TOPIC P: California Poppies

I missed seeing them this year.  It is not that I did not go looking for them.  I typically see them near Gorman as I travel south to Los Angeles along I-5.  But this year, they were not really there to be enjoyed, except in small isolated blooms deep in the fields.  I even checked the state natural reserve in Lancaster.  Not many there this year either.

I am talking about California Poppies.  This delightful little flower is the state flower, and it usually is evident along the highways in the spring of each year.  Each bloom is not very big, maybe 1-2 inches in diameter with several sprouting together out of one plant. They are a vibrant yellow gold color that screams for attention in the hills.  They typically share the hillsides with cream puffs, lupine, and other wildflowers.

This year, however, the January temperatures were too low and the annual rainfall was too minimal to produce a great batch of California Poppies.  Typically, the highways are littered with them.  And hills and hills of them are evident at the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve SNR in Lancaster, off Highway 138.  I have been there many times to view these natural wonders.  The Reserve offers 8 miles of trails through the hills amongst the flowers.  My dad and I visited there several times, just to enjoy the flowers and take some pictures.

When they are in bloom, they are magnificent:

“Simply to see a distant horizon through a clear air—the fine outline of a distant hill or a blue mountain top through some new vista—this is wealth enough for one afternoon.”  Thoreau

I am always amazed and delighted when the flowers come back every February to May even as I am puzzled about how their appearance can be so varied each year.  I have always known it is tied to the rains—or lack there of.  One year, the rains came, but the grasses sprung up earlier and thicker than usual and choked out the flowers.  Lots of things can happen to impact the blooms.  Recently I read “Called Out” an essay by Barbara Kingsolver and her husband Stephen Hopp in her book Small Wonder—and it addressed this exact phenomenon.  In that essay, they were talking about the wondrous displays of wildflowers in the Arizona desert and explaining how they keep blooming year after year, but the same explanation applies to California Poppies as well.

Simply put, Kingsolver said, “God planted them.” She then offered a more scientific explanation. Apparently the plants ensure their own survival through the variety inherent in their seeds.  Some seeds bloom faster or longer than others, or need more water than others, or are content to wait for years before blooming than others; the seeds are not all the same! Some years might be impressive, others not so much, but the next year is always a possibility. More officially, “Desert ephemerals. . . [stash] away seasons of success by varying, among and within species, their genetic schedules for germination, flowering, and seed-set.”  Each year, more blooms are likely because each species has a “blueprint for perseverance” that guarantees that wildlflowers—like the California Poppy—“will go on mystifying us, answering to a clock that ticks so slowly we won’t live long enough to hear it.”

I appreciate knowing there is a scientific explanation to support my hope that the poppies will keep blooming year after year. And I applaud the wonder of nature every year when they do bloom.  I can only imagine how magnificent the sight was for John Muir over 100 years ago, when it was not hills and hills of gold, but miles and miles of gold.

Here is how Muir described it:

“One shining morning a landscape was revealed that after all my wanderings still appears the most beautiful I have ever beheld.  At my feet lay the Great Valley of California, level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine forty or fifty miles wide, five hundred miles long, one rich furred garden of yellow Compositae. And from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flowerbed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, and so gloriously colored and so radiant it seemed not clothed in light, but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city.”

Wouldn’t that be wondrous to view?  Still, I will be content to see whatever flower show blooms each year.  I am hopeful 2014 will be a good year once again.  What are your favorite wildflowers?

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!

Today would have been Mom and Dad’s 72^nd Wedding Anniversary. 

Mom died in November 2012.  This is the first anniversary since her death.  Dad is doing okay:  alert, fairly active, and joking with the staff at the Center where he lives.  I tend to see him on Saturdays.  Memories of Mom always come up, but as time passes, the tears are not always there anymore.  Good memories.

One of Dad’s favorite memories of Mom is the day he first saw her.  It was in the Steinmetz High School cafeteria.  Dad was some sort of hall monitor, but his focus was not on his job. He saw her across the room during lunch and just knew she would be his.  That was in 1939.

Ray & Dorothy Before Getting Married

They were married on June 7, 1941, in Chicago, Illinois.  Mom carried yellow tea roses.  They went to Wisconsin Dells for a short honeymoon.

Heading to the Church

Mr. & Mrs. Ray Ross

Presumed Postcard Honeymoon Souvenir

Dad is very proud that since the wedding, he has not taken off his wedding band, ever, not even once.  Not slogging through the muck at Iwo Jima, not in messy everyday clean-ups like while painting or working in the garden, and not in the hospital during surgeries.  He refuses to take it off to this day—it is his last tangible connection to Mom.

One of Their Last Visits 2012

When I see him tomorrow over dinner, I am sure we will share some good memories, and probably cry a bit.  Mom and Dad—Raymond Francis and Dorothy Birkemoe—were a great couple.

Dad will enjoy these photos of Mom and Dad over the years:

1966: 25 Years Together

1975: 34 Years Together

1984: 43 Years Together

1989: 48 Years Together

1991: Cutting 50th Anniversary Cake

1992: 51 Years Together

2011: 70 Years Together

I know their love lives on.  Happy Anniversary!

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THINGS WERE A BIT DIFFERENT BACK IN 1941

Average 3 bedroom house cost $4000

Average house rental was $32 a month

Average annual income was $2,437

A new Ford cost $680

Gas was $0.19 a gallon

Bread was $0.08 a pound/loaf

Milk was $0.54 a gallon

Bacon was $0.34 a pound

First Class Stamp was $0.03

Some popular songs were “Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered,” “Deep in the heart of Texas,” “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” and “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.”

Some movies that came out that year:  Citizen Kane, Dumbo, How Green Was My Valley, Sergeant York, and The Maltese Falcon.

Japan Bombed Pearl Harbor

Superman was rated 4-7 because of his X-ray Vision

Greta Garbo Retired

Red Skelton started on the radio, with his closing “God Bless”

4^th Thursday in November officially named as Thanksgiving

CURIOSITY: The Key to Educational Reform?

Our Educational System:

When you think of school—no matter what level—what image comes to mind? For most, it is a teacher at the front of the room, perhaps writing on a blackboard, and students sitting in nice neat little rows.  Things may change with the different levels and over time, but not very much. Sometimes there are computers in the room.  Or maybe the chairs are in a circle, or students are clustered in small groups.  Still, the basics of education have not changed much since schools were first being built.

Sugata Mitra explains that this basic educational structure was delineated during Victorian times when capable workers were needed in factories.  The workers needed to be able to read enough to follow directions accurately and to follow rules and regulations to the letter.  They needed to be able to step in and do the job in the factories without asking too many questions.  Today’s problem is that those skills are no longer what are needed for most jobs.  According to Mitra, “The Victorians were great engineers. They engineered a [schooling] system that was so robust that it’s still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists.”

Mastery of content—once prized as the mark of an educated person—is also not so crucial today given how quickly information changes these days and how readily all that new information is available to anyone over the Internet.  What general workers and good citizens need today includes the ability to access information, assess its credibility, and then apply it as needed in new situations.  The world needs critical thinkers who can create, collaborate, and cooperate while still getting the job done.  The world also needs good communicators who can use social media as well as traditional communication pathways to keep the customer informed and satisfied.  And those customers could be from anywhere in the world.  Things like business acumen and marketing strategies and specialized skills or processes are still needed, but by themselves, these abilities will not necessarily keep someone employed.

The Need for Change:

Ask most educators today if the educational arena needs to changed, fixed, reformed, and you will hear a resounding, “Yes!”  The problems come with deciding what changes will help.  And then it is not just the need to try that change in the classroom, but to have the change accepted throughout the system.  Especially in higher education, what happens at the community college has to transfer to four-year schools.  There is a movement through accreditation processes to develop more realistic and appropriate learning outcomes and assessment practices, so the critical thinking and habits of mind needed by workers today can be at least part of what is being taught.  Even the language needs to change:  shouldn’t we be more focused on what the students learn than on what the teachers teach?  The call for this paradigm shift is not new.  Barr and Tagg have been pushing it since 1995. Some have embraced these ideas, but active learning and student-focused education are still not the norm everywhere.

Thus systemwide change is not happening—or at least it is not happening quickly enough.  Online education has brought some changes in the delivery system, but—even though the students are logging on from home—the basic structure of the educational system is still about the same.  Teachers present materials and opportunities for the students to grapple with and learn from.  To really figure out what to change to help people learn and to clarify exactly what should be learned these days, maybe we all need to just step back.  Start over.

Sugata Mitra’s Plan:  Curiosity & Encouragement:

Fortunately, Sugata Mitra has a great idea on how to revolutionize education.  He makes the change sound so simple when he presents his idea at Ted Talks 2013.  Actually, he has been working on this idea since the late 1990s.  And his ideas are based on working with students, with actually trying things out, with kids, getting them to learn. Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, calls his idea “minimally invasive education.”  Over the years his project was called “The Hole in the Wall” experiments, but he is now working on “The School in the Cloud.”

Mitra’s plan:  Give kids a question and some learning tools and get out of their way.  Let curiosity take over, pushed forward gently by persistent praise and encouragement.

Listen to him share this simple, profound idea in February 2013 as the winner of the TED2013 Prize:

Can it really be this simple?  I think it can.  The grown-ups just have to let it happen—and then figure out a way to use this notion to reform higher education as well.  Any ideas?

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Quotes by Sugata Mitra

“It’s quite fashionable to say that the education system’s broken — it’s not broken, it’s wonderfully constructed. It’s just that we don’t need it anymore. It’s outdated.”

“In nine months, a group of children left alone with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West.”

“It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens. It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete.”

“My wish is that we design the future of learning. We don’t want to be spare parts for a great human computer.”