Once in a Lifetime

Have you ever seen an awesome sight that because of its splendor, you have held the memory tightly for almost your entire life? I did. When I was eight, I saw an arm of the Milky Way galaxy. It is a rare sight. We were passing through the arm and it could only be seen for a few nights, but it was the most beautiful sight I ever saw. We were in the country, so the sky was a deep black velvet. I don't remember seeing the moon, but the sky looked as if a giant hand had strewn handful after handful of diamonds across the sky in a river of brilliance. The stars were so closely packed that they formed bright patches of white. Years later, when I read that the the Milky Way was named because the arms look like milk spilled across the skies, I knew exactly what it meant. I am glad I was alive to see this sight. I am glad I can tell my students about it every year as well. Now, thousands of students have seen this sight through my eyes.

Technology and toads

Once when I was young, the field behind us flooded and hundreds of frogs laid eggs. My parents had bought me a very nice pair of new shoes and after climbing the shed and watching the frogs over the fence for many days, I was ready to go exploring. I put on my new shoes and got a coffee can with a lid. I walked into the deep, water-soaked mud of the field and began to collect little toads. They were so cute! each one was a perfect little frog no larger that a pinkie tip. They had little mouths and little eyes. Into the can they went. When it was half full, I thought I might need a larger collecting can, so I squished my way back across the field. Each step was harder than the first. My shoes kept getting stuck in deep holes full of soft mud and water. Finally, I was out of the field. I looked down at my feet and panic flooded me. My shoes were ruined. With great stealth I made my way back to my house and hid the shoes in the garage. Walking very softly, I went to my room so I could also hide. When I got there, I sat on the floor and released my cache of toads. They were jumping all over the room when my mother opened the door to fuss about the shoes. Immediately her focus changed and with tight lips and a fierce frown (and one or two squeals) she helped me catch all of the little toads and put them back into the can. They were everywhere and when we would catch one and open the can, others would jump out. They got behind everything, under the bed, and even tried to go out the door. By the time we were finished, her anger had dimmed. All she said was, that I would have to take the frogs outside and clean up the shoes. For some reason, I don't remember getting in trouble for that, though I was sad because my pretty new shoes were never the same.

I only bring this life moment up because tomorrow I will be teaching with everything new - yes, I became a science teacher and I still make messes - but tomorrow I will be using 3 new types of technology and teaching on a block schedule, which I have never done before. I have five different classes to plan for and 3 different grade levels. It feels a bit like I am chasing toads, but I know that if I do this one toad at a time, I will be able to do it all. Hopefully, like that one dead toad I found in my room after the toad time, I will not miss anything.

Water and Energy

Water has always fascinated me. When I was very young, we had a blue VW bug that needed water at least once a trip. My mother explained that we needed water to make the car go. I believed the car ran off water. I had an accepted paradigm that the car must split water and use it for energy. For 15 years, I accepted this idea until that embarrassing moment in my twenties when I told the story and realized that the car had a bad radiator. That was a moment...but the joke was on them when several years later people started to experiment with water as fuel. I have a dream that we will eventually find a way to break apart and combine water in such a way that it will be a closed system and the car will run off of 3 gallons of water that it breaks apart and recombines. Imagine a car that does not need replenished fuel. Recently, watching a film about Einstein and the events leading up to finding the energy from the atomic bomb (called Einstein's Grand Idea, I think) this idea was reinforced.

One of the coolest things about Star Trek is the belief in a better future. The knowledge that we will survive as a species and we will solve many of the problems we now take as a part of our condition. Pollution is one of those. A car that has no emissions will be a great stride forward.

Star Trek and Me

I was six years old when Star Trek first came out. We lived in a mobile home. There was never much money. Sometimes we had to collect coke bottles to sell for food. I wish I could say it was a happy childhood. Looking back, I would best compare it to a war zone with my father often in a drunken rage, but I had Star Trek and science. Oddly, my mother and father agreed on this and encouraged the science experiments that led to my life-long passion. If you had looked for me as a child, you would have found me away from home staring at the waning moon, walking along the rail-road tracks looking for rocks from foreign places, digging in the dirt to watch the bugs, wading in a creek, or hiding under the coffee table so I could watch Star Trek, which aired too late for me to stay up. I am positive my parents must have seen my legs sticking out from beneath the table, but no one noticed the time until the show was over. Captain Kirk became my substitute father. I thought he looked like my father, but he behaved much better, at least in most shows.