I’ve more or less moved on from actual Public School Classroom Teaching for other adventures (the internet has provided mind-blowing alternatives in that regard) at this stage in my life but this was my whiteboard from way back around 2008-09. I was teaching high level Nuclear Physics (which is what I did in the Navy) to 9th graders who lived in a relatively disadvantaged community with very high Free and Reduced Lunch roll numbers.
It was hard.
I don’t do things that are easy…never have really. For some really odd reason, this scares people, and I’ve never really understood why. Is it some kind of glitch in our Evolution? Or, I KNOW, maybe it’s a GHOST THAT WAS SENT FROM FARMULLLLTWOOT TO HAUNT ME?!!
…………………………AARAARAARRRAAARRARGHAARRGHGHGGHGHGHGHG!!!!
So, yeah, the other Teachers (and Administrators) didn’t get it…they thought I was teaching sorcery or something.
Took me a few years to realize the hard fact that I was not going to change them or the school system itself….I learned that it’s impossible to change a system when you’re still in it………IT consumes YOU instead….and at that point, it’s nothing but a trap…
…so I bounced
It seems Heaven (or whoever is fraudulently in power over others and uses it to abuse them) has always attempted to Forbid people to teach…and learn….Science.
OH! …see the green arrow? You might not be familliar, but that is an old Police album from the 80’s.
The name of the album, if you don’t know, is called Ghost in the Machine. It was named after a British Philosopher’s (Gilbert Ryle) concepts on the mind and the body being separate…this was a way to momentarily explain how the body can be well known as a machine but the mind, at the time, was still very much a mystery…so they assumed the mind was like a Ghost.
Which it’s not…..duh.
We NOW know that there is NO Ghost in our Machines, and our bodies hold very little mystery as to how they function, how we reproduce, and how our genes code for everything we are and see about us.
So while there is no Ghost in our Machine, there is definitely plenty of Machine in our Machine…we are basically just chemical machines of goo and hardened Calcium.
So when I say on this site that there is “No Ghost in your Machine”….I’ve been teaching this stuff a long long time now (although with less…or zero…profanity, of course…at least not in front of the kids……..duh).
I’ve always known that the News was mostly Bullshit…however, at the time, I just didn’t know why or how it worked.
But those mysteries are now as gone as Gilbert Ryle’s is.
– Your Friendly Neighborhood Science Teacher
English