Tag: immersion

24¢ per hour

Picking green beans at the Heifer International Ranch.

We worked in the fields this afternoon: picking beans and planting garlic. Clear skies with a cool, early October breeze; warm, but not hot.

It was enjoyable work. The fields were small and there were a lot of us. Lots of conversation.

We picked somewhere close to 64 lbs of green beans, which, according to our guide, sells for somewhere around six dollars per pound (organic beans). Three hundred and eighty four dollars. Took us about an hour.

Earlier in the morning, we’d had a discussion about Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Heifer ranch is a CSA. People from the surrounding towns buy shares in the annual crop, and the ranch brings them a basket of produce every week for the season. CSA’s are great: fresh local produce, for about the same price as in the store. You tend to get a broad enough variety that it helps expand your cooking repertoire. And you avoid all the externailties from long distance transportation and factory farming.

Finding out how much workers make in CSAs vs industrial agriculture.

They (our guides) had compared CSAs to the “typical” industrial agricultural system. Students read out notecards as they went through the all the jobs of the people who get your tomatoes to you. One student, who represented the energy going into the system, had to do a lot of jumping-jacks and pushups – situps too. There are eleven different jobs in the industrial system, with the people actually picking the crops – migrant workers – getting one cent for every dollar you pay at the store. They are three jobs within the CSA, and the farmer gets 80% of the sale price.

The presentation was a little problematic, unfortunately. Heifer is a CSA after all. Trouble started with our facilitator’s terminal question, “So which one do you think is better?” The first response was, “Well with the economy these days, won’t you loose a lot of jobs with the CSA?”

Fair point. But it might be argued that the industrial system might take one big farm and 11 jobs to bring 1200 tomatoes to market, it might take 4 CSAs, and about the same number of jobs (12), to do the same. Although the each person in the CSA system gets a little less, the money is more equitably distributed.

The second question, cut to the crux of the problem, “But what are the notecards leaving out?” Cynical? Perhaps. However, I’d like to think of it as healthy skepticism.

So now our guide was stuck. How could she, an obvious advocate for CSAs, convince the skeptical? Not easy, perhaps not even possible. By being too strong of an advocate for her side, she’d have a hard time convincing even the impartial.

It’s not easy making an argument that you’re passionate about. Not at all.

Snapping green beans. Students agree that beans you pick yourself taste better.

I made sure I had a small discussion with the more skeptical students, to make sure they realized that even if you distrust the credibility of someone, you can often learn something useful. In fact, that’s why you should always look for multiple sources of information. Also, while CSAs are great for some things, local farms in Arkansas or Missouri aren’t going to be producing a lot of tomatoes in January.

That’s why I’m glad we picked the beans later in the day. And it was important that we did the accounting.

It took sixteen of us one hour to pick $384 worth of beans. That works out to 24 bucks per person per hour. Since the migrant workers only make 1% of the final cost, we would have made about 24¢.

24¢ for an enjoyable hour of gardening on a pleasant day. But what do you do when you’re hot and miserable in the middle of the summer, and hour after hour after hour of the same work is what you need to feed your family. And you’re missing school to do it.

Planting garlic.

I’m not sure that students will intuit the difference between what we did and what migrant farm workers do; neither the time we put in, nor the effort we expended were anywhere near equivalent.

I think making that distinction is important. Recognizing what migrant workers do, many who are the same age as my students, might make the point of what organizations like Heifer and Human Rights Watch are trying to do better than just talking about it, or simulating it, in the classroom.

I think it might make a big difference to hear the voices of these workers.

So I’ll show the HRW video advocating for the CARE Act to reduce child labor among teen migrant workers, and see if it has an impact.

Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing

One of the first things we learned at Heifer was the process of group formation. It was also one of the last things they talked about so it must have been pretty important.

The four steps are:

    Forming: Students are quite polite to each other when they first get on the balance board.

  • Forming: When the group first gets together, people tend to be cautious with one another. But because they’re so careful with what they say and what they do, newly forming groups don’t usually get much done.
  • Storming: Now the barriers start to break down as individual personalities manifest themselves. People start speaking up. A lot. They become less polite. Conflicts arise. People become accusatory. There’s lots of energy, but because of all the conflict, they still aren’t able to get much done.
    • Storming: Vociferous disagreement breaks out.
  • Norming: The conflict begins to settle down as the group starts to work out its kinks, as all the individuals begin to adapt to one another. Groups may need guidance to get there because everyone has to stop fighting, but as it usually helps that the group will start to see successes because of successful co-operation.
  • Performing: A well-functioning group can get a lot done. They’re able to communicate effectively, and take action effectively. Their productivity kicks into high gear and they can accomplish much together.
Norming: The group begins to organize itself. Rules of order are put in place.

Not all groups get through all four steps, and every time the group changes, such as when a new member (like a new student) is introduced the groups will need to go through some version of the four steps as they learn to accommodate the newcomer.

A well established culture will help groups adapt to change. This is yet another benefit of multi-aged classrooms, because a healthy classroom culture eases the transition as older students leave and new students come in.

Performing: Roles are assigned. Balance is achieved (from 2, to 5, to 57 seconds).

Even so, awareness of the four steps is extremely useful because it helps everyone anticipate that there will likely be some conflict, but that conflict is part of the group forming process and will likely diminish with time.

So you should expect, every year, to have to spend some time group building. Two weeks dedicated to orientation and teamwork is what Betsy Coe’s Montessori Middle School program uses. It’s a fair chunk of time to take out of the year, but because good groups can get so much more done, it’s well worth it to build a good classroom community.

Butterflies in the Herb Garden

A spicebush swallowtail butterfly (Papilio troilus) in the herb garden.

At the Heifer International ranch. Time spent weeding the herb garden. Not much weeding done (by me at least), but much photography. Pretty. A word designed for butterflies.

A variegated fritillary butterfly (Euptoieta claudia) in the herb garden.
An eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly (Papilio glaucus; officially documented by Linnaeus in 1758).
A skipper (family Hesperiidae) extracts nectar from a flower in the herb garden.

Butterflies are classified as:

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Lepidoptera

References

Maggie Eisenberger, personal communication.

Opler, Paul A., Kelly Lotts, and Thomas Naberhaus, coordinators. 2011. Butterflies and Moths of North America. Bozeman, MT: Big Sky Institute. http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/ (Version 10/08/2011).

Flynn, J., 2007. Georgia Butterflies, Bibb Co. GA. http://www.shrike.net/butterflies/0-regions/bibb.htm (Accessed 10/08/2011).

Resorting to Poetry

We’re off to the Heifer International farm near Little Rock for a week. I have not been there before, but I suspect I’ll be disconnected, loosing contact with the part of my brain that has all the details.

I could program during some of my downtime, but all the reference documentation is online. I could do some reading about pedagogy – I’ve been meaning to get to the book about homework – but I suspect it would be extremely frustrating to not be able to look up the references and follow thoughts with some online research. And I can’t really blog.

I’m not even sure I’ll have phone service.

So instead I’ve brought a book of poetry. It’s the same one I used to take on long trips before I was so fully committed to the internet. I’ve read it through a number of times, but there’s always something new to discover.

And it should provide the time I need to finish memorizing a few favorites. At one point I could recall the first three parts of the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, but I think I’m back down to one now.

At any rate, there might be some slow blogging for the next week. I’ve scheduled a few posts but not enough to cover the time I’m gone, so this might be the first significant break for a couple years. We’ll see how it goes.

It Takes a Long Time to Go Away: Collecting Garbage on Deer Island

Collecting anthropogenic debris on the beach.

Plastic bottles take 100 years to break down; styrofoam cups – fifty years; aluminum cans – 200 years; glass bottles, which are made of silica, just like the beach’s white sand – who knows. So we took a little time out of our adventure trip to collect anthropogenic debris as we walked along the beach on Deer Island.

Leather (shoe) - 50 years.
Plastic bags - 10 to 20 years.
Styrofoam cup - 50 years.
Plastic bottles - 100 years.
Tin cans - 50 years. Aluminum cans - 200 years.

We picked up stuff on our way out, so we were able to enjoy the fruits of our labours on our walk back to the landing point.

The beautiful beach cleared of garbage.

Note

The degradation times for marine garbage can be found on the SOEST website, but That Danny has an interesting compilation of data that tries to reconcile the different degradation times you can find on the web.

Biota on the Deer Island Beach

Comb Jellies are pretty and not poisonous.

We were there to collect garbage, but we found lots of life on the Deer Island part of our adventure trip to the gulf.

Ecotones, the boundaries between different environments tend to be rich in biological diversity.
Hermit crabs were everywhere.
Comb jelly in the hand.
Ospreys nest on the island.
Barnicles on a stick.
Tiny crab.
There were fewer actual snails than there were hermit crabs.
Dolphin in the boat's wake.

Collecting Garbage on the Beach: The Trip to Deer Island

To the left, a long, narrow, lightly-wooded island. Skeletal trees, dying on the upwind end; drowned by the attrition of the waves. To the right, a narrow, eager, urban strip. Hotels and casinos, pressing against the water’s edge; vying for access to the white sand beaches and gentle waters of the sound. Such different places on either side, yet the one on the right is the reason we’ve come to the one on the left. We’re here as part of our Adventure Trip to pick up any artificial debris that’s managed to float across the sound and collect and contaminate the quiet, isolated beaches of the island.

We’d gotten on a pontoon at the research lab right after breakfast, so the early adolescents were still a little groggy. Our vessel’s captain asked a question about team mascots which promptly woke up approximately 63.64% of the class, and served as a topic of conversation for the twenty or so minutes it took to get to the drop-off point on the west-north-western end of Deer Island.

Shrimp boat caught in the act of deploying its nets.

Mostly unobserved by my busy students were the half dozen shrimp boats casting their nets in the sound. Long, spider-like, almost robotic arms spread out from the vessel to lower the nets. It’s quite an impressive sight. Commercial shrimping is a major industry all along the Gulf coast.


Deer Island (and its hike). View Coastal Sciences Camp, Gulf Coast Research Lab in a larger map

Mostly dead trees.

The island itself is long and thin, wedge shaped, no more than a couple hundred meters at its widest at the eastern end, but thinning to less than 100 meters to the west. Although wider, almost all the trees seem to have died on the eastern end. Then there is a gap and the trees are mostly alive. Looking at the satellite image, you can see a clear channel cutting through the island. From the image, I’d guess the channel is tidal, with water moving back and forth, filling and draining the sound with each cycle of the tides. The sediment deposited in the quieter waters of the sound (to the north) seem to be forming a small, white-sand delta; the equivalent deposits on the south are probably washed away by the longshore current pretty quickly since that shore is exposed to the wind and waves.

Deer Island is not an active barrier island: twelve kilometers to the south, Horn and Ship Islands do that job today. However, given the shape of Deer Island, it may have once been a barrier when the coastline was further inland. This is all part of the coastal plains deltas, which includes the Mississippi Delta and smaller rivers. These rivers transport sediment from the mountains inland and deposit them in the ocean, gradually building out the land. As the deltas build out, the barrier islands also push out to accommodate them.

Scrambling for dry land. Note the rich, black mud.

The pontoon pulled up on a broad, sandy beach then retreated to deeper waters where the fishing is better. The white sand beach we landed on was an artifice, just like the East Beach Drive beach we’d walked the day before. Our first steps betrayed the secret. Breaking through a thin cover of sand, we sank knee-deep into a rich black mud that’s the natural sediment in a quiet waterway like the sound.

Our guide, on the other hand, seemed to have a preternatural ability to avoid sinking into the mud, or even getting her feet wet, or even touching the water.

Stephanie, our guide, carefully takes her first few steps off the boat. (no photoshopping was involved in the creation of this image).

References

The first image was distorted using a four point distortion method with ImageMagick.

> convert sc-deer-island-1843.jpg -matte -virtual-pixel transparent -distort Perspective ‘0,0,0,200 0,664,0,564 1000,0,1000,0 1000,664,1000,664’ tst2.jpg

> convert sc-deer-island-1841.jpg -matte -virtual-pixel transparent -distort Perspective ‘0,0,0,0 0,664,0,664 1000,0,1000,200 1000,664,1000,564’ tst.jpg

Squid Dissection

Observing external features; finding the beak.

To follow up my own attempts at a fish anatomy lesson, I asked the people at the Gulf Coast Research Lab’s Marine Education Center to include a dissection in their program for our Adventure Trip. They chose squid.

Squid are nice because they’re mostly soft tissue and the organs are fairly easy to identify. They’re also quite charismatic, which piqued the students’ interest. These squid were going to be used as bait, so I didn’t feel too badly about using them for science.

Squid and reference diagram.

Once again, our guide, Stephanie, was an excellent teacher. A good time was had by all, even though it was a bit gruesome.

An excised beak.

I would have liked to have a little more time to draw some diagrams, but I don’t think my students would have had the patience. It was the Adventure Trip after all, and they’d much rather spend the time outside.

As for the future, I like this note about squid dissection:

… this … is a tactile experience. You may want to explore this aspect through sensory activities, written descriptions, poetry, and/or artwork. Encourage students to experience the many textures found inside and outside the squid’s body. Moving fingertips along the suckers is suggested as well – the suckers do not scrape or hurt if you are gentle with them.

–Center for Educational and Training Technology, Mississippi State University: Squid Dissection

This quote comes from a Mississippi State website, which also has a great set of calamari recipes in addition to dissection instructions. I’m always in favor of an interdisciplinary approach; food-preparation rather than purely dissection.

Finally, the University of Buffalo’s Biology 200 class has some excellent, labeled pictures, for reference.