Adolescents like to tick you off. Push all of your buttons to see what happens. And you want to ask, “Who are you really?” and, “Do your really not care?” We probably did the same when we were that age, but do you also remember how idealistic we were? The video below, from Penguin Publishing (found via The Dish) captures a bit of that duality of the adolescent mind. The use of white space and of just simply words also ties it quite nicely into our ongoing discussion of poetry in a “spark the imagination” kind of way.
Month: March 2010
Statistical significance
A discussion of statistical significance is probably a bit above middle school level, but I’m posting a note here because it is a reminder about the importance of statistics. In fact, students will hear about confidence intervals when they hear about the margin of error of polls in the news and the “significant” benefits of new drugs. Indeed, if you think about it, the development of formal thinking skills during adolescence should make it easier for students to see the world from a more probabilistic perspective, noticing the shades of grey that surround issues, rather that the more black and white, deterministic, point of view young idealists tend to have. At any rate, statistics are important in life but, according to a Science Magazine article, many scientists are not using them correctly.
One key error is in understanding the term “statistically significant”. When Ronald A. Fisher came up with the concept he arbitrarily chose 95% as the cutoff to test if an experiment worked. The arbitrariness is one part of the problem, 95% still means there is one chance in twenty that the experiment failed and with all the scientists conducting experiments, that’s a lot of unrecognized failed experiments.
But the big problem is the fact that people conflate statistical significance and actual significance. Just because there is a statistically significant correlation between eating apples and acne, does not mean that it’s actually important. It could be that this result predicts that one person in ten million will get acne from eating apples, but is that enough reason to stop eating apples?
It is a fascinating article that deals with a number of other erroneous uses of statistics, but I’ve just spent more time on this post than I’d planned (it was supposed to be a short note). So I’d be willing to bet that there is a statistically significant correlation between my interest in an issue and the length of the post (and no correlation with the amount of time I intended to spend on the post).
Boredom in a fractal world
A few of my students have been complaining that we don’t do enough different things from week to week for them to write a different newsletter article every Friday. PE, after all, is still PE, especially if we’re playing the same game this week as we did during the last.
So I’ve been thinking of ways to disabuse them of the notion that anything can be boring or uninteresting in this wonderful, remarkable world. A world of fractal symmetry, where a variegated leaf, a deciduous tree and a continental river system all look the same from slightly different points of view. A counterintuitive world where the smallest change, a handshake at the end of a game, or a butterfly flapping its wings can fundamentally change the nature of the simplest and the most complex systems.
“Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.”
— Terry Pratchett (Interesting Times)
There are two things I want to try, and I may do them in tandem. The first is to give special writing assignments where students have to describe a set of increasingly simple objects, with increasingly longer minimum word limits. I have not had to impose minimum word limits for writing assignments because peer sharing and peer review have established good standards on their own. Describing a tree, a coin, a 2×4, a racquetball in a few hundred words would be an exercise in observation and figurative language.
To do good writing and observation it often helps to have good mentor texts. We’re doing poetry this cycle and students are presenting their poems to the class during our morning community meetings. It had been my intention to make this an ongoing thing, so I think I’ll continue it, but for the next phase of presentations, have them chose descriptive poems like Wordsworth’s “Yew Trees“*.
The world is too interesting a place to let boredom get between you and it.
* An excellent text for a Socratic dialogue would be the first page of Michael Riffaterre’s article, Interpretation and Descriptive Poetry: A Reading of Wordsworth’s “Yew-Trees”. It’s testing in its vocabulary but remarkably clear in thought if you can get through it.
What is peace?
I asked the question, “What is peace?” on a test and the answers were beautiful to see. Peace is more than the absence of war, my students have internalized that concept, but what else? One student said that they really had no idea about what to put for that question and just put whatever came to mind. Many of them say it’s also the absence of fear. I did not ask if they thought that we lived in a peaceful country (at least according to their own definition) but I think I will probably ask that question when we go over the test.
The other frequent answer revolved around the idea that peace also means freedom, particularly freedom of expression. That certainly was a common theme when they researched human rights activists.
Sleeping in
Sleep rhythms change during adolescence. Students often find it harder to get to sleep at night and harder to get up in the morning. Their best time for learning is in the afternoon. So why not just adjust the school day? Margaret Ryan has an interesting article on the BBC website about an English secondary school that did just that, starting lessons one hour later at 10:00am. Their preliminary results seem favorable, but the research has not yet been published.
Prof Till Roenneberg, who is an expert on studying sleep, said it was “nonsense” to start the school day early.
He said: “It is about the way our biological clock settles into light and dark cycles. This clearly becomes later and later in adolescence.”
Prof Roenneberg said if teenagers are woken up too early they miss out on the most essential part of their sleep.
“Sleep is essential to consolidate what you learn,” he said.
Parabolas
To supplement the Excel program to graph a line, I’m also posting a simple program to graph a parabola.
Blood Falls: Life in Extreme Environments
For millions of years, cut off from the atmosphere and the sun by an immense continental glacier, microbes survived in a lake of salty water under the ice. No air and no sunlight means no oxygen, so the water became anoxic and able to dissolve iron out of the rocks and sediment beneath the lake. But sometimes the lake breaches and the iron rich water comes to the surface where it is exposed to the air once again and the iron reacts with the oxygen to form a red mineral, hematite (rust). A template for life on Europa? Maybe. Blood Falls, Antarctica.
[googleMap name=”Taylor Glacier” width=”490″ height=”490″ mapzoom=”2″ mousewheel=”false” directions_to=”false”]-77.773, 163.37[/googleMap]
Co-opting the iPod: Flashcards
iPod Touches are quite convenient little PDA’s. Beautifully tactile, they are a pleasure to use. A few of my students have them and I’ve had to think long and hard about allowing iPods in the classroom because, for a little while there, students were using them under the table for all sorts of illicit applications (games). I was tempted to ban them outright, and I have not yet made a final decision but I thought I’d try co-opting the devices first.
So I now have a few students using the iPod Calendar, taking notes, and now one has found a nice little flashcard app called Cramberry. Apparently, the major selling point was its catch-phrase, “Studying doesn’t have to be painful.” The app costs $4.99 for the full version (the Lite version is useless). I’ve also tested Flashcard Touch myself, which is free this month (March), and it seems to work well (see the screen capture).
PDA’s are still on probation; they can be very useful. The outstanding question is one of trust. Will students use them appropriately, or are they too much of a temptation. A key Montessori principle is that students should take responsibility for their learning and trust is an essential component. I am cautiously optimistic.