Profane, Reverential

Update on Teaching Water and Air Science

This Friday, I think I will update you on the teaching I’m currently doing.  I wrote a post awhile back about my joyful struggles thinking about how to teach 8th grade science in a way that takes seriously my desire to work with the students and the science in a way that is holistic and anti-materialistic.  Now I am doing that very teaching that I’ve been contemplating these last few months.  I am grateful whenever I get the opportunity to try some authentic research in a classroom, and that is how I think about what I’m doing right now.  

I made a first attempt at teaching in this way last school year, and learned a lot through that experience. So we could think about this as the 2.0 try. I’m also grateful that the school has welcomed me back to try again!

A big idea I’ve been working with, that merits its own post someday, is that materialism takes an entirely “profane” approach to assumptions about the natural world.  That is to say that a core unspoken assumption of materialistic science is that the world’s physical material is dead (or rather “lifeless”), homogeneous, entirely open to inspection and dissection, and without spirit.  In the very first class with this fine bunch of 8th graders, I introduced them to the words “profane” and “ with reverence” with respect to doing science.  I told them that my own education had been largely of the profane variety, but that these days, I saw and welcomed the change that seemed to be coming in the world of science: that more scientists and people teaching and studying science were coming around to the idea that more reverence was called for, or at least more attention to context.  In particular the multiple environmental crises we are in the midst of seem to be convincing some people (I wish it were many more) that different approaches are needed.  By the second day, we had some working definitions of the two words.  “Profane,” for example when studying water science can be summed up as “It’s just water.”  Studying water scientifically and with reverence is more like “Water, you have my fullest and best attention now.”

There are a couple ways that this new approach has changed what I teach and the order in which I teach it:  When I last taught this class, I took the class out to observe a tree on the last day, after three weeks of water and air experiments in the classroom.  This time, I took the class on the second day.  The idea is that if you want to study water scientifically, yet with reverence, you have to start by observing water in its own context.  Trees are, of course, living beings that are masters of both air and water.  And so, studying and understanding trees is paramount to understanding water.

We did an observational and drawing exercise on a big beautiful willow tree.  Doing that exercise (which produced some very evocative and scientific illustrations) and questioning the students about their prior knowledge of tree anatomy and biology revealed to me that they didn’t really know how water flows in trees, and how trees grow.  So, by the third day, we were getting acquainted with heartwood, sapwood, xylem, cambium, phloem and bark, and learning that the “most living part” of the tree (the cambium) is precisely the ring that lives between the water flows (upward through the xylem, and downward through the phloem), and that growth in the tree happens right there, sandwiched between the flows.

The idea that you can’t study water until you spend time paying attention to water in its context is still a pretty revolutionary idea today.  Science today, profane as it usually is, assumes that you can fill up a glass of water, take it to the lab, poke it, prod it, apply electrical current to it, dissolve things into it, etc; and that the sum total of your data from doing all these things to water can tell you completely “what water is.”  A reverential approach insists that we visit water in the places where water belongs.  And water belongs in so many places, doesn’t it?  But sitting still in a test tube is really not one of them.

I feel quite pleased with how this approach of studying hydrodynamics, hydraulics and aeromechanics, is placing life at the center of our study.  For a couple generations, it’s been thought that physics is the “hardest” of sciences, because it contains the most rigid and mathematical approach to nature, a distilled picture that reduces nature to constituent atoms and homogeneous matter.  But I think taking an approach that starts by going out into nature to find out what nature has done with, for example, water and air, is one that has such potential to bear better fruit. It’s also more respectful.

I said to the students that there is nothing wrong with a profane knowledge of water, unless it is the only knowledge of water that seems to count. I am trying to present a range of experiences to explore water and air in both profane and reverential ways.   We are certainly doing more typical experiments with water and air in test tubes and bottles.  We are learning about pressure, compressible gasses and incompressible liquids.  We are studying the science of how some things float and other things sink, calculating densities, etc.  And, we are also doing this:

Yesterday, after 8 days of studying and discussion, including plenty of water and air observations, I gave the students the assignment to take all of their notes, their own memories, and their experiences from the last two weeks’ of class and . . . to write a poem.  Actually, to write rough notes for what could eventually become four poems, or four works of art.   The poem starter sentences were simply: “Water is . . .”, “Water does . . .”, “Air is . . .”, and “Air does . . .”  The idea of this exercise is to encourage these 8th graders to bring their own selves and their own experience to the study of something as ubiquitous and mysterious as water and air.  While it was a difficult exercise for some of them, looking at what they’ve written, I think it was worthwhile.

I’ll mention in passing that last night I tuned into the Aldo Leopold Foundation’s special week of online presentations. Robin Wall Kimmerer was speaking and I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to hear her.  She is the author of several books, the most well known being the truly amazing book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.  To call this book impactful, prescient, and powerful is understating it.  My entire mindset has been changed by reading this book, and I was reminded of the power of Kimmerer’s approach to ecological restoration by her excellent speech last night.  I was also reminded that all of the above ideas that I’m sharing in this post were all inspired by Kimmerer’s work.  She calls science done as indigenous peoples have done it for centuries, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK).  While I don’t have the familial roots in a Native American culture like Kimmerer, I think I am trying to teach science in a way that honors the capacity of every human to interact with the natural world in a way that preserves the relationship, the intimacy and the dependency that can keep us from thinking: “It’s just water.”

P.S. I’d like to share some of what the students have written with you, but I need to ask their permission before I do.   Perhaps you’d like to try the exercise yourself!  If you do and you feel like sharing, place it in the comments below! For now, here are some of my own free brainstormed responses to the above prompts:

Water is . . .

Sensitive to the slightest touch, making waves, and waves over waves.  Water never stops moving, never stops communicating, always listening and always replying.

The first room we all occupy before we are born is a watery one.  Vestigial gills give way to lungs and we are born to be mostly air-creatures.  But may we never forget our watery beginnings!

When I get too hot or am working hard, my body makes salty water right from my skin (sweat).  Or, if I’m cutting onions, or experiencing a moving drama, salty water comes out of my eyes (tears).  

Trees have water going up in the xylem and down in the phloem, and in between all of this flowing water is where they grow!  I guess I also have water flowing through me all the time too. . .

We don’t just need water, and we’re not just made of water; we need water to always be flowing through, just like the trees.  If a person isn’t “passing water” regularly, that person is not well!

Water does . . .

Cascades and courses and weaves and braids.  Water runs down my perfectly smooth windshield, in rivulets but never in a straight line. As it runs, it meets another drop waiting down the slope, and, Bloop!  They become one and flow down more quickly together (but some is always left behind too . . .).  

My wipers can push the water away so I can see the road more clearly, but there is always some left over.  If I turn on my defroster too, the leftover water streak will quickly evaporate into the air!

Water freezes as hard as a rock, but it’s a rock that floats in its liquid self!  In the farther north, ice and snow pack can layer over many thousands of years and become glaciers, and icebergs

Water soaks through my shoes and wets my socks, it makes its way along the paper towel all in its own.

Water seeps into every crack and crevice as it constantly seeks its level.  Then it freezes and plays havoc with our smooth streets, making spring’s potholes!  It seeps into our basements too, and cracks our front porch concrete!

Water is the first ocean under the second ocean of air.  Water is sensitive enough to pick up every wobble, yet powerful enough to carve our very landscapes.  From the most terrible floods to the tiniest drop, water cleanses and reforms, constantly.

Air is . . .

Air is what holds me up as I ride in a car or, better, on a bicycle.  Air cushions my ride.  

Air moves in and out of my lungs and I seldom have to even think about it.  

Air is what holds the clouds up, I suppose, and when they get too heavy to stay up there, raindrops fall through the air.

Air rising in water is a bubble.  Water falling through air is a drop.  Both are spheres, little balls seeking their place.  Air bubbles wobble as they rise, but raindrops fall more directly, usually!

Hot air in an inverted silken bag can fly me into the sky!  Or, air passed over a plane wing can lift the plane and me and all my fellow passengers, and our luggage, easily!  As long as the plane keeps pushing itself forward, we ride the air.

For that, the plane needs a propellor or two, or some jet engines.   They are pushing the air so we can ride on the air!

Air does . . .

“Wind” is the word we use for what air does, nearly all the time.  It moves, constantly moves and never in straight lines!  Trapped air is stale air and it is usually not nice at all to smell or breathe.

Wind blows in curlicues and loop-the-loops.  It makes leaves and plastic bags swirl in mesmerizing dances, and causes the turbulence in airplane flights.  Air is always being playful, but be careful because air can play very, very rough sometimes!

Air wants to leak, wants to release, and can make funny sounds, like when you let go of a balloon you just blew up.  All kinds of funny and beautiful sounds come to us through the air, and all kinds of pleasant and disgusting smells.  

If wind is what air does, then pressure is how the wind and air do it.  Pressure can create storms and light breezes.  Pressure can create symphonic sound, or screeching noises.  If a jet goes fast enough, a sonic boom pressure wave will make your ears hurt and shatter glass!

The first thing a baby does upon being released from its watery bedroom?  Cry and breathe!  Our nose and mouth and larynx and lungs were made for the air.  We breathe air, but fish can breathe air too, because air can also be found in the water.  Water nearly always has air, and air nearly always has water.  They like to mix and mingle, and vortexes are often how they do it. Air likes to get together with water and make some impressive and dangerous demonstrations!  Hurricanes and tornadoes, typhoons and tropical storms.  All our weather comes to us through the air, and the weather will always keep coming.

Photo by mrjn Photography on Unsplash