My New Science Education Career

As Fluff told you in the previous essay, I have moved to Strasbourg, France. I was really relieved to get here, and could not have done it without extensive help from my daughter and French son-in-law. They had almost everything ready for us, and are helping us with the rest.

I joked that I was going to be a full-time grandpa. But, as it turns out, that is mostly what is happening. I had fantasies about traveling in Europe, at least in the “Schengen zone” where the only thing you need is a European passport. Not all Schengen countries are in the European Union, with a common currency, but they erect no barriers to one country’s approved residents traveling to another. I thought I would go to see all the natural areas, and continue posting videos and essays about the natural landscape of France. But I am having plenty of challenges even without leaving Strasbourg. Just learning our way around, establishing a bank account, learning to use the tram, and buying a few things keeps me and my wife occupied when I am not reading, writing little essays like this, or staying with my grandkids. The cultural transition I am now experiencing will take several months. Then I can think about travel.

That is my new science education career: teaching my grandkids about the wonders of science. There are a lot of things that I have taken for granted ever since I was a little child, such as the fact the Earth is roughly spherical; it rotates at an angle; it revolves around the sun, and this accounts for the seasons. I just assumed everybody knew this, but my grandkids will have to learn it from me, or from school, hopefully both. And to do this, my wife and I just bought them a globe, nearly identical to the one that I had when I was a child. The fact that the Earth turns, rather than the sun moving across the sky, is not something that you can just see from the ground. It is something you have to deduce from evidence. I feel anew the sense of discovery I had as a child.

The globe also has raised mountains, which will allow me to show the kids how Tibet differs from France in more ways than one. It will also allow me to explain rain shadows. I can also explain the Gulf Stream, which is why Strasbourg, at 48 degrees north, has a moderate climate.

I assumed that everyone knew that when it is winter in the Northern Hemisphere, it is summer in the Southern, and vise versa. But apparently this is not true. A wild right-wing commentator, Dinesh D’Souza, was so angry at global warming science that he would grab at every bit of information he could find to discredit it. In a recent year, he heard that Australia had snow in August. D’Souza proudly declared, how can there be snow in August if there is global warming? He did not know August is winter in Australia. This is something my grandkids will know before they finish elementary school. D’Souza was briefly the president of the King’s College, a fundamentalist Christian college in New York. He was forced to resign, not for ignorance, but for the fact that he had an affair with the wife of one of the administrators of the college.

The only problem with the globe is that it is labeled in Italian. But here in Europe, no matter which country you are in, you are surrounded by other languages. Italy is only a few hundred kilometers south, closer than Spain. So this is not really a problem.

And this is just the first step. Within the next year or so, we will get the grandkids a microscope (surprisingly cheap) which will open new worlds to them, I hope, as it did for me. And a music synthesizer. I hope they will grow up learning music as a language and a form of expression, not just as a pleasant (or annoying) background to other activities. A telescope? Maybe not, since, so far, every night and most days have been cloudy, thanks to the Gulf Stream.

I even thought about making videos and writing essays in French about science and nature. But it will take a long time for me to have enough fluency in French to do this. I will never be another Jamy Gourmaud. I will just never speak or write French well enough. The French language is the subject of my next essay.