doyle's New Writeups

carbon dioxide (essay)

2009-12-20T16:24:38Z

High school sophomores have firm convictions:

Neil Armstrong never walked on the moon.
We will all die in 2012.
Aliens walk among us.

In class I try to avoid opinions. In the short run, many of my lambs will remain confused. It is not my job to convince Amanda that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon--as soon as I use my position of authority to make a point, I've lost my chance to teach a child how to think.

It is my job, however, to make them skeptics, to have a sense of what we do not know, to suspend judgment while using their God-given senses and rationality to come to their own conclusions, conclusions that might change should new evidence become available. As a result, I fear that some day a mother will tell my principal that I did not vigorously dispel the notion of aliens, of rigged moonwalks, of the impending doom 3 short years away.

Or maybe the parents believe these things, too.

One of the hardest…

September 20, 2009 (person)

2009-09-20T00:54:37Z

I've been busy. Too busy.

Too busy to clam, to write, to stargaze, to play my guitar, to get drunk, to chase ghost crabs on midnight beaches, to watch the monarch butterfly migration, to catch sea bass, to carve wood, to watch the ferry come and go, to brew peach melomel, to be human.

Last night Leslie and I stargazed on the edge of the Delaware Bay, chased ghost crabs under the starlight, and today we raked up some clams from Richardson Sound. I will play my guitar tonight for her after an ale (or two), and tomorrow I hope to sit on the jetty and watch the butterflies flutter by. Next week I'm brewing peach melomel, come hell or high water, and I am "wasting" my time writing now.

My hands smell like low tide at the moment--I played, today, and rejoined the universe. Women and cilantro and bay mud all smell like life, and that's no accident. I forget sometimes. If I ever forget permanently, I may as well be dead.

Clamming is…

Lammas (person)

2009-08-01T23:18:58Z

The sunlight diminishes perceptibly now. The plants know.

The past week we've eaten deep purple eggplants and bright pink brandywine tomatoes, yellow summer squash and green-and-red striped beans. Today we will pick basil for pesto, some for tonight, some for February. A bowl full of ripe blueberries waits for us, sunlight incarnate. But the sunlight is dying, and the plants know.

We do not speak of religion in class, at least not formally, though students will occasionally ask religious questions, and I will deflect them. I explain that some things cannot be known through science, and that what I believe beyond the limits of science falls outside the province of class.

In class we talk of light and hormones, photoperiods and abscisic acids, to explain how plants know. We talk under the hum of fluorescent lights, time marked by defined blocks of time. In class, September light is exactly the same as February…

The Choice (essay)

2009-07-23T13:30:15Z

    The intellect of man is forced to choose
    perfection of the life, or of the work,
    And if it take the second must refuse
    A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
    When all that story's finished, what's the news?
    In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
    That old perplexity an empty purse,
    Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.

    W.B.Yeats

We just came back from overseas in a matter of hours, hurtling in an aluminum cocoon. It is easy to wax philosophical when staring at the Earth several miles below.

If you do not know all that grows within a yard or two from where you are sitting, and none of us do, then contemplating "life" while staring out a window 6 miles over the Earth is a mere conceit. Ireland does not exist in the sky.

Leslie and I walked a couple dozen miles on Inis Mór, part of the Aran Islands in the Galway Bay off Ireland. Each step was different. Each of hers was different from each of…

communion (person)

2009-07-01T02:34:53Z

Our neighbor's father died last night after a brief but ravaging illness.

The usual laughter rising over the fence has been missing the last few weeks, and I suspect it will be some time before it returns.

An earlier thunderstorm cleaned the air, as they do in Jersey, and the azure dusk sky marked the last few hours of June. My tiny pond was already wrapped in gray shadows, everything but the sky bled of color except for the occasional cool fire of a lightning bug.

The end of June marks the start of the dying of the light, punctuated by the mourning next door.

I turned to go back inside, then turned back again. I did not want June to end.

On top of the stockade fence separating our yards is a small platform I built a couple of years ago, a place for my potted plants to grab a little more light. (A maple tree keeps growing, and my garden now falls under its shade.)

A forgotten prickly pear sits in a cracked pot--I've had it for years, given to me…

June 23, 2009 (log)

2009-06-23T18:56:06Z

It's June.

Light, life, and more light and more life. Little makes sense, but in June the abundance pushes aside the questions.

I have tooth marks in my thumb from a fluke. A snake no longer than a ruler tried to strike me a few hours later. A lone bat heralded dusk.

School winds down in June.

Next year I plan to start with Darwin's idea of descent with modification. He did not invent evolution. He did, however, figure out that the raw beauty of life's symphony here can be explained without appealing to some central plan that places humans above all else.
It's all there for those who care to look.

If you are going to acknowledge something is unknowable or incomprehensible or too powerful to comprehend, hey, I'm right there with you. Many things will remain unknowable in any scientific sense.

When you try to explain the inexplicable, when you presume to know the "meaning" of existence, though, keep it outside my classroom door. I…