reflection on busyness

The end of one holiday, grades coming due, another important holiday coming, more responsibilities and shortened daytime hours have left me feeling like I need to have my soul recharged a bit. The plan... go to the woods.

My favorite poet, Mary Oliver describes how I feel perfectly:

The Old Poets of China

Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
If offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

thinking about "stuff"

Yesterday, my YES magazine came in the mail with an issue dedicated to environmental impact. I love that the magazine arrived at the same time I am thinking about the consumerist side of one of my favorite holidays. I love many things about Christmas: the family gatherings, the food, the magic of the nativity story and Santa, the singing of carols, the tree and its trimmings, but I am turned off by the focus on shopping as a way to celebrate.

There is an article in YES by Annie Leonard who made The Story of Stuff, a short, web-based film that explores the social and environmental costs of consumerism. I show this this film to my Environmental Science students and for some of them it is the first time they have looked at consumerism with a critical lens and it changes them. Parents talk about it when I meet them on open house night and some teachers in more conservative parts of the country have gotten in trouble for showing it, so it must be good!

So, as I think about the shopping and celebrating we are going to do for Christmas, I am thinking of ways to increase the meaning and decrease the eco-footprint of our holiday season. I am thinking of the craftiness of Nan's family in making homemade gifts and the thriftiness of Katie's family in re-purposing everything. They both inspire me!

So, here are my ideas for a greener Christmas that is rich in fun and celebration:

• Give gifts that are edible or otherwise consumable (a yoga class, massage, etc)
• For holiday parties or family gatherings, use a grab bag (one gift per person) or white elephant gifts for everyone. To really minimize impact, have the gifts be items people already own brought from home. These gift exchanges usually end up being very funny and much less pressure for the people buying the gifts. This year we will try this for the cousins.
• Buy gifts that are homemade by local people or make gifts yourself. Since I have very limited crafting abilities, some of my past gifts have included a cookbook of my recipes or calendars made with family photos for the grandmas.
  
• Cultivate family traditions that don't revolve around gifts: three of my favorites are singing carols as part of nightly story time every night in December, visiting Santaland at Macy's on 34th Street (its free!!) and and having my husband's family over on Christmas day.
• Recycle gift wrap(or make your own out of stamped brown paper bags) and bows. Or you could use newspaper to wrap gifts. I did this for a few years and my parents don't let me forget it.
  
• Make your own gift tags out of recycled holiday cards (I got this idea from Nan).
• Donate old, unused toys to charity or hand them down to family and friends.
• Find gifts at thrift shops, on freecycle.org or Craig's list
• Limit gifts to items that are meaningful and well-made.

I think the most important thing to remember is to only do things that you find meaningful. Changes in consumption habits should make you feel freer, less burdened and more creative.

Thanksgiving

A house full of people and lots of eating!!

Thanksgiving shows at the kid's schools

A lot of special moments spent with grandparents and good friends

Making and launching water rockets

Digging in the sand and looking for algae and barnacles

Black Friday spent at the Bronx Zoo


Last week was a much needed chance to slow down and enjoy the people we love

these days

These days there is a lot of sibling love around here. Jove occasionally offers Miranda his lap during dinner. Now that the night comes earlier, a lot more time is spent playing indoors, making up games. They have spent the last couple of days cooking playdoh in the toy kitchen: making playdoh cookies, pancakes, etc. It melts my heart when they look to each other for comfort and invite each other to play along.

These days Jupiter and I are both really enjoying Radio Lab on NPR. These highly, entertaining radio broadcasts talk about science and society. I assign them to my students as extra credit. And they like them, too. My favorite so far is the one on parasites.

These days I finally feel a sense of balance between my outside the house life and my inside the house life. My goal is to stay as emotionally present as possible when I am with my family and not worry about undone job related work and, likewise, to focus on work at work and not drift into guilt about not being home. I am grateful that I truly love both responsibilities and I have a lot of help.

Fall Fun

Everyone in the house is asleep right now as I blog. We are all tired from all of the Halloween festivities. Both Jove and Miranda were very excited about trick-or-treating and we had to stop a couple of times en route to eat candy.


All of us had Halloween events at our schools: the kids had parades and class parties, Jup did a bunch of cool dry ice demos and was part of a science department thematic costume as gruesome chefs and I dressed as a tree and showed my classic Halloween video "Bloody Suckers" about blood sucking parasites. We did a lot of dry ice experiments at home and had a few failed attempts at trying to blow up a rotten pumpkin in the backyard.

I took the kids to the Botanical Garden for their festivities last week: a parade, cider pressing, pumpkin decorating and other plant crafts. It was a beautiful, warm fall day. The leaf color is peaking right now and we are trying to enjoy it as much as possible.

I have been doing a lot of outdoor labs with my students lately, which is fun for them and for me. I always take my environmental science students many times a year for different labs, but this was my first time taking my earth science students. We hiked to a rock formation which shows features of metamorphic rocks.

why I teach

I found this illustration on Elsa Mora's blog and I thought it pretty much summed up how amazing it can be to spend my days with young people (including my own children).


She says
"Emotional growth also has a lot to do with being a good observer, with paying attention to other people's pains and needs. Observation leads you to noticing important things and this, at the same time, inspires you to take action. Then, when your action (even a tiny action) makes a difference in someone else's life, you grow a little, and you get to feel better about yourself as a person."

Amazing insight.

garden science and a good bowl of popcorn

Jove is always experimenting and often the experiments involve plants and dirt. Last spring, Jove decided to germinate some popcorn seeds from our own stash of popcorn. He has perfected his germination technique, a single layer of seeds is placed in a wet paper towel inside of a covered dish. A few days later, the seeds have sprouted. We transplanted the seedlings out into Jove's garden and cared for them all summer. The corn stalks grew and eventually flowered and each stalk produced one ear of corn. We waited for the ears to dry on the stalk and then Jove harvested them. He shucked the seeds off the ears and we waited for them to firm up a little more. We tried popping them once, but they didn't expand enough. We waited a couple of more weeks and then today we popped a big bowl of Jove's popcorn. He was very excited and it was yummy.

So, in the process of growing corn for the first time I learned quite a bit about how corn plants reproduce that I hadn't really given much thought to before. I will share my discoveries here with you because I am sure you are all dying to know how corn reproduce. Humor me... All fruit bearing plants (each kernel of corn is a fruit) make flowers that have pollen (from the male part) and stigma (the female part) that is sticky and receives the pollen and transports it to the unfertilized egg. In corn, the male pollen bearing flowers on the top of the plant are called the tassel and the silk are the female flowers. The amazing thing that I noticed with our corn was that each silk strand connects to an individual kernel of corn. That means each pollen grain travels down the entire strand of silk to carry its DNA to the unfertilized kernel to allow it to grow into a fertile seed. If you ever see shriveled corn kernels, they would be the unfertilized eggs. Amazing.

Jove learned quite a bit, too. Jove asks a lot of questions related to evolution and my answers often involve discussions of variation within a species. So when our four corn plants are growing, he noticed that the silk on two of them and part of the husk were tinged purple and he says, "Look! Variation." Aha!!