I was twenty-four years old when I started teaching at the Community School in Ketchum, Idaho. I taught seventh and eighth graders to write, eleventh graders to read, and, because the science teacher was overburdened, I took on an eighth-grade science class. I was also the assistant soccer coach, even though I knew nothing about soccer, and the outdoor program advisor, even though I didn’t know enough about the behavior of adolescents in the outdoors (nobody does).
The Community School was a start-up. Its headmaster had been the principal of Hemingway Elementary School in Ketchum, but he only had a provisional certificate, and he had been spat out by the Idaho educational bureaucracy when he failed to take the classes required for formal certification. He had been a popular administrator, and enough parents opposed his firing that he was able to start, on a wing and a prayer and a smoldering sense of injustice, his own private school.
It was a long-shot endeavor, but it had a lot of support and wealth behind it. By the time I was hired, the school was moving into a new building, growing an endowment, and adding a new grade every fall. When our eleventh graders became seniors, we would have a full 7-12 curriculum and I would become, in addition to my other duties, the college counselor.
I taught grammar and read short stories with my younger students. I finally learned the structure of my native language. I learned how to give feedback without discouragement, and with my eleventh graders, I learned the American literary canon. I was up late most nights, studying harder than I ever had, trying to stay ahead of my students.
If you want to find out how much you didn’t learn the first time around, teach. It’s a humbling experience, going into a classroom to teach something you’ve just barely learned, but most of the time it works.
The surgical residency model—watch a procedure, do a procedure, teach a procedure—describes the process.
I didn’t know much about a science book, as the song goes, but when I stood in front of my eighth graders for the first time, my ignorance wasn’t a complete liability. I had completed my undergraduate science requirement by taking geology. I had barely gotten my gentleman’s B- by learning enough geochemistry to know that some bonds between molecules are stronger than others, and those bonds vary over a spectrum of temperature and pressure (I have remembered that over almost five decades because it’s a handy metaphor for a variety of human connections, not because I learned anything about chemistry).
My professor was the scientist and writer Stephen Jay Gould. He taught by osmosis. By sitting in his class you absorbed a world view that included wonder in the face of new data and a healthy suspicion of anybody’s prior expertise, including your own. He taught science as an open-ended subject, one where an unexpected result could upend your entire project, damage your career, and wreck cherished schools of thought. He said this was a good thing.
He also taught the scientific method as the only way you could know the real world. Otherwise, the imperfect human brain, high on hormones, illusions, politics, instinctual fears, and received superstitions, could trick you into believing in a world that didn’t exist. You could base your life on a complex of lies.
The only problem with the scientific method was that it could take years to know that a scientific fact was really a fact—that light could be both a particle and a wave, for instance—and you might spend the rest of your life trying to figure out what that fact meant.
It was luck that handed me a roomful of eighth-grade science students, and luck that I had no curriculum, no textbook titled Earth Science, and no sense that eighth graders were too young for any material I could come up with. I told my students about eccentric 19th century British naturalists, who turned their libraries and living rooms into museums, and who considered their field studies, however haphazard, to be contributions to cutting-edge science. We would do the same.
I had ordered blank books for the class, and I passed one out to each student.
“This book is your scientific notebook. It’s proof you’re a reliable witness to the world,” I said. “Keep it neat, but not that neat. Write down what you see and hear. Draw what you see. You can press leaves and flowers between its pages. Write down every question that lets you look deeper into the world. You’re an observer, and science starts and ends with observation.”
I also handed out a few pages from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, wherein the author, Robert Pirsig, lays out the scientific method. Pirsig, after describing how observation results in hypothesis, hypothesis results in experiment, and experiment results in theory, says that the scientific method is slow—too slow for most people’s patience—but if you really want to know the world, it’s the best tool you have.
I didn’t subject my students to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but it was in my library and I read and re-read it before field trips—every class period, that fall, that had survivable weather—and I emphasized to the class Kuhn’s ideas that science progressed not by finding answers to questions but by asking questions no one had thought of before. I repeated Kuhn’s idea that Einstein’s theories had to wait until a whole generation of classical physicists were killed off in World War I before people would accept them as science. Without knowing much about Einstein, I told them he had inspired thought experiments that had young people in starships returning to earth to find that all their friends had died of old age. That got them excited, looking at each other and imagining each other as old.
I gave them the gambler’s version of the Laws of Thermodynamics: 1) You can’t win. 2) You can’t break even. 3) You can’t get out of the game. Eighth graders, being thirteen, didn’t take well to these rules.
I told them if they refused to believe me, we’d construct perpetual motion machines and take them to the National Science Fair and save the world.
None of our perpetual motion machines worked, which was a good introduction to our next text, which I had found in a Boise bookstore the previous summer. It was a spinoff from the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth, which had come out my senior year of college. Limits was a study of population and resources that indicated you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet.
I can’t remember the title of our spinoff textbook. I can’t find it in my library. I’ve tried to research it on the Internet, and I’m still searching. (If I’ve loaned it out to anyone reading this, please bring it back.)
The book is a close examination of all the sustainable energy avenues that were available to civilization in 1974. These included maximum expansion of hydroelectric dams, tidal energy, solar, wind, biomass, fusion (thirty years away in 1974, thirty years away now), surface/deep-sea thermoelectricity, Gulf Stream turbines, geothermal plants, orbiting solar panels, and something that looked much like Nikolai Tesla’s plan for the earth to be used as a giant electrical generator.
Included were estimates on cost and time of completion. Everything was to be up and running by the year 2000. Looking back, some of those energy schemes look impractical or dependent on yet-to-be-invented technology, but enough of them would have worked that, had they been implemented across the world, civilization would by now be freed from the lethal effects of fossil fuel.
At the end of the semester, the class notebooks came in. Some of them were scribbled chaos and some of them were far too neat, but they all were the work of people who had been witnesses to the world, and they took their work seriously. For one semester of their lives, a class of thirteen-year-olds in Idaho had a fair amount in common with Stephen Jay Gould.
It was a great class. I can’t believe I got away with it. I can’t believe I told privileged white kids in an Idaho ski resort that their world was doomed unless their generation and mine saved it. We were humanity’s last chance, I said. It was now or never. I can’t believe I said that in 1974, when it was probably already too late.
Fix-this-or-die projections had already been made in 1972, when The Limits to Growth was published. Jimmy Carter was the only U.S. president who took his job seriously enough that he tried to save his people and their country from their own appetites, and he failed miserably.
There is tragedy here, and it lies in the fact that on a minor planet orbiting a minor star on a minor arm of a giant spiral galaxy, a species evolved with enough sentience to discover the laws of physics and build a civilization and create works of art and music that are stunning in their beauty and complexity and promise. But that same species ignored its own discovery—in some cases passed laws against the laws of physics—and reverted to a point in its history where science hadn’t been invented yet. Humans came to value sensation more than observation, the subjective over the objective, and a soporific self-indulgence—indistinguishable, in practical terms, from death—over basic self-awareness.
Little wonder that they have wrecked their planet instead of recognizing they were going to need it to live.
My science class ended after one semester. A new science teacher was hired for spring, and I went back to teaching people to read and write. I took what I had learned from teaching science into my literature classes, and to the extent I could, I turned literature into a scientific phenomenon, one worthy of deep examination, one whose anomalies and flourishes served a larger whole, the meaning of which was reserved for further study. It was not saving the world, but I like to think that it has allowed my literature students more purposeful and happier lives in the time they have had left.
I don’t know that any of my students became resource and population activists. A lot of them have had children and some of them have grandchildren despite what they learned in eighth-grade science. Like a lot of humans, including me, they rebel against the laws of physics, even if they no longer need the theory of relativity to see each other as old.
As for me, I’m hoping to stay ahead of entropy at least until the photos that have come back from the James Webb telescope are published. That’s eight days from now, and it’s going to be an occasion that stands in triumphant opposition to millennia of humanity’s reptilian death-wishes. The data James Webb is beaming back to earth will certify humans as one of the great species of the cosmos, one capable of brilliant engineering, overwhelming curiosity, boundless imagination, and a desire to live and explore the universe as an exercise in intellectual joy.
One imagines the aliens of the second expedition to our sun and planets (I don’t know their name for their first expedition, but we know it as Oumuamua) finding the James Webb telescope drifting out among the asteroids and pulling it into their ship and examining it. It’s a little worse for ten thousand years of micrometeorite impacts, but it’s still magnificent, and glittering, and the aliens immediately recognize it is an artifact of galaxy-class minds.
“It’s a telescope-time machine,” the chief scientist of the aliens will say. “They wanted to see back to the beginning of things, and they got close.”
“Way smarter than we thought they were,” the assistant to the chief alien scientist will say. “Some of them. But they were still primates. Tribes, dominant males, intraspecies warfare, the whole depressing business. They were toast before they got out of the gate.”
They will shrug (or they would if they had shoulders) and pack the James Webb away among their other souvenirs, the Picassos and Rembrandts and Gutenberg Bibles and the ’57 T-Bird and Clovis points and the flash-blackened Stradivarius and the recordings of Hitchcock movies and Brubeck and Beethoven and Martin Luther King. Then they’ll head out in the direction of Andromeda, looking once again for still-living sentients, because even after all this time searching, they’re still hoping to find someone with whom to compare notebooks.