpretive Center that as recent as 10,000 years ago, most of North America was an ice field and there was a plains continent where the Berring sea now lies.  Archaeological evidence puts the earliest homo sapiens in this area between 32 and 14 thousand years ago according to the center for the study of the first Americans.    The center had a great display on biological adaptability and climate change.  It used the Woolly Mamoth as an example.  This species was robust and lasted for 3 million years.  But it’s shape and tooth shape were specialized and when the environment changed, it could not adapt with it.  This was compared to what we call the African Elephant which has been around for 50 million years.    Homo Sapiens have also been on the radar for only 3 million years.  How will we adapt to changing climate, the decline of availability of fossil resources, and increases in population?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.fws.gov/alaska/nwr/map.htm

Debt

datadan Uncategorized , , , ,

Quote:

A 2013 study by the urban institute shows that:

  1. 35% of USA citizens (77 million) with a credit file, have a report of debt collections.
  2. They owe an average of %5178 (median $1,349).
  3. Debt in collections involve a nonmortgage bill – such as credit card balance, medical or utility bill – that is more than 180 days past due and has been placed in collections.
  4. 5.3 percent of people with a credit file have a report of past due debt, indicating they are between 30 and 180 days late on a nonmortgage payment.
  5. Both debt in collections and debt past due are concentrated in the South.

How can these facts be used in the classroom?

In statistics

Have students read the article:

  • What considerations were taken by the study.
  • How did they collect their data?
  • Mean v Median….why does it matter here?
  • Why mention there is a correlation between high debt and geographic location?

Algebra II

  • The effects of credit card debt, compound interest, and exponential growth.

 

 

Great Studies to use in Statistics

datadan Uncategorized , ,

 

Studies that I managed to acquire by contacting the scientist and requesting a copy for my classroom:

 

Cannabis Use Is Quantitatively Associated with Nucleus Accumbens and Amygdala Abnormalities in Young Adult Recreational Users : Jodi Gilman (et al.)  4/2014.

 

Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks.  Kramer, Adam ; Guilleroy, Jamie, Hancock Jeffery.

The Third Wheel: The Impact of Twitter Use on Relationship Infidelity and Divorce. ClaytonRussell B.. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. July 2014, 17(7): 425-430. doi:10.1089/cyber.2013.0570.

Autmaticy of social Behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and Stereotype Activation on Action. Bargh, John; Chen, Mark; Burrows, Lara

  • Released through Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

This one here on debt

Air Pollution and Suicide: Amanda Bakian.

 

Professional Development – Research

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It’s time to start a collection of Professional Development Resources.  This post will be devoted to books and articles regarding research inspired in part by Joe Hallgarten’s piece: “If you can’t stand the research get out of the classroom?“.   If you are looking for workshops, conferences, or institutes  look over here.

Books

  1. Classroom Instruction that Works; Research based strategies for increasing student achievement by Marzano, Pickering, and Pollack.
  2. The Teaching Gap: Best ideas from the world’s best teachers, Stigler, James.
  3. Knowing and teaching elementry school math: Teachers’ Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States (Studies in Mathematical Thinking and Learning Series).  Ma, Liping
    • ISBN: 10: 0415873843
    • A great investigation into knowing something deeply affects teaching.
  4. test

Articles

  1. “If you can’t stand the research get out of the classroom?“, Hallgarten, Joe

Websites

  1. Youcubed started by Joe Boeler on revolutionizing how math is learned and taught.