See what I found tucked away my document storage!

From a Teacher’s Diary – September 1967

Come into the Garden, Maude…………….

   Drawing by Antonia Bottinelli             Age 9   (Used with Antonia’s permission )

(Note: I left my classroom teaching position in the summer of 1967 to work as science advisor to the 365 public elementary schools in the Leicestershire Education Authority. My role focused on promoting, encouraging and supporting teachers’ classroom science. This journal entry was made in the early summer of 1967, at the end of an environmental education workshop with forty teachers.)

September 1967 - At the end of one of my pond-dipping workshops at Foxton Field Study Centre, we put our microscopes and white dishes to one side and talked about what we had discovered throughout the day. The conversation soon shifted to what was and what wasn’t going on in their classrooms Some, I knew, were comfortable teaching science, some weren’t.

One teacher, sitting at the back of the room, told me and the class what happened when she asked her 7 year olds to draw a garden worm. A little girl, with wide questioning eyes, put up her hand and said: "I've never seen a worm. How big are they? Are they like snakes?”  

The other teachers smiled – and I was reminded of the story I heard somewhere of the young boy who was flabbergasted when he saw a cow being milked on his first-ever visit to the farm. His only experience with milk was in bottles delivered on his doorstep by the milkman each morning.

This isn't so surprising, is it, when you think about it? If you live in a high-rise apartment building you don't have many encounters with worms or cows. But so what? Would it matter if our children grew up not knowing about cows and worms? What relevance have the lives and activities of cows and worms to the urban child who lives in a concrete environment? And, taking this further, does it matter that adults view many small creatures with distaste and pass on their prejudices to their children? After all, isn’t it true that smoldering beneath the surface of many of us are hostile attitudes to nature. Which one of us hasn't trapped and killed a mouse, stepped on a snail, crushed a spider, or swatted a fly?

Well, I think it does matter. Isn't it important that all children have an opportunity to experience the natural world first-hand and to learn about familiar living things that share the world with us? As teachers, shouldn't we provide the children in our care with the opportunity to discover the natural world for themselves, to learn to enjoy it and to appreciate our dependence upon it? Won't that subsequently encourage them to care for it?

For many teachers of young children, nature  (creepy crawlies, birds, rocks, fossils, for example) is an invaluable aid for educational purposes, an inspiration for discussion, science, language, art, music, and writing. They know that outside the door is a huge outdoor classroom, a place to learn about and to learn in. It needn't be a dense woodland, rich meadow, pond or clear mountain stream (they help, though!). A schoolyard, however sterile, is home to a myriad of interesting small animals. Turn over a brick and you find woodlice, slugs and snails. Standing in silky webs are spiders, hiding under dead leaves are earwigs, centipedes and millipedes. Lurking inside cracks in the wall are tiny beetles. Small animals have big life histories and are easy to keep for short periods of time. A friend of mine, a professional biologist, kept a small colony of woodlice in a tobacco tin for a few days, dropping in the occasional damp dead leaf for food. Not, of course, by any stretch of the imagination,  a recommended way of keeping small creatures, but it does show what is possible.

If we create appropriate classroom homes for small creatures, think of what our children could learn from observing creepy crawlies at close range. Woodlice, for example, would be ideal creatures to keep in the classroom. They’re easy to find and they’re so interesting!  Female woodlice mature when they are about two years old and rear their young in a brood pouch under their bodies. When the offspring are ready to emerge, the female stands still, and stretches her front legs out stiffly so that the young can crawl down to the ground. And snails! What wonderful creatures they are, and so easy to keep for a few days. As are spiders, and worms, and millipedes and slugs………………………….

If children are encouraged to find, watch, and understand how small creatures live, won't it help them learn to live in harmony with nature and appreciate living things? And, important for us teachers, doesn't a worm or a spider give us so many ways of developing classroom skills?

Try it and watch how it impacts the children!  And your classroom!!   

John Paull  1967        

'I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.’ Albert Einstein

'I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.’ Albert Einstein .............of course!! :) Thank you, Albert!

Having had a very early breakfast and done an hour or so feeding the birds, saying hello to the magpies, jays, squirrels, deer and rabbits, stroking Molly the neighbor's cat, chatting with Bertie and Fiona, picking weeds and watering the thirsty potted plants on both decks,  I'm sitting on the deck with my well-earned second round of tea (fourth cup, actually).................and I'm looking in awe at the view of the open countryside and the nearby trees, listening to the birds and staring at the beautiful blue sky.

Then, the thought occurred: hey, put your curiosity questions on your blog!! Why not?

So, here goes, here's what's in my mind this morning:

• A small house finch is hopping around on the deck, checking out what's there. S/he ignores the water in the bowl and isn't interested in the sunflower seed. My, it really has the sharpest beak! Ooops, it's gone - nothing appealed to it. What was it looking for?

• Meanwhile, there's another little red chested guy way up on top of the olive tree, looking down at me and talking its head off. Whatever is it saying? Is it talking to me? Oooh, it's just been joined by the most beautiful yellow chested bird...............they're staring at each other, but not uttering a sound. Are they friends? Sure hope so.

• The morning glory flowers are so beautiful - deep purple with five black stripes - what a contrast to the dominant, very tall, bright yellow sunflowers. They're all facing the rising sun and swaying gently in the breeze. Why are the sunflowers so tall? They sure need more water each day than I drink!

• Oooh, there's a kestrel hovering above, looking for its brekkie! (Seeing a kestrel always reminds me of my dad........his favorite bird). Wow! There it goes, swooping down. Wonder what it saw? My, oh, my. They have incredible eye sight!! I wonder how far they can see? Do they have good hearing, too? I wonder what their preferred breakfast is? A vole? Snake?

• Wish I could hover like a hawk!! Whatever do they think about?

• All the beautiful, towering olive trees........they've been here such a long time and, no doubt, seen a lot.........I wonder what they think of what they see, feel and hear today? They don't seem to mind the heat and I never water them. Should I?

• Well, our new fence is up and looking good. I've transplanted some climbers - hope they'll take. If so, we should get some dead good spiders living there pretty soon! Wonder what species we'll get?

My 73rd birthday, July 14th, 2015

A morning walk in Gateway Mesa..........

An interesting BBC article on the A Bomb.....

Given my long time friendship with David Hawkins and, through him, with Philip Morrison, both of whom were part of the atomic bomb project in Los Alamos during the second world war, I was intrigued to read this article in the BBC magazine today.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33365776

Was H.G.Wells the first one to think of the atomic bomb?

The atom bomb was one of the defining inventions of the 20th Century. So how did science fiction writer HG Wells predict its invention three decades before the first detonations, asks Samira Ahmed.

Imagine you're the greatest fantasy writer of your age. One day you dream up the idea of a bomb of infinite power. You call it the "atomic bomb".

HG Wells first imagined a uranium-based hand grenade that "would continue to explode indefinitely" in his 1914 novel The World Set Free.

He even thought it would be dropped from planes. What he couldn't predict was how a strange conjunction of his friends and acquaintances - notably Winston Churchill, who'd read all Wells's novels twice, and the physicist Leo Szilard - would turn the idea from fantasy to reality, leaving them deeply tormented by the scale of destructive power that it unleashed.

The story of the atom bomb starts in the Edwardian age, when scientists such as Ernest Rutherford were grappling with a new way of conceiving the physical world.

The idea was that solid elements might be made up of tiny particles in atoms. "When it became apparent that the Rutherford atom had a dense nucleus, there was a sense that it was like a coiled spring," says Andrew Nahum, curator of the Science Museum's Churchill's Scientists exhibition.

HG Wells in 1944

Wells was fascinated with the new discoveries. He had a track record of predicting technological innovations. Winston Churchill credited Wells for coming up with the idea of using aeroplanes and tanks in combat ahead of World War One.

The two men met and discussed ideas over the decades, especially as Churchill, a highly popular writer himself, spent the interwar years out of political power, contemplating the rising instability of Europe.

Churchill grasped the danger of technology running ahead of human maturity, penning a 1924 article in the Pall Mall Gazette called "Shall we all commit suicide?". In the article, Churchill wrote: "Might a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings - nay to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?"

This idea of the orange-sized bomb is credited by Graham Farmelo, author of Churchill's Bomb, directly to the imagery of The World Set Free.

By 1932 British scientists had succeeded in splitting the atom for the first time by artificial means, although some believed it couldn't produce huge amounts of energy.

But the same year the Hungarian emigre physicist Leo Szilard read The World Set Free. Szilard believed that the splitting of the atom could produce vast energy. He later wrote that Wells showed him "what the liberation of atomic energy on a large scale would mean".

Szilard suddenly came up with the answer in September 1933 - the chain reaction - while watching the traffic lights turn green in Russell Square in London. He wrote: "It suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction."

Illustration of the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction

In that eureka moment, Szilard also felt great fear - of how a bustling city like London and all its inhabitants could be destroyed in an instant as he reflected in his memoir published in 1968: "Knowing what it would mean - and I knew because I had read HG Wells - I did not want this patent to become public."

The Nazis were on the rise and Szilard was deeply anxious about who else might be working on the chain reaction theory and an atomic Bomb. Wells's novel Things To Come, turned into a 1936 film, The Shape of Things to Come, accurately predicted aerial bombardment and an imminent devastating world war.

In 1939 Szilard drafted the letter Albert Einstein sent to President Roosevelt warning America that Germany was stockpiling uranium. The Manhattan Project was born.

Find out more

HG and the H-Bomb by Samira Ahmed is broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday 5 July 2015. You can catch upvia the iPlayer.

Read Samira's blog on the making of the programme

Szilard and several British scientists worked on it with the US military's massive financial backing. Britons and Americans worked alongside each other in "silos" - each team unaware of how their work fitted together. They ended up moving on from the original enriched uranium "gun" method, which had been conceived in Britain, to create a plutonium implosion weapon instead.

Szilard campaigned for a demonstration bomb test in front of the Japanese ambassador to give them a chance to surrender. He was horrified that it was instead dropped on a city.

In 1945 Churchill was beaten in the general election and in another shock, the US government passed the 1946 McMahon Act, shutting Britain out of access to the atomic technology it had helped create. William Penney, one of the returning Los Alamos physicists, led the team charged by Prime Minister Clement Atlee with somehow putting together their individual pieces of the puzzle to create a British bomb on a fraction of the American budget.

Leo Szilard

"It was a huge intellectual feat," Andrew Nahum observes. "Essentially they reworked the calculations that they'd been doing in Los Alamos. They had the services of Klaus Fuchs, who [later] turned out to be an atom spy passing information to the Soviet Union, but he also had a phenomenal memory."

Another British physicist, Patrick Blackett, who discussed the Bomb after the war with a German scientist in captivity, observed that there were no real secrets. According to Nahum he said: "It's a bit like making an omelette. Not everyone can make a good one."

When Churchill was re-elected in 1951 he "found an almost complete weapon ready to test and was puzzled and fascinated by how Atlee had buried the costs in the budget", says Nahum. "He was very conflicted about whether to go ahead with the test and wrote about whether we should have 'the art and not the article'. Meaning should it be enough to have the capability… [rather] than to have a dangerous weapon in the armoury."

Churchill was convinced to go ahead with the test, but the much more powerful hydrogen bomb developed three years later worried him greatly.

HG Wells died in 1946. He had been working on a film sequel to The Shape of Things To Come that was to include his concerns about the now-realised atomic bomb he'd first imagined. But it was never made.

Towards the end of his life, says Nahum, Wells's friendship with Churchill "cooled a little".

"Wells considered Churchill as an enlightened but tarnished member of the ruling classes." And Churchill had little time for Wells's increasingly fanciful socialist utopian ideas.

Wells believed technocrats and scientists would ultimately run a peaceful new world order like in The Shape of Things To Come, even if global war destroyed the world as we knew it first. Churchill, a former soldier, believed in the lessons of history and saw diplomacy as the only way to keep mankind from self-destruction in the atomic age.

Wells's scientist acquaintance Leo Szilard stayed in America and campaigned for civilian control of atomic energy, equally pessimistic about Wells's idea of a bold new scientist-led world order. If anything Szilard was tormented by the power he had helped unleash. In 1950, he predicted a cobalt bomb that would destroy all life on the planet.

Protest at Aldermaston

In Britain, the legacy of the Bomb was a remarkable period of elite scientific innovation as the many scientists who had worked on weaponry or radar returned to their civilian labs. They gave us the first commercial jet airliner, the Comet, near-supersonic aircraft and rockets, highly engineered computers, and the Jodrell Bank giant moveable radio telescope.

The latter had nearly ended the career of its champion, physicist Bernard Lovell, with its huge costs, until the 1957 launch of Sputnik, when it emerged that Jodrell Bank had the only device in the West that could track it.

Nahum says Lovell reflected that "during the war the question was never what will something cost. The question was only can you do it and how soon can we have it? And that was the spirit he took into his peacetime science."

Austerity and the tiny size of the British market, compared with America, were to scupper those dreams. But though the Bomb created a new terror, for a few years at least, Britain saw a vision of a benign atomic future, too and believed it could be the shape of things to come.

Aren't Bonzai trees so beautiful...........

Today's walk through Gateway Mesa was a real treat...........I was so taken by the great variety of lichens that covered the beautiful rocks............and the fir trees that had established a living spot in the cracks.

If I've go this right, lichen ( a cooperative blend of fungus and algae) produce a liquid that dissolves rock...........just enough for them to make a home. Then, over the years, as the dirt gathers in the tiny holes and the winter ice expands and makes the cracks bigger, there's enough growing material for a tree seed to germinate.

And, hey, lo and behold, we see little dwarf trees looking as if they are growing happily in their own private space :)

Two articles of interest for teachers.........

In Today's Guardian (UK) newspaper:

Teachers in England are seeing unprecedented levels of school-related anxiety, stress and mental health problems among pupils of all age groups and abilities, particularly around test or exam time, according to a new report.

Children aged 10 or 11 are said to be “in complete meltdown”, in tears, or feeling sick during tests, and problems can be made worse by their competitive parents, according to the Exam Factories? report commissioned by the National Union of Teachers and conducted independently by Merryn Hutchings, emeritus professor at London Metropolitan University.

Teachers complain that low achievement at tests or exams is resulting in low motivation and low self-esteem. One secondary school teacher at an unnamed school said “self-harming is rife” at key stage 4 (14- to 16-year-olds) and reported that a pupil was hospitalised for three months in a psychiatric ward following a suicide attempt, another nearly starved herself to death and numerous other students “suffered from symptoms that are on the questionnaires that the NHS uses to diagnose depression”.

The report looks at how tests, exams, Ofsted inspections and other “accountability measures” are affecting schools. It includes responses from a survey of nearly 8,000 teachers, case studies of heads, other teachers (not all NUT members) and children, and a review of research and other literature.

Hutchings said: “The problems are caused by increased pressure from tests/exams, [children’s] greater awareness at younger ages of their own ‘failure’, and the increased rigour and academic demands of the curriculum.

“The increase in diagnosis of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive disorder) has been shown to be linked to the increase in high-stakes testing. Thus it appears that some children are being diagnosed and medicated because the school environment has become less suitable for them, allowing less movement and practical work, and requiring them to sit still for long periods.”

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Christine Blower, the NUT general secretary, said: “The findings about the experiences and concerns of children and young people are shocking and sometimes upsetting.

“The study exposes the reduction in the quality of teacher-pupil interaction, the loss of flexibility and lack of time for teachers to respond to children as individuals, the growing pressure on children to do things before they are ready, and the focus on a narrower range of subjects.”

The NUT has been at odds with successive governments over testing, exams and inspections for 25 years but the findings on children’s health may strike a more sympathetic chord among politicians this time.

A number of other reports in recent years have raised concerns about the increasing pressure children feel. ChildLine has reported big increases in school and education-related issues and Lucie Russell, director of campaigns at charityYoung Minds, said in response to Hutchings’ findings that many of those the charity worked with “said that they feel completely defined by their grades and that is very detrimental to their wellbeing and self-esteem”.

Russell said: “We have to question the role of schools in relation to developing well-rounded, confident young people.”

Ofsted has never reported on pupils’ mental health since it was established in the mid-1990s, although ministers across health and education departments have become increasingly worried about the issue.

The Department for Education said: “No one should be stressed out by exams, which is why we have scrapped modules and January assessments so young people are only entered for tests when they are truly ready.

“We are also investing in mental health services helping schools provide counselling services and support for pupils with mental health needs. This is alongside almost £5m funding for projects dedicated to helping children and young people with mental health issues.”

And a letter in today's NYT:

To the Editor:

In “No Teachers Are Required for Grading Common Core” (news article, June 23), we have final confirmation on the state of the teaching profession today. We prepare our teachers poorly in programs that are rarely rigorous and almost never useful to the practitioner; we pay them far less than what other professionals make while simultaneously requiring them to obtain more and more specialized degrees; we tell teachers that we will evaluate them fairly based on standardized test results from students; and now we hire former wedding planners to grade those tests so we can rate those teachers.

Doesn’t anyone recognize the insanity of public education these days? How can we make the claim that teaching at any level is a profession when there is every indication that our public policy treats it in such an insulting fashion?

It is small wonder the most accomplished students from the college ranks predominantly seek other avenues of employment. Can you imagine doctors having their performance be judged on some standard operation, a dubious premise to begin with, and then have the results be evaluated by — what — truck drivers? I happen to love truck drivers, and I know they would be the first to tell us they don’t want to rate doctors or have doctors rate them, so why is it O.K. for teachers?

Of course it’s always the money, isn’t it? Maybe we think: Anyone can teach. That may be true, but anyone can do surgery, too, except the trick is that you are supposed to heal patients, not harm them. Great teachers heal, and we treat them like dirt.

GEORGE WHITTEMORE

Princeton, Mass.

The writer has been a teacher, a dean and a headmaster.