Last week in my physical science class, a student with a contagious laugh asked, “Would you write me a college recommendation letter?”  Her table-mates, three boys, broke up.  She was serious.

I chuckled too. For one, she’s a sophomore.  College application season comes fall, senior year.  Ambitious juniors request letters in May, before summer break but they’re the exceptions: the planners, forward thinkers, movers and shakers of the teenage set.  A sophomore?  You’d think this girl’s got rocket fuel in her veins.

Alas, no – she’s unproductive, off-task: giggling, laughing, goofing.  Hardly the right stuff.  It’s what sophomores are best at, being silly, but this girl lives to stand in the comedic spotlight.  She’s the Sarah Silverman of the classroom, minus the off-color.

She got the boys roaring again when she said, “Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.”

Life at 53 comes with its share of indignities.  Surrounded by youth, the indignities get amplified.  I’ve slipped on a scientific supply catalog and dropped like a telephone book from a lab table, briefly disappearing from class view before popping up like nothing happened, supercharged with adrenaline, having concussed myself – left to wonder later why my temple pounded so.  I’ve reached above my head to hang a toy airplane from the foam ceiling panel when a muscle cramp set like concrete along my jawline so severe I had to walk, head askew, to the rear of the room and request the class, “Stop looking at me.”  After scarfing a cafeteria plate of rice and butter beans, I’ve farted and stood silently, letting a nattily-attired boy take the fall.

I approached her table, withholding comment, a teacher’s first technique – physical proximity – to direct students back on task when Little Sarah Silverman, immune to discipline, dropped her pencil in dramatic fashion, “I want to be a pediatrician, so I need a recommendation letter from a science teacher.”

Between convulsive fits, the boy next to her, Deeter, said, “Can you imagine taking your children to see Sarah?”

Little Sarah Silverman said, “I can’t ask my biology teacher.  Last year I had a concussion and I was forced to make-up my finals before I was ready.”

“And your story proves what?”

Little Sarah changed the subject, “I have another request.”

“Ok.”

“Would you be offended if I told you a bald joke every day for the rest of the semester?”

Research suggests that about half of all men will experience some kind of male pattern baldness by the time they are 50. It has been linked with things like poor self-esteem and body image, the perception of being old, and depression. It’s hardly that surprising then that worldwide, men spend nearly $3.5 billion naturally trying to either hide or reverse their natural hair loss.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“You don’t get bald jokes?”

“I’m not bald.  A shaved head is my choice.”

“You look offended.”

“Irrelevance is not offensive.”

“Are you really that bald,” little Sarah paused, a look thrown to her boys, “or is your neck just blowing a bubble?”

The boys exploded.

Some students are not behaviorally built for the classroom.  The unconventional recommendation letter, for me, is the easiest to write.  The kids destined for stardom, you can just tell.  The ‘good student’ model is hardly the only, or even an adequate, predictor for future success.

This past Friday the class had been quieter than normal; little Sarah Silverman was absent.  End bell about to ring, Deeter presented his phone and I saw little Sarah’s face, Face-timing.  She appeared to be a passenger in a car.  Her voice, filtered through the phone, “I have a joke.  Ready?”

“Ok.”

“You’re so bald, I can see what’s on your mind.”

In one study, researchers had participants rate photos of men with full heads of hair, and another group rate the same men, but with their hair digitally removed.  Because only their hair was modified, any differences between the groups had to be due to baldness. The bald men were rated as being:

• 13 percent more dominant.
• 6 percent more confident.
• 10 percent more masculine.
• About an inch taller.
• 13 percent stronger.
• Nearly four years older.

Great news, still, four years older?  Ouch.  I could let my hair grow, perhaps regaining the lost four years, but at what cost?  There’s a third category of hair, the lowest rated:  Thinning, But Not Bald.

I’ll be writing little Sarah Silverman her recommendation letter in eighteen months, if she still wants it.  She’s not my best student, but little Sarah reminds me, you’re at your ambitious best with nothing to hide.

Yesterday, I showed an image to my physics class of a hedgehog curled into a ball and the description:

The spines of a hedgehog obviously help protect it from predators. But they serve another function as well. If a hedgehog falls from a tree—a not uncommon occurrence—it simply rolls itself into a ball before it lands. Its thick spines then cushion the blow by increasing the time it takes for the animal to come to rest. Indeed, hedgehogs have been observed to fall out of trees on purpose to get to the ground!

Pearson Education 2019

It’s the physics unit on impulse and momentum change.  Air bags, seat belts, and crumpling bumpers are more typical examples used to demonstrate the relationship between impact force and impact duration, the idea, increase the time duration of the collision to reduce the impact force (cushion the blow) while the moving body’s momentum drops to zero.

Hannah appears interested, raises her hand, “I have a hedgehog story.  My cousin had one.  She named it Bruce Quillis.”

“And?”

“That’s my story.  It’s not really a story.”

“Class, other hedgehog names?”

“Quill Smith.”

“Quill Ferrell.”

“Prince Quilliam.”

Seated next to Hannah, Stretcher says, “I have a story.  My aunt once killed a hedgehog by drowning it.”

“That’s one sadistic aunt.”

“No, wrong idea.  She drowned it in the bathtub.”

“And how does the bathtub make her less sadistic?”

“She was giving it a bath.”

“Hedgehogs require grooming?”

Stretcher says, “She got distracted, left to do something else.  Hedgehogs can’t swim.”

Someone else says, “They’re soft if you pet them in the right direction.”

I look at Blatt’s tablet and see a paused Youtube video, titled ‘Hedgehogs Swimming’.  Blatt turns his tablet to Stretcher, “Hedgehogs can swim.”

Stretcher shrugs, “Baby hedgehog.  They can’t swim.”

Rayva says “Hedgehogs are illegal in Georgia.  I tried to get one.”

I ask, “Before or after you discovered they were illegal?”  Rayva is silent and drops her head, acting like she’s taking notes.

Hedgehogs are much smaller than, and unrelated to, porcupines. Hedgehogs are not considered rodents, they’re insectivores.  Hedgehog spines do not detach like a porcupine’s quills.  Porcupines that shoot their quills like projectiles are a myth.

Young hedgehogs may lose their spines in a process called ‘quilling’ but they’re replaced as they age into adults.  Spines may be permanently lost due to disease or under stress.

Sally dug into her backpack and extracted a plastic bag containing her blood-stained wisdom teeth (permanently lost to the dentist just yesterday) and asked if anyone would like to see them.  She said her blood was taken and centrifuged (referencing first semester’s unit on centripetal forces) to separate the platelets, apparently used in her recovery treatment.

In Britain, wild hedgehogs are considered threatened by habitat loss and vehicular hedgicide.  In America, it is illegal to keep a hedgehog as pet in California, Arizona, Georgia, Hawaii, Maine, NYC, Pennysylvania, and Washington D.C.

Hedgehogs are used as croquet balls by the Queen of Hearts in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

The most common hedgehog pet species are hybrids of the white-bellied hedgehog and North African pygmy.  Hedgehogs can be socialized by tender pet owners, taught to trust being handled by humans without curling into a prickly ball, but by nature, they’re loners and only ‘hook up’ for mating.

Cross a hedgehog with a poodle to smooth their coat, what would you name it?

“Poodlehog.”

“Hedgoodle.”

“Hedgie-poo.”

A former student peeked into my empty room last week.  I was expecting a current student, worried she’d forgot to make-up her final exam.  She wouldn’t pass without it.  It was a Thursday, the first of two planning days in 2019 following winter break.  You might wonder how a student could forget such a thing.  She took it Friday, a day later, and passed.

It’s always a little jarring when a former student returns, a mental struggle to place them in time and space, awkward when their name is lost too.  Superior name recall was once a source of pride, but the waves of students over the years have cured me of that.  Minutes after she’d left, it came to me – Roopsha.  Only been two years after all, a unique name (the double o, an assonance rhyme with poodle) and she’d returned once before.  I should’ve remembered.  Would humanity be better off if we remembered everything?  If you could switch on the gene for photographic memory, would you?

First, you’d have to believe there is a gene, or gene combination, for photographic memory.  There isn’t.  How do I know?  Because there is no such thing as photographic memory.  An article in Scientific American, “Even a winner of the memory Olympics still had to keep sticky notes on the refrigerator to remember what she had to do during the day.”  I once had a parent call me on the last day of school to demand I add points to her child’s final grade, points her child deserved that I’d supposedly promised and failed to deliver, this mother telling me she believed her daughter over me because her daughter ‘kept a thorough system of sticky notes at her bedroom desk to keep track of such things’.

Some take pride in never forgetting a face, but most of us remember faces better, we remember visual material better than non-visual.  Seems we all have a kind of photographic memory.  It’s the few who combine intense study over years with better-than-average innate ability who seem to possess a remarkable skill.

I remember Roopsha had impeccable study habits: intense attention, note-taking, kept an agenda, planned ahead.  She stood out for the type of question, less about physics, more about logistics, like the classic, ‘how many questions on the test?’ Or, ‘can we round 9.8 to 10 for gravity?’ Or ‘is pen ok?’  Explaining the hard stuff, how to think about the physical world, can wear a teacher out, but the easy stuff, the sheer volume, is tiresome too.  Politeness and sincerity matter.  Roopsha oozed both and I came to enjoy her earnest questions, unnecessary as I felt them to be.

Today she’s a sophomore at MIT majoring in biomedical engineering.  Roopsha’s high school science fair project won acclaim at the County level and maybe the State too, I don’t remember.  She’d been an intern at the time and assisted a researcher at Georgia Tech.  Or Emory.

Now she’s researching the human genome, cataloguing proteins, a challenge shrinking her library of proteins.  She mentioned protein folding and synthesis, cellular somethings-or-other, microbial mish-machinations and I nodded along like it was all very interesting and made perfect sense.

On MIT’s website, there are  many young women in the images wearing lab coats and latex gloves.  No Roopsha though. On MIT News, an article discussed a gene form that’s been linked to Alzheimer’s.  “The researchers also found that they could eliminate the signs of Alzheimer’s in brain cells by editing the gene with CRISPR.”  Roopsha had referenced CRISPR technology and I said, “That reminds me of a short story I’d read over the holidays.”

It’s a story set in a future world where CRISPR gene-editing technology is mass-marketed to humans for the purpose of selecting traits for their lawn, pets, and children.

Roopsha said, “You know there are reports the Chinese have used this technology to clone a human baby.  I don’t know if I believe the story or not.”

“Healthy skepticism is the hallmark of a good scientist.  T.C. Boyle mentioned the Chinese pioneering the CRISPR technology in his story.”

Pulling out her phone, she asked, “What’s the title?”

“Are We Not Men?”

Roopsha said, “You should check out the movie, ‘Gattaca’.  And a novel called ‘Beggars in Spain.'”

In 2011, NASA published a list of its most scientifically plausible science-fiction movies.  Gattaca (1997), starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman made #1.  The theme is eugenics, a society where children are born with predetermined genetic traits.  The fictional society in the novel, ‘Beggars in Spain’ is split between the non-genetically modified (The Norms) and the modified to not need sleep, the sleepless gaining unfair advantage.

I jotted her recommendations thinking I’d need to forfeit sleep to get to these. 

***

CRISPR technology is touted as ‘democratized gene editing’  because the technology makes it super easy to snip DNA segments.  In effect, any old plumbing researcher with a pair of microscopic scissors and tweezers can mess with life’s fundamental building blocks.

You don’t need a lab coat, a petri dish, and university funding to mess with life’s fundamental blocks.

On Christmas Day at my sister’s I met McBaker.  Or Mick.  Or Baker.  Or Machine Gun.  Depending on who you ask.

My sister Rose’s husband picked the puppy up Christmas Eve at what he’d hoped wasn’t a puppy mill in a northeastern Ohio town I’d never heard of – Dundee – a town whose existence I briefly doubted; Dundee exists alright, it’s there in Wikipedia, 71 miles south of Cleveland in Tuscarawas County.  Tuscarawas is a Native American word meaning ‘open mouth’.

The puppy gnawed on my nephew’s socked foot with a weak jaw.

Poodles are apparently crossed with any breed.  The naming convention is biased toward oodles, doodles, and poos:  Malamoodle, Giant Schnoodle, Dalmadoodle, Eskapoo, Jackapoo, Poovanese, and Pootalian.  The list goes on:  Poodle, Woodle, Foodle, and Saint Berdoodle.  From a list of 112 Poodle mixes on dogbreedinfo.com, I counted three that excluded -oodle or -poo from the name, for good reason: Rattle, Rottle, and Daisy Dog.

Poodles crossed with Pit Bulls are Pit Boodles.

The hairless red pit bull, a taut muscular hide the color of a ripe maraschino, has a great name: Cherry Pit.  Cherry pits do not exist.  They’re the pigment of fiction writer T.C. Boyle’s imagination, bred to be germ-free in his short story, “Are We Not Men?”

Inside her home, my sister followed her Mini-Goldendoodle bent over with a spray bottle of pee-be-gone in one hand, damp sponge in the other.

The puppy needed a name.  Baker Mayfield-mania has overtaken northeastern Ohio as well as my sister’s household of three teenage boys.

Their last two dogs were named O’Malley and Finnegan.  The puppy’s working name was McBaker.  Shortened to Mick, or Baker.

My wife said McBaker wasn’t Irish, it’s Scottish.  How would she know this, I wondered?  Last year, my wife had submitted her own DNA to ancestry.com.  She knows things.

I like Peat.  Not Pete.  Peat.  Peat bogs are in Ireland.  Peat is burned to keep you warm (and cuddly).  I texted Rose my idea.  You could call him Peaty.  She texted back, “Dog’s don’t recognize their names for 12 weeks.  There’s time to change.  The boys have settled on Mick.”  The dog seller called, “How’s Charlie?”  Rose wondered, “Who’s Charlie?”

In a Sam Pickering essay collection, “Letters To A Teacher”, in the very first chapter on the first page, he writes of the value of forgetfulness:

“The heartache of being human is that often when we act selflessly and with good intentions we bruise others.  For teachers surrounded by children who at times seem sadly vulnerable the heartache rarely ends.  No matter how well intentioned teachers are, they will bump those about them.  Two things enable teachers to cope.  The first is simply forgetfulness.  Life pushes so much at us that a specific event rarely clogs the mind for a long time.  In Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Mole and Ratty search for Portly, a lost baby otter.  They rescue Portly, finding him sleeping between the hooves of Pan, the deity of the natural world.  Pan bestows the gift of forgetfulness upon Mole and Rat, “lest,” Grahame writes, “the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and light-hearted as before.”

The second thing that enables teachers to cope, Pickering writes, “the real effects of teaching remain mysterious, something that complicates attempts to define good teaching.  Almost never do teachers know exactly how their words, or actions, affect students.  Moreover, if we really believed that everything we said shaped students, we would be too terrified to speak.”