“She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven't you?”                   -Norman Bates, Psycho

YES, emphatically YES!!
Yes, sorrowfully, yes.
Cycles of hubris
Waves of malaise
And sheer madness
purple, silver,
brilliant, flourescent
madness

Nearby? Projectile
Entangled in this web?
Dismissed
Like a discus

Yet tethering

Each strand
Sits out there
lonely
Swaying in the calm breeze
With the sorrowful confusion
of a refugee

When can we return?
Will it ever be the same?
Shall we start anew elsewhere?
Join the diaspora of defeated hearts

I am the quake
the hurricane
the scourge
the woman who has gone
MAD
You forgive me, don’t you?

I am sitting at Madhatter's, reading journal article after journal article for a group content analysis project. I am at the sole table in the 'library'. In the room to my left is a baby shower that ends at 11:00. In the room to my right is a group of women waiting to get into the room to my left for their shower that starts at 11:00. I can feel the employees' tension.
A little girl, about age four, but clearly quite precocious in her big girl's dress and fancy shoes just walked in with her mom and an aunt. She is carrying a baby gift almost bigger than she is. I am sure she insisted that she arrive with the gift in tote. I can't help but envy this little girl. She will be surrounded by the women in her family today. She will hear their stories, watch their body language, unconsciously adopt their mores and mannerisms.
When I was about her age, maybe slightly older, my mom and I picked up Aunt Janice for a baby shower. My Aunt Janice has four boys around my age, two older, two younger than me. Brian, the second to oldest, could not understand why he couldn't join us for the baby shower. "Boys aren't allowed to go to baby showers," she stated. As the mom of four boys, she must have relished such an invitation.
This was unacceptable to Brian. It didn't make much sense to me either, although I felt pretty lucky. My aunt walked to my mom's car muttering about the kind of boy who would want to be with a bunch of women all day and then fussing at him to stop throwing a fit (in her choice words). Just as she slid into the front seat, we heard a loud crash from her front porch. "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" We all jumped out of the car and headed to the porch. Scattered broken glass littered the floor and Brian stood on the other side of the glass-paneled door with a bloody fist. My family is nothing if not passionate. I'm sure Aunt Janice dealt with him accordingly. I can't remember anything else that day, not even whose shower we attended or if we attended at all. What I remember is that Brian knew then the power of a bunch of women coming together to celebrate, to swap stories, to laugh, to advise, to gossip, to be women amongst women.

One room has cleared out, and the women to my right have started to migrate over to my left with fancy flowers and decorations. I MISS my family!!!!

Brian's third baby recently joined our family. He has attended all showers and celebrations.

Science: To Know

"Many of us are familiar with the science format, which has the student progress from hypothesis to procedure to observations to conclusions. It may be a neat, clean organization, but not one that mirrors how people actually learn. Our minds do not separate our observations from meaning-making structures. The students are constantly making observations, conclusions, and hypotheses all at the same time. Our attempts to separate thinking into subskills may result in losing important aspects of a scientific study" (Sakai & Leggo).

I envision a Prezi presentation with multiple circular paths to explain the scientific process. Some paths take you right back to where you started; some lead you to new inquiries. As students journal, they synthesize new meaning based on their observations, prior knowledge, and collaborations with peers and teachers. Can't these journal entries be stories? poems? paintings? comic strips? We need to help them to see science as fun, as social and personal and as an exploration. Despite what the text books or FOSS kits reveal, the answers to the unit may not be known ahead of time. How many of you have encountered questions from your students that puzzled you? Wow... that's a great question. Let's find out. For me, it seems to occur almost always during our science lessons. 
I like science. I like to teach science, but if it had been equated to story-telling and infused with choice and creativity, I would LOVE it. Summer goal: explore the TEKS with my colleagues and create interdisciplinary lessons that facilitate inquiry and exploration. It's never too late. When I love it, they'll love it. 

Mathematics of Light by David Morley

The wavelengths of daylight 

register on bright equipment:

flutterings across a spectrum

from infra-red to ultraviolet.

Discover me at an ice age,

at a midnight of colour,

in a place where rainbows

unbind themselves completely.

But you stand in the noon.

Shadows are inventing themselves

over your quickening retina;

the day moves on to shade

when spires are like pen-strokes

in the heat haze… It’s

like Newton’s gold trances

as he skimmed slates on the sea,

like Einstein’s chatter over tea,

borealis, wispy cigarettes. It’s

down to the human to live it, take

it in. Keep my sunlight warm for me.

 "A Harvard research team, headed by Jeff Lichtman, has duplicated the way that a television monitor uses varying amounts of just three colors (red, blue, green) to produce a huge array of resultant hues. They have applied this technique in the brain using fluorescent cyan, yellow, and red pigments--varying amounts of which can produce 90 possible color combinations to label individual neurons" (Batts, 2007).  How pretty. 
"Ages ago, educated people were often artists AND scientists (like Leonardo di Vinci) and the pursuit of knowledge and fact fed into their desire to understand aesthetic beauty and the creative process" (Batts). 



Batts, S. 2007. The technicolor brain: science and art. I found at this website: http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2007/11/the_technicolor_brain_science.php, but it's no longer there. Search 'Shelly Batts'.

Sakai, A. & Leggo, C. 1997. Knowing from different angles: language arts and science connections. Voices From the Middle, 4(2), 26-30.