Winter versicles

I've been posting these to Facebook: might as well give them a permanent home. No, I'm not a poet, but I used to know one.

Winter whinge

I'd rather have a splinter

Stuck in my big toe

Than live a day in winter

For winter will not go.

Winter growl

I wanted to say what I think about winters

To tell the whole story, by hook or by crook —

But then I was told that the nasty old printers

Won't let me use those words in their sort of book.

Winter grizzle

Every poet winter fears:

It freezes their poetic ears,

Poets moan in winter time

Of seasons when it's hard to rhyme.

They loathe the fierce and chilly blows

That frizzilate a poet's nose,

They rant and rail at polar winds

That mortify a poet's shinds.

Every poet hates the winter

Winter forces poets into

Ugg boots, jumpers, woolly socks,

Beanies for their tangled locks . . .

Every poet winter fears,

Then spring comes in and interferes!

All the poets love their springs

That rhyme with sings and swings and strings.

Last of the winter whine

I've had enough

Of winter's rough

And ready hold

On wind and cold.

I hate the storm

Just give me warm

Fresh air and fun

And summer sun.

The Microscopist's mate, part 8 of many.

Just for the record, all of what you find here, and in the other blogs in this series, is now available in fuller detail in my e-book Looking at Small Things.  Go to this link to find out more about how to get the free low-resolution copy, or the cheap high-resolution version: I'm a professional writer, so I like selling books, but I'm also a professional educator, so I like sharing ideas.

There's a similar free or cheap deal on offer for my Playwiths ebook as well, and to see what else I have been doing (LOTS!), go to this link.

You know what they say about ducks, calm, serene and quiet on the surface, paddling like #**@!^ underneath?

Well, that's been me, over the past fortnight, but it's all been worth it.

In one direction, I have just finished going through the the design draft of Australian Backyard Earth Scientist.

Thanks to Jo Karmel's patient editing and Stan Lamond's meticulous design, it now looks and quacks like a book. Or a duck. The bird above, by the way has a name, but  I use the name as my alter ego in another place, so I'm not telling! (What I will tell, is that the National Library of Australia will publish in in January 2019.)  The picture above indicates the likely appearance of the cover, but no guarantees, OK?


But wait, there's more! I have finally worked my way to the end of a guide for K-6 teachers on introducing the gentle art of microscopy in a simple way to young people. You can find it as a PDF by clicking on this link.

Basically, I have looked at all the exciting things you can do with a clip-on magnifier and a device (phone or tablet) to photograph small things. I matched each of these activities to the sloppily drafted pious hopes that make up the National Curriculum.

All of the images (except the one showing the gadget, above) were taken with the Go Micro, and the circle you see is a 9 mm field that you get on a device with no digital zoom.

I did this work as a pro bono for the people who are marketing these Go Micro gadgets: they are a start-up, based on Flinders University. In case you don't know, pro bono is Latin for posh people. As I said, a couple of years back, Latin is a very useful language, at times. Excreta tauri cerbrum vincit.

Back to garnering images, I care about this project because one way into the sciences is by the study of nature, which has absolutely nothing to do with the rubbish my cohort was subjected to in Year 6 under the name "nature study", work that I suspect was mandated by a po-faced and unadventurous pile of stodge, splendiferised by the cognomen 'curriculum'.

No, I want adventures, and here's one I haven't written yet. It is based on the 'skin' or exoskeleton of a huntsman spider, left in my garage after it moulted.

Now huntsman spiders are hard to photograph, because they run around, so I wondered what I could see, and after I looked and found things like the long face on the left, I called this adventure

...do spiders have eyelashes?
First off, I shared one of the images with my older grandchildren, who are 9 and 11, and used to grandpa's odd friends. I headed it: 'A really GRUESOME spider?'

This is really a harmless Australian spider called a huntsman. The circle you see there is about 9 mm across, so it's fairly big.

Well, to be precise, it's only the skin of one. When insects and crabs and spiders and things need to grow, they burst out of their skin. When they do that, there's a soft skin underneath, and they push that soft skin out before it hardens. We call this moulting, but don't worry about that name so much.  The important thing is that the skin sits still for photos.

In the picture, you can see the transparent skin that covered the eyes, lots of whiskers, and also the fangs, which curve around too much for them to be able to bite us. 

I hope you two like it, because at least one species of Australian huntsman spiders is now living in New Zealand.  If you ever watch the movie 'Arachnophobia', you will see the NZ spiders.

Why? Well, it seems the ones that survived in NZ had a "communal habit", meaning they lived together as a group, while the Australian ones prefer to be alone.  If you want mobs of spiders to move together, the New Zealand ones were the best ones to use.

Now, back to my question about the the eyelashes. Today, I started getting adventurous, zooming in by using the built-in digital zoom that comes with most devices, which means losing a bit of clarity.

Still, the bristles that were hard to spot in the first image are now fairly clear.



Here, we can see four of the eyes, but I wasn't finished yet. I zoomed in again, and blow me down, don't those whiskery things look more than a bit like eyelashes?

They aren't eyelashes, of course, but things like that must have evolved for some good reason, and doesn't that look like a nice little question to debate?

Or maybe it sounds more like a future Ph. D. topic? From little things, big things grow, and if those questions have already been solved, there are other huntsman bits to be investigated, like these shots of a palp and some gleaming fangs:

And because the source was a sloughed-off skin, no animals were harmed!

Now back to fitting things to the curriculum, anybody who has seen me in a workshop will know my on-man dialogue:

Me 1: But where dos this fit in the curriculum?

Me 2: In the slot marked Wonder...

Me 1: But there isn't and slot marked Wonder...

Me 2: (grinning wickedly): Then make one!

Oh the things we can think...if we're allowed to.

The Microscopist's mate, part 7 of many.

Just for the record, all of what you find here, and in the other blogs in this series, is now available in fuller detail in my e-book Looking at Small Things.  Go to this link to find out more about how to get the free low-resolution copy, or the cheap high-resolution version: I'm a professional writer, so I like selling books, but I'm also a professional educator, so I like sharing ideas.

There's a similar free or cheap deal on offer for my Playwiths ebook as well, and to see what else I have been doing (LOTS!), go to this link.

Announcing: some serious progress!

Links to previous parts: Part 1, Part 2,  Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6.

The drought has been due to the fact that I have been producing this guide for teachers, as a pro bono job.

I will, as indicated previously, be expanding this into a book on the arts of microscopy.

You can now see the fruits of my labours, though if you have read the previous six parts, you will have seen some of that already. Anyhow, we have released a draft document: Go Micro: Foundation to Stage 3.

This links interesting activities to the National Curriculum in Science, though there is one to the Maths curriculum as well.

I am an opinionated old secondary (and occasionally tertiary) teacher of matters biological, though when people asked me what I taught, my answer was always a bright "children!".

Over the years, I acquired a healthy distrust of theory, even as I was completing a Master's degree in Education. This work concentrated on measurement, evaluation and curriculum, and I still have a small private practice as a "fixer" of multiple-choice questions, here in NSW.

I became a bureaucrat, specialising in translating good theory into good practice, keeping the Head Office parasites away from the teachers, and that is still my position.

That is why I now, having acquired all of the papers I need to prove that I am retired, spend my time writing beautiful practical books for kids. Most of these relate to science, technology, Australia and history in various combinations.

I write for grownups as well, and I am a volunteer bush regenerator, doubling as the wrangler-of-first-resort for trapped possums, confused echidnas, snakes and redbacks. Venomous, sharp-toothed and spikeful animals are no threat to an old bureaucrat...

Clearly, my life lacks any real excitement, so I am also the 'visiting scientist' at a local primary school in a CSIRO volunteer program. My aim is to get my 500+ charges (Foundation to Year 6 in a bush setting) excited and inspired to go and look for themselves.

When an acquaintance told me about the Go Micro, I saw its possibilities right away, and started playing with the gadget, aided by two grandchildren. It worked, so I suggested using them in class to the primary teacher I work with, but a number of primary teachers advised me that they are required to link things to the National Curriculum.

For readers unfamiliar with the NC, here is a police artist's impression, prepared from the statements offered by the surviving victims.

Reminding the reader of my post-graduate qualifications in this area, the National Curriculum is, in my professional opinion, proof that a camel is a horse designed by a committee, the sort of committee that compares a camel with a horse by taking two camels and sawing the humps off one of them. (A quick nod to Lee J. Cronbach, who crafted that vision.)

The National Curriculum is a horrid, dull, uninspiring farrago that quacks when it should lead, and acts as ballast when it should be providing extra lift. No doubt it means well, but it does harm to the spirit. (I hope, dear reader. that you weren't a part of writing the NC, but I'm a risk-taker, and I warned you that I'm opinionated.  And, you should be ashamed of yourself. So there!)

Many years ago, I was an observer/advisor to the NSW lower secondary science syllabus committee, and I became aware of the problem at Snake Gully Central School (not its real name, for obvious reasons). There, each year, there was one science teacher, and the idiots in Staffing sent out a new first-year-out teacher each year, to be the only science teacher in a small school, with no support, no guidance—and no hope.

In particular, the syllabus was deliberately "non-prescriptive", which meant it offered zero guidance or advice, and young teachers need just that. By mid-year, in three successive years, the new teacher had packed up and gone by the middle of the year, and the principal wrote an impassioned letter asking for a bit of common sense, which outraged the air-headed theorists.

Their theories were fine, but totally unrealistic; their doctrines were unworkable. I watched them, and went away to do what I could to get helpful ideas out there. I still care about turning theory into practice, and buried in the mess of the National Curriculum, there are some useful suggestions.

As a bureaucrat, I lurked in the interstices, and wriggled through the gaps, doing practical things among the inert and the fearful, making life easier for teachers, and so now, as Advanced Middle Age looms, I have set out, once again, to make life easier for teachers. It occurred to me that an old sweat knows the tricks of the trade, and has a duty to share those tricks before falling of the perch.

I am a private citizen, so nobody has to listen to me, and I certainly don't have to listen to the plastic trendoids who wrote the curriculum. So far, the clean draft of my guide is complete, up to Year 6, and I am now tackling Years 7 to 10.

Teachers, I believe that the format covers most of the things you need: if you have any thoughts for improvements or additions, I would welcome them.  I have the time and the equipment to solve most challenges, but don't fear any copyright rubbish if you take one of my basic ideas and do something with it.

The Creative Commons copyright shown on my activities is Attribution, Non-commercial, Share Alike, but as I see it, the format is just a format, and not subject to copyright. Take the framework, and do your own thing!

Use it as you see fit, but if you see an essential aspect that needs to be added, please throw those thoughts to me, so I can do the heavy stuff.

It's time for Stone Soup, people.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.