I have a good friend called Deon who travels the country and can’t help himself but show off the lens on his whizz-bang new phone that has more apps than I’ve got thumb muscles for.
He’s taken to photographing and sharing online all sorts of wonderful fungi which cross his path every day.
You’d think he was a mycologist, but he’s not — last year it was micro-spiders and we all thought he was working hard on a phobia.
What I like about Deon is that he is driven by his wonder of the world and his photos come not only from wherever he travels on any day, nor the technology that he remains professionally at the forefront of, but also from deep within.
He was a former colleague and drove us all down the track — some kicking and all of us screaming — to using digital technology in the classroom.
I relented one day.
The traditionalist in me had the kids going from one eye peering down a microscope to then transforming their images into quasi-Picassos in 2B lead on snow-white paper that wished it was still a tree.
Then we transitioned, inevitably, to Deon’s idea of sticking the lens of the students’ iPads and smart phones onto the microscope eyepiece.
My word.
Short story: the students learned to identify a hundred times more things than I ever did at that age.
Yes, it wasn’t traditional biology but balance that against what happened next and it’s a no-brainer.
They wanted to learn more. Their wonderment went wild!
It bloomed — no more physics trajectories on the black/white/whatever board, when you could film the projectile side-on in slow motion and everyone had a copy within seconds.
Time lapse seed germinating, slow motion hydrogen-filled balloons exploding into a ball of flame (I did hold that match a bit too close after all), Young’s double slit experiment — so incredibly hard to explain — could be done with real lasers in a dark room and get the same result a younger Young did in 1801 with candles.
(Google that one. Actually, don’t.)
When I was in my early 20s, I first saw a ‘cup’ fungus and nearly fell over.
It looked like a pixie had left a few tiny bowls of Arnott’s mint slice next to my violas.
An inspiring lecturer pointed me in the direction of the bird-nest group of fungi.
Take the time to have a look out in the paddock, under the house or the native vegetation, take the smartphone and then take it all in.
I saw my first-ever house centipede this year — cuddly things. Yes, cuddly.
Just the wonder of the intricacies of nature in its complex physicality should send your mind into appreciating that we cannot harness nature in our round-up, super and two-stroke world.
The boffins in the labs continue to do their best to find among the (literal) detritus of our world the next penicillin (bread mould), paper pulp refinement (a wasp), a multiple sclerosis wonder drug (fungus that feeds on a dead cicada) and chainsaw teeth (a big beetle with a bigger overbite).
Liverworts are my bag.
They have always perplexed me simply for their tiny little shiny leaves, not quite a plant, not quite a moss, not a lichen and not pronounced ‘liver-wart’ either.
(Liverwert as in St John’s Wert, but I’m guessing most have that wrong as well.)
My fly-fishing buddy drags me away should I pause midstream beside a shaded cliff face and start poking with my knife.
Invite me over any afternoon and if I go outside, I’ll wander to the south side of your house and crouch down for a good gander at your liverworts (more tea, Vicar?).
I never studied liverworts. I can’t name them — they are just that tiny thing in nature I like the look of.
If I could grow them in a pot, I would.
Take your phone outside and go find your own little thing.