North to Alaska. Trailer Sailing the Inside Passage.

I am doing this travelog on the installment plan. I had great hopes of writing blogs over the summer while we were sailing. But I didn’t. I’ll try to blame it on the electronics, we had trouble keeping the computer charged, but really I needed to recharge myself even more. And downloading pictures, organizing them and writing frankly didn’t stir me. So now with the rains of fall coming and sitting in my Lazyboy I figure it is about time. My wife Viviann and I took our third trip to Alaska on Red the 27 foot trailer sailer I designed and built. We ended up spending about five weeks and going about 900 miles on the water. We live in Quilcene WA and trailer the boat to Prince Rupert BC. Ketchikan Alaska is ninety miles north of there and is where most folks go through customs. Viviann deserves credit for almost all the pictures. Getting out of the driveway onto the road is a major accomplishment. Here we are on the Edmonds-Kingston ferry. It's the 3rd of July and I snuck in under the fifty foot mark. Actually I had measured and I was about 6" over. Sometime you need to stick it to the man. After taking an hour and a half to go about 25 miles, it is the day before the 4th of July after all, it was pretty smooth driving up to the Canadian border at Sumas. We did make a quick stop in Bellingham at West Marine to buy a replacement solar vent. Unfortunately I couldn’t figure out how to install it until I brought it back after the trip, so we weren’t as well ventilated as I might have liked. Oh well something had to go wrong. I’m including a few pictures of the highway to encourage anyone to do this trip. It is worth the drive especially since the route is beautiful and the roads are in good shape with shoulders and passing lanes every ten miles or so. This is the hairiest part of the trip going up the Fraser River. It is pretty steep with pullouts for trucks to check their brakes. That wacky Canadian sense of humor. Our second night at Ten Mile Lake Provincial park near Quesnel BC which is about 375 miles north of the border. We are always the center of attention among all the campers and travel trailers. The next day we drive on through Prince George with the cheapest diesel in the Canadian part of the trip at about $4.75 a gallon. Then onto Houston with the world’s larges fly rod. After about 800 miles we pull into the driveway of the organic farm where our daughter Lilly is spending the summer near Smithers BC. Nice view from the front yard. It turned out it was the 30th annual Smithers’ Music Festival that weekend so we relaxed and spent the weekend hanging out with our daughter and listening to music and taking in the scene. These were a group of native dancers. Local color My daughter’s cabin. Small but cute. My daughter and I share birthdays. The best present I ever got. Here we are enjoying the birthday girl’s favorite birthday cereal. Reese’s Pieces or some such thing. Wildlife near Smithers. Then Lilly gave us a bicycle tour of beautiful Smithers. Back on the highway down the Skeena River to Prince Rupert. After a week of hot weather the cool damp coast of Prince Rupert was a nice place to rig the boat. On the other two trips up I had used the Travel-lift to put in and take out. It was always quite a bit more expensive than at home but I didn’t know if I could launch and retrieve the boat off the trailer so I just bit the bullet and paid. But this time I called the boatyard and their minimum rate was $300 each way. Yikes. So I talked to a lot of folks at the boat ramp and decided to go for the gusto. It worked out fine, the boat slipped off though I had to tie it to the dock, pull the truck forward and then back further down again to get it off the trailer. Later to put it back on I lowered the rear part of the bunks and it was easy. The ramp is steep, wide and paved. There was a fair amount of traffic as fishing was good but it worked out fine. Though when I came back down to the boat after parking the truck, a powerboat had tied up behind and they were a little miffed that a sailboat had tied up to the ramp dock. When I explained we had just launched it they were surprised and a little taken aback. Not a lot of sailboats up here period, let alone ones that launch from a trailer. And now were are floating pretty. Like I said it is about ninety miles to Ketchikan the closest place to check into US customs. At five knots it is a two day trip so I called ahead and told them I would be anchoring along the way. They like that. On the first trip I didn’t know you were supposed to let them know and they would have been upset, except I had run aground on the way and hurt my arm pretty badly. It was swollen up and looked like it was possibly broken, so while the harbormaster waited to drive me to the emergency room, the customs guys weren’t too concerned with a lack of a phone call. I wouldn’t recommend hurting yourself as a way to avoid scrutiny however. Just make the call. Most cruising on the Inside Passage is fairly protected except for crossing Dixon Entrance which is between Prince Rupert and Ketchikan. It is a stretch of water 40 miles wide that is fully open to the Pacific. It can be terrifyingly rough. My brother fished commercially for many years in Alaska and told me crossing Dixon Entrance during a storm was the only time on a boat that he ever thought he was going to die. So we pick our weather carefully. This time we were able to go across the day after we put in the water. On the trip before we waited almost a week in Prince Rupert for the weather to clear. You just never know but I would rather wait that not. This picture was typical of the weather this time. Here is the latest in iPad accessories. I was running out time and had to make my own floatable “waterproof” case. I used INavX on it and it worked great. I did replace the Ziplock every once in a while. Here are a couple of little cruisers we ran into coming into Ketchikan. I couldn’t come any closer or their helicopters would strafe me. We met up with my nephew Jake on a purse seiner in Thomas Basin which is where we like to moor. It is 58 foot wooden limit seiner. By the end of the season it turns out they had caught over a million pounds of salmon. It was a good year. Then one of the cruise ships came in. This is Disney’s one and it played the theme from the Magic Kingdom on its horn. How is that for corporate branding? If you look close you can see my nephew’s seiner tied up to the dock below it. It looks only slightly bigger than the lifeboats. Then a little shopping in Ketchikan Then some real shopping, showers at the swimming pool, the sun comes out and we are off. We head south from Ketchikan to circumnavigate Prince of Wales Island.

Flashbulbs, Technology and Permanence. Using the Obsolete to Teach Science

 I set off a flashbulb the other day in science class. My students were so impressed you would have thought I had shown them fire for the first time. And in a sense maybe I had. I set it off with a heavy chrome-plated flashgun that I inherited from my father. My father was a commercial photographer in the 1950’s and 1960‘s. When he died I ended up with a couple of camera cases full of gear including several dozen flashbulbs. My students immediately wanted me to set off another one, which I did, and four or five cell phones immediately appeared in order to record it.

There is some irony in this. We have been studying lightbulbs, the incandescent type, essentially unchanged since Edison. It no longer surprises me that my students don't know how something as ubiquitous and common as a lightbulb works, so we do a lab where they dissect one; they remove the glass, measure and examine the filament, trace the path of the current though it, then turn on the light in the presence of air. It burns white as the sun for an instant then burns out with a puff of smoke.

But unlike the cell phone, incandescent lightbulbs are on the way out. The government has mandated their demise because they are energy hogs. But their immediate replacement, the compact fluorescent, has a trifle of mercury in them and works in a far more mysterious manner than simply using electricity to heat up a thin wire until it glows. So not only are they more confusing to understand, if a teacher had their kids break the spiraled glass to get at one of these bulb’s innards, they could expect a hazmat team to show up in their classroom. 

Since my kids have started doing this lab I have learned there is more to a lightbulb than I would have guessed. There is a built-in fuse to prevent a fire in case of a short circuit within the bulb and like many people, I was under the misconception that lightbulbs had a vacuum to keep oxygen from burning out the filament. Instead they are filled with argon, an inert gas, that has the advantage that its pressure slows the sublimation of the tungsten filament. This sublimation is how a light bulb eventually fails. My students come to understand that since there is no oxygen inside a light bulb really doesn’t "burn out” and what a fine word like sublimation means.

This leads to why I set off the flashbulb. It is a technology even more obsolete than the lightbulb, in fact it is only slightly more advanced than the tray of flash powder it replaced. A flashbulb is a simple affair, they look like a lightbulb but instead of being filled with an inert gas, it is filled with oxygen. And instead of a tungsten filament there is a tuft of finely shredded  aluminum. When a tiny current flows through it it does "burn out" and it does it quickly. It produces a brilliant flash, a flash that left my students awestruck, blinded with a bright yellow shadow before their eyes. The bulb blisters, smokes and it too hot to touch. Growing up I saw my father take many pictures with this very flash gun. It has a red button that ejects the hot bulb and my father would deftly catch them and like a magician make them disappear into the pocket of his suit jacket. 

I was surprised at my student’s enthusiasm because even the cheapest throwaway camera uses a miniature strobe light that is technologically light years ahead of a flashbulb. But while I can talk about the quantum mechanics behind a high voltage electrical field that ionizes the gas in a strobe until gives off light, that is beyond abstract and there is something about the inherent simplicity of flashbulb that allows for understanding. 

Sometimes I wonder if this approach is a good one. A teaching colleague and myself had a spirited discussion that arose over an offhand comment about whether students should learn how a phonograph works. I argued yes, for several reasons. First there is the historical: a phonograph, like a cell phone was a breakthrough technology in its day. 

Second, it is a wonderful opportunity to show a practical application of how a changing magnetic field creates a changing electrical field, something that an amplifier and speakers can turn into sound. It can also show how sound is created by simple vibrations when a student puts a pin in a piece of tagboard and listens carefully as the point traces the spiral grooves of the record. 

But at least as important to me, a phonograph, lightbulb or a flashbulb shows kids that technologies can be understood. Whereas a cell phone, computer, or an iPad are pure magic, they might as well be filled with fairy dust, a thin piece of wire glowing white hot is as primal as fire. A needle vibrating as it rubs on the striations of a record can make the voice of Caruso come alive. 

And there is also the sentimental in showing my students my father’s tools. His flashgun was made for the eternities. It was a tool built as tough as a hammer that demonstrated a belief in permanence. Or, one could equally argue, that it demonstrated a stubbornness, a refusal, to believe that all technology changes. 

But it does have a heft and seriousness to it that most of today’s ephemeral technologies don’t share. And because of that ruggedness it is still works. And because of that I can demonstrate to my students that what they don’t understand doesn’t need to be explained by magic or ignored because it is incomprehensible. 

Drop by Drop. The Value of Small Acts of Activism.

Loomis Miller

My father was an active conservationist in the 1960's and 1970's. At that time there were still serious proposals to log the Olympic National Park. He was particularly concerned over an effort to build a highway along the Washington coast from the northwestern-most tip of the state down to the Oregon border. This included a strip of stunningly beautiful coastline that was the only wilderness on the continental west coast.

It was argued that this highway would boost tourism and create jobs. It would be progress. But he thought that conserving a wilderness beach was more important than turning Washington's coastline into Seaside Oregon, our version of Coney Island. He figured there were already enough souvenir stands selling postcards of beautiful beaches.

He was a commercial photographer and, along with others, he hiked the beaches, camped in the rain, took pictures and gave slide shows to anyone who would stay awake to watch them. He wrote letters to lawmakers and generally made a nuisance of himself. In the end, the highway wasn't built, and if you ever get a chance to hike this wild beach along our coast I'm sure you would agree that it is a rare treasure. And, if you want souvenir stands, there are still lots of those in other places.

My father was no John Muir, he didn't neglect his family and dedicate his life to this cause and he didn't stop the highway by himself. But he added a few drops to a stream of activism that saved one small part of our natural world.

This all comes to mind because of a response to an email I sent out recently. I am the president of our small local teachers union. I am one of those union bosses you hear so much about. I encouraged our members to contact their legislators to urge them to restore some of the cuts that our school, students and teachers, have taken over the last few years.

The person responding to my email was frustrated because we really have gotten a raw deal for years. We wrote letters, we called legislators, we attended town hall meetings, we wore tee shirts, and what did it get us?  Well, we haven't gotten raises; hell, we took pay cuts, we still have large classes, we took the state to court and won, and even with that nothing seems to change. So the writer asked, “Really, what was the point?” I totally get the frustration.

But I would simply answer that without activism it would be worse, a lot worse. I would argue that without the 100,000 phone calls that our state union’s members made, we would have a governor that is even less concerned about the welfare of students and teachers than the one we do have. I would argue that without the letters and phone calls we would have health care costs that are higher than we already do. And I would argue that without educators in the field saying enough is enough, we would be faced with even more brain dead education reforms than we already are.

And I don’t think I even need to argue that without folks writing letters, making phone calls, and giving slide shows, we would have burger stands instead of stands of old growth cedars along the Washington coast.

So, are things ever going to improve, and not just get worse less quickly? I really hope that is the case but I can't be sure. But I am absolutely positive that if our side isn't heard, public education will suffer. And kids will ultimately suffer the most.

All parents give their children advice, and like most children, I didn't listen as much as I might have. But near the end of his life, my father and I were talking about a fight we were having in my small town. It had resulted in the anti-tax gang failing several school levies in a row. Our local school was hurting, kids were losing out, and it seemed like there was no light at the end of the tunnel. He simply said, "Todd, don't let the sons of bitches win." So that's why I fight, so the sons of bitches don't always win.

The 1:1 Classroom is So 2012.

Ipads, Orangutans and Steam Engines, an Argument for the Real. 

I have been concerned that the 1:1 classroom might be getting a bit long in the tooth, and when I saw that the National Zoo is providing their orangutans with iPads I knew my worries were true. A quote from the article spells it out,  “Don’t be surprised when these adorable species will start using iPads soon to keep them from getting bored.” In an Apps For Apes program our national zoo’s clever primates are playing drums, pianos, or, in one example, a 25-year old orangutan stares Zen-like at animated fish while listening to new age music. http://www.ubergizmo.com/2013/01/orangutans-now-use-ipads/

In case Edu-Speak isn’t your native language, the one-to-one classroom means that there is one computer or iPad or some cheap off-brand tablet for every student to use in a classroom. This is the dream of all technologically literate and responsible teachers. In fact, in some circles it is considered professional malpractice to settle for anything less. And thanks to all the unchallenged publicity about how well this engages and teaches students, more and more districts and teachers are achieving this technological Nirvana. When the Golden Ratio of Tech to Kid is reached then as near as I can tell the teachers put their feet up on the desk while the students are so engaged with their own learning that some of them wet their pants and skip lunch because they forget to take a break. 

But in light of the fact that iPads have been reduced to entertaining orangutans, I think the one to one ratio has jumped the shark. For the 2013’s we need to move beyond a mere 1:1 classroom to at least a 2:1 or even better a 3:1 classroom. I have been informed by people who are obviously smarter than I am, that today’s kids are not like us digital dinosaurs. They were born with silicon chips in their mouths, they have had instant access to unlimited information ever since they Googled who the hell Einstein was,  the minute their Baby Einstein video was over. If they aren’t texting, Tweeting, Facebooking, Chat Rouletting or Instagraming then they are playing video games that teach them educationally useful skills, such as stealing cars and how to avoiding learning anything that isn’t fun. 

And this brings me to why the 1:1 ratio is no longer enough. According to “Jobs' Law.” any piece of tech equipment that you give a kid will be uncool six months after it is released. Recently I had a kid throwing his cell phone against a wall hoping to break it so that he could get a new one. The iPad 4 we get kids this year won’t even make a cool door stop in a couple of years. And is anybody still using their Polaroid camera, VHS tapes, Atari, flip phone, Zune, boombox, AOL, or floppy discs? Yes, for you non-dinosaurs, floppy discs were once cutting edge. 

How can cash strapped schools compete?  Well, it isn’t a matter of how, it is a matter of survival, and we need to move beyond this self defeating paradigm of 1:1. We need to invest in not just a computing platform for every kid, but a gaming one too, and maybe one pair of Google Glasses per child. Perhaps widescreen tv’s lining classroom walls like in a sports bar would be a good idea and one to one jetpacks wouldn’t hurt either.  Anything less and the kids will be bored which means we will never get their attention, and without that they will never learn anything and the collapse of civilization is not far behind. It will be hard to keep up with this technological arms race, but like the real arms race we just have to suck it up and spend what it takes.

Of course there will be the Luddites who just don’t get it. They will try to argue that there may be alternatives to going virtual. And they might have a point. I have to admit that I like steam engines. Luckily the Steam Punk trend has allowed me to come out of the closet about this, but I still have a toy steam engine that I had as a kid. 

In science, when we are studying heat, I bring it out and fire it up. The kids always laugh when I tell them how my friend Dorian and I would would spend hours in his basement running it and pretending we were manning the engine room of an ocean liner. But they always stop laughing when the little engine that could starts running. It fumes like a teakettle, it stinks, its little whistle gives off a shriek and the flywheel spins. I remind them that they have seen one like it, only much larger when they watched Leonardo DeCaprio in Titanic. I point out that this was a technology that arguably changed the world more than computers, cell phones or, God help us, Ataris. In fact, steam fueled the industrial revolution that has led to everything they now take for granted. 

If I had even a 1:1 classrooom,  I wouldn’t need to go to the trouble of firing up my toy. I could turn them loose and they could research steam engines, they could see animations of how they work, they could watch videos of steam engines far more impressive than my little toy. But those things aren’t real. They don’t smell, they don’t whirl before your eyes, they don’t give off heat. They are images on a screen and in my experience the real trumps the screen every time. 

And before anyone points out that I am not typing this on my trusty Remington, that I am virtually connecting with anyone who reads this, that I used Google to research this post, and that paper replaced papyrus, I get it. I know there is a place for technology in our lives. I want my kids to be able to find information, connect with their friends and research their interests or maybe even research steam engines. But I also know our kids have no shortage of technology in their non-school lives and maybe school can be a place that emphasizes the real. 

Of course dinosaurs like me may go extinct, maybe our style deserves to go the way of the small brained. Maybe we need to move on, being unable to adapt. But I still think having a six year old, or a sixteen year old, make a Plaster of Paris dinosaur footprint has more value than looking at a picture of one, even if the picture is in 3-D. And if they want to they can use my foot as a model. 

Perfectly Circular Holes, Differentials and Wooden Cougar Skulls.

Finding Usefulness in the Useless.

Recently  I received my first hate mail for a blog  post I wrote about not wanting to be told I had to become a better teacher. You can find it here.  The hate mail wasn’t really hateful, more just rude, unkind and not based on the facts, which I suppose hate is, too, but it did make me think. The writer, a fellow who I'll call Richard, said he was an assistant principal and that I was the poster child for why teacher unions and teacher tenure should be abolished. If not for high-priced lawyers he would “fire my ass.” I shouldn’t be allowed around children, I was pretty much useless and so on. Well, being the introspective fellow that I am, I have reflected a bit on this and the writer may have a point.

I teach in a small rural high school and as a result I wear many hats. Besides teaching three different science classes, I have two woodworking classes with kids ranging from those who have never cut anything more challenging than butter to students who have worked with me for four years, often more than once a day. 

And here I wonder if Richard isn’t right. The kids have four required projects that sequentially teach them skills and safety around machines that can turn their fingers into hamburger. After that, they can pretty much build whatever  they want. And this continues as long as they are in woodshop. So I have students building everything from chairs they may never sit in to bookcases for books they don't have.

Now I am sure there are state standards for what I should be doing in shop. But luckily my administrators don’t have time to get worked up over them, either because there are no high stakes standardized tests in woodworking, or, according to Richard, since my job is as secure as the Queen Mother’s they can’t do anything about me in any case, so why bother.

But I do have a few standards of my own that I follow. These weren’t developed by consultants or committees, so I am sure they are lacking in all sorts of important ways. 

My first standard is that students show up on time and get to work. As any teacher or business person knows, this isn’t an easy one to meet. 

My second is that students work to the best of their ability. They don’t get to move on until their project meets a very subjective standard of mine, which is, if they take the project home, are their parents going to be impressed that their child built this, or are they going to say, "Mr. Miller lets you get away with building this POS..." and he shouldn’t be allowed to work around children, yada, yada, yada.

My third standard is that students have to have something “useful” to work on and then they need to put in time on that project. This isn’t an easy one, either. Often high school kids don’t always have projects they want to build, period, and who gets to decide what’s useful anyway?

Industry certainly has an idea of what is useful. In a feeble effort to improve myself, last summer I sat in on a seminar sponsored by Boeing and other local industries to find ways to encourage kids to go into manufacturing and the STEM fields. 

There was a presentation by a Boeing representative about how Boeing uses the local high school skills center to teach kids how to become airframe specialists. He showed off a section of an airframe: imagine someone had taken a Skilsaw and cut a random square out of a 737 about the size of a pizza box. It was shiny and smooth and lined with hundreds of perfectly spaced rivets in perfect rows. Just like you would want to see the next time you board a jetliner.

 He explained that this was the culminating project of an eight week course on how to drill perfect circular holes in perfectly spaced patterns and perfectly rivet them together so that your next ride in a 737 doesn’t end up like this. 

Now that is useful. Trust me, I want my rivets in rows as much as the next fellow and here these folks have high school students learning this important and useful skill.  

And what do I have my kids doing? Pretty much any damn thing they want. 

You see, in my class, the kids get first right of refusal on what is useful. I have one boy building a custom gaming chair complete with drink holder so a moment won't be lost while he is zapping aliens.  I have a kid building an amazingly elegant, but possibly uncomfortable lounge chair, who will learn first hand where form and function collide. 

 I  have a couple of less directed boys who were always at a loss for useful projects so I put them to work doing shop improvements. After a few days of this they came to me and told me they had a plan. They wanted to build a game table out of the blown out rear end of one of their pickup trucks, the differential.  I was so happy they had a project that I said sure. And build it, they have. It stands about four feet tall and weighs over a hundred pounds. When I asked how were they going to sit at it, they replied that they would build tall stools. They learned how to weld and forge steel, and that an idea and its execution are two different things. And we all do like to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right?

 I also have a very creative and talented young woman carving an accurate and realistic life-sized cougar skull out of basswood. The real cougar skull is a family heirloom that resides in a velvet lined box. She reminds me of Hamlet as she studies the skull from all angles and sketches and carves it. She has become intimate with her project, she totally owns her learning, and in the end it has absolutely no practical use. There is no wooden skull reproduction industry threatening to ship its jobs over seas if our schools can't provide skilled skull carvers. But she is happy and so am I. 

So, in the end, who is right? Do we need skilled workers who can build airplanes in American factories for decent wages? Absolutely. Do we need people who are willing to do repetitive, precise, detailed work? Absolutely. Do we want the workers who rivet our airplanes to be free spirits who drill their holes any old place they want to? I would hope not. 

But we also need the type who see a cougar skull as more than a dead piece of bone and create something unexpectedly beautiful out of nothing. Or maybe an entrepreneur who looks at a junked airplane and sees furniture. Or the kid who decides that drilling hole after perfect hole isn't what they want to do for life and maybe they want to try something more interesting. Even if they can't meet the standards of fellows like Richard, maybe they would consider teaching. You never know where a little uselessness might lead. 

Please Don't Try and Make Me Into a Better Teacher.

The more I teach the less I want to think about teaching. At a recent district wide science and math meeting I announced, “I have no interest in improving my teaching.” This shocked pretty much everyone within earshot, and like a politician trying to take back an unfortunate soundbite, I backtracked on my words and tried to explain them. But fundamentally they were true. I have taught for fifteen years and that is long enough for someone who makes it past the first few trying and desperate years to learn the craft. And a lot of it is a craft. Preparing lessons, time management, grading papers, learning to manage a classroom are skills that one learns over time and skills that become easier with time. 

And just because I want to think less about teaching doesn’t mean that I do.  In the shower in the morning I tweak my lesson plans  for the day. I wake up in the middle of far too many nights with school on my mind and on my drive home I still wonder and reflect about what went well and what didn’t. But what I don’t want to do is to told I have to read books about teaching techniques, be forced to “reflect” on my teaching for my evaluation or generally keep being told that I need to improve my teaching. Frankly I am good enough. 

I once heard an interview with Bob Dylan who was asked whose music did he listened to and who influenced him now. He laughed and said he didn’t really listen to anyone anymore. Why would he, he is Bob Dylan for Christ's sake? I am no Bob Dylan. And I’m not even proportionate in the teaching world to the Bob Dylan’s of our profession. 

But I am the teaching equivalent to a journeyman studio musician or a journeyman carpenter for that matter. I know what I am doing, I put in a full days work and I can be counted on to adapt to new situations, new curriculum and a changing student population. I try new things. I spend a lot of time finding new activities and techniques to connect better with my kids. I work to adapt my teaching to my audience just like any proficient professional will. But being a teacher is what I do, it is not my life. 

And I am think this is a good thing. In fact I think this balance in my life makes me a better teacher than I would be without it. It also means I haven’t burned myself out trying to be the Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ of teaching world. 

No one expects their accountant, their doctor, their lawyer, their favorite athlete or even their carpenter to routinely reform their profession, but for teachers reform is the norm. It is the norm to the point that veteran teachers roll their eyes with a “What goes around, comes around,” look at the introduction of the latest techniques  or technologies that we are expected to adopt to make every child succeed. 

But nobody talks about reforming our society so that kids aren’t left alone while their parent(s) work two jobs. Nobody talks about reforming our society so that our students most stable and caring place isn’t just in their classrooms.  Instead we reform education. We send teachers to relearn their craft on the fool’s errand that with enough  blame, with enough cajoling, with enough threats we can get teachers to solve the problems that our larger society refuses to face.  

But more training won’t teach me to me more empathetic. More accountability won’t tell me which kid’s parents are getting divorced. More inservices won’t help me notice that a kid is looking depressed. These are the intangibles that make me a better teacher. And I don’t want training in how to learn them. I think as caring aware humans we learn these lessons all on our own though experience and perseverance. And while we embrace the idealism and enthusiasm of new teachers, unfortunately idealism and enthusiasm are the first casualties of working in a system where your profession isn’t respected and you are blamed for the failures of that system. 

Most teachers are foot soldiers in the war on ignorance, a few make it to platoon leaders and an even fewer few might make the rank of of a non-commissioned officer and with that rank have some input into developing the strategy of this war. But unfortunately most of the educational strategists aren’t teachers, they don’t spend time in classrooms, instead they radio in their orders from afar. 

I am an optimist, I don’t think you can make teaching a career if you aren’t. But I am also a realist and I am not ashamed to say that that realism tells me to not to accept even more irrational responsibility for things that are out of my control as a teacher. So the next time some policy maker, politician or administrator tells me I need to improve my teaching I apologize in advance if the request is met with a roll of my eyes. 

The Allure of Fire.

Even using conservative archeological evidence, humans have been staring into fires at least 10,000 times as long as humans have been staring into computer screens. So what happened recently in the Materials Science class that I teach shouldn’t really have been a surprise 

I am trying to interest my students in metals. Where do metals come from, how do we get them, why should we care? I started the lesson with where do metals come from. The digital generation that is my students were only moderately engaged; in fact a couple were surreptitiously trying to use their cell phones. One student correctly answered, “From stardust.” Everyone laughed and I had to work to get their attention back. The lesson wasn’t going well; frankly, they didn’t seem very interested. After leading them to the understanding that almost all metals start as ores, I told them the story of how I personally got interested in this question. 

I was home sick one day, hypnotized by my laptop, when I found a video clip on You Tube simply titled “Making Steel from Dirt.” Watching it led me to an epiphany. A fellow who looked like a cast member from Deliverance was explaining the process of smelting iron from iron ore, or dirt. He was doing it essentially the same way it has been done since the beginning of the iron age. You really need just four things: iron ore (the right kind of dirt), charcoal, a furnace, and a source of air.

I then told my students that I had tried to do it myself. In fact I had tried it on three separate occasions. With the absolute certainty that only teenagers possess, several of them were happy to tell me that I had obviously wasted my time. 

By any rational accounting of time and money, I suppose I had. I spent many weekends collecting scrap wood and turning it into charcoal in a filthy process that could have been out of Dickens. Because I didn’t know where to dig for iron ore, I used my credit card and bought 150 pounds of commercial ore that is used for pottery glaze. I scrounged, bought and collected the parts to build three separate furnaces and spent days assembling them. Then, each actual smelting attempt took a complete day from morning to night to fire the furnace. 

I passed around the few bits of iron that was what I had to show from all this work. It wasn’t much, it could easily fit in one hand. My students enjoyed my joke that even if I had only paid myself minimum wage, in an ounce to ounce cost comparison my iron probably approached that of gold, if not platinum. With this revelation several more students joined the chorus that I really had wasted my time. 

After they all had a good laugh, I showed a short video of my own iron smelting adventures. The video is laced with clips of white hot fires, sparks lofting into the dark night, glowing coals and red hot slag pouring out of the furnace like blood. It isn’t a great video. I had pieced it together from clips people at the smelting party had taken, and the fact that people had come to watch this further amused my students. In the end there is a clip of me hammering a bit of white hot iron right out of the furnace and flattening it on the anvil. There were cheers from the people present. It wasn’t a lot, but I had wrestled iron from dirt. 

By the end of the video my room was quiet and I heard one student say, “Could we do that?” Then a couple more joined in. “Could we really do it?” I was surprised and taken aback. I sort of mumbled that we could, but it would have to be outside of the school day. It wasn’t something we could do during a regular class period. And the actual smelting would have to take place on a weekend. After explaining the time commitment, I asked again if they were still interested; they were. Then I asked for a show of hands from the rest of the class and to my surprise two thirds of the class wanted in. 

Two boys immediately offered to bring wood for charcoal. One of the only three girls in the class took it upon herself to schedule a time to start. I suggested she ask me next week as class was nearly over, and with determination she simply asked, “Is there any reason we couldn’t we pick a date now?” So we did. Next week we will start with making charcoal in this long process to recreate a discovery. 

For the ancients it took three of the four elements, earth, air and fire, to wring a new element, iron, out of the earth. For my students I think it was the fire that got them. Humans would not be human without controlling fire. This control changed the world in ways that make modern marvels like airplanes, cell phones and computers pale in comparison. And there is nothing more profoundly simple than staring into the depths of the coals and thinking about nothing and thinking about everything.

I am sure teenagers since the beginning of the human race really aren’t any different than my students, with their fascination with the new and interesting, their tendency to jump to next best thing. By next week, my student’s interest may have moved on so we will see if they show up. I hope they do.