Landforms in the sandbox before and after the rain.
We left the sandbox uncovered under last week’s heavy rain, and the result was a new perspective on erosion, sedimentation and the evolution of landforms.
Nice, sharp, hand-sculpted valleys were smoothed out by the raindrop splatters. The beautifully steep sided fjord on the lower left, in particular, eroded into the gentler slopes of a fluvial surface.
This process is diffusional. Sand moves from high peaks to fill in the low valley floors, evolving toward a softer, flatter land surface in the same way dye in pan diffuses from the high concentration droplet to a more uniform distribution.
There was enough rain that water pooled, for a little while, at the lower end of the sandbox. This allowed the formation of a beautiful little delta from the main river, which was most remarkable to observe while it was raining because the channel bifurcated at its mouth with running water to the left and right of the depositional landform.
Island bluffs surrounded by sandy beaches.
The standing water in the “ocean” also caused the islands to partially erode at the edges to create steep bluffs overlooking sandy beaches.
And finally, if you looked carefully at the sides of the river channel you could see where the water was beginning to cut into the banks, a little offset on either side, to start the formation of meanders.
One of our fish has died. With permission, I’ll let Sage Beasley, the main instigator of the fish tank explain (she does it much more elegantly than I could):
A few weeks ago one of our fish died. Its name was It’s A Fish. I liked the fish. I had gotten him for a Natural world experiment and when we were done with it I put him in a tank at school with the other fish It’s A Whale. It’s A Whale is still alive and healthy. We found a religion for [It’s A Fish] (he’s Norse) and followed their ritual to send the fish into the next life. We put it in a paper boat with vegetable oil and set it on fire. We have released the fish’s spirit to where ever it goes next.
– Sage Beasley (2010), in the Middle School Newsletter.
I’ll just note that every middle school should have a sandbox/watertable.
One of the easiest and most elegant ways of explaining the classification of organisms, the history of life on Earth, and the relationships between different organisms is to construct a phylogenetic tree. I have a great exercise I like that takes just some bits of colored paper, string, a poster board and some thumbtacks.
To start, each student writes the Latin domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species names on separate pieces of colored paper. I hand out paper in stacks and give them strict instructions not to rearrange the order of the colors. Wikipedia is actually a great resource for this because they tend to be quite reliable on this if they have the specie you’re looking for (and they have quite a bit).
Students then tape the pieces of paper together on a string, species at the bottom, domain at the top, and, one by one, tack them to the poster board. As each student attaches their string to the board they say the common name of their organism and then recite the phylogeny.
When I did the exercise on Monday, I asked the students to use the organisms they’re working on for their independent research projects so everything started with the domain Eukaria. Interestingly enough, the Wikipedia pages don’t have the domain classification, probably because they think it’s too obvious, but I had a number of kids spend quite a bit of time trying to figure it out; they probably benefited from doing so I didn’t mind at all.
Constructing the phylogenetic tree.
Classifications that are the same are tacked one on top of the other, Eukaria on top of Eukaria, Mammalia on top of Mammalia and so on, so that, as students add their parts of the phylogeny, you begin to see the phylogenetic tree. We had insects, mammals, plants and reptiles, so there was quite a nice variety represented.
After about half a dozen lineages were on the board, the procedure began to get a bit repetitive, so I started to ask students to guess, based on the common name, where the next species to go on would diverge from the rest of the emerging tree. Students seemed to like this part of it. I had started with homo sapiens when I demonstrated the procedure so it was salutary for them to see how much the other organisms differed from humans.
When everything is tacked on, you end up with a cute picture of a the tree of life that makes a cute, but awfully real looking, phylogenetic tree. Students tack their pieces of paper on the string at different distances, some much closer together than others. As a result, the final tree is looks as though it shows the genetic divergence between the different groups. It a fake, but lends a sense of verisimilitude non the less.
We’ve discovered committees. Yesterday, after spending half an hour discussing the brand new bread bag prototype that one of the students came up with, they decided that maybe just the people interested in working on them should work on them. So we just, organically, created a committee.
As with all new discoveries we’re now using them for everything. Today the students decided on a committee to run Dinner and a Show. We’ll see where this goes.
WritingDEN‘s Tips-O-Matic is a great site on writing great paragraphs and essays. The pages are very simple and well organized, without all the distracting noise of ads and extraneous information.
The language curriculum focuses, in general, on developing good writing style and craft, but some of my students need to work on the basics of essays a bit more, particularly with high-school entrance essays coming up.
When sorting through the many issues around immigration and globalization it is nice to be able to highlight the small things that make it seem worthwhile.
The East Village Community School in New York City is selling a CD, as an arts fundraiser, of songs performed by its students. The songs and musicians have roots that span the globe, from Mauritius to Tibet to Spain to Ireland to name just a few.
The CD in $15 and you can order it from the School’s website.
NPR’s Weekend Edition had a nice article on the parent driven project:
In the field of cognition, the march towards continuity between human and animal has been inexorable — one misconduct case won’t make a difference. True, humanity never runs out of claims of what sets it apart, but it is a rare uniqueness claim that holds up for over a decade. This is why we don’t hear anymore that only humans make tools, imitate, think ahead, have culture, are self-aware, or adopt another’s point of view. – Frans De Waal (2010).
My students studied the question, what is life, last cycle, and through their readings and Socratic dialogue I’ve been trying to approach the question of what is sentience and what distinguishes humanity from other organisms (or robots for that matter).
We’ve found that the lines between us and them are very hard to draw.
Pushing the discussion into questions of morality, primatologist Frans De Waal has a wonderful post on where it comes from, and if there is any clear distinction between humans and other animals. He argues that morality is innate, a product of evolution, and there aren’t clear distinctions.
The full article is a worthy read, with good writing and well constructed arguments. It’s a bit too long for a Socratic Dialogue but might be of interest to the more advanced student, particularly those going through religious, coming-of-age, rites of passage, like preparations for confirmations and Bar Mitzvahs. While De Waal’s evolutionary reasoning has been used to argue against religion, he takes a much more subtle approach:
Our societies are steeped in it: everything we have accomplished over the centuries, even science, developed either hand in hand with or in opposition to religion, but never separately. It is impossible to know what morality would look like without religion. It would require a visit to a human culture that is not now and never was religious. That such cultures do not exist should give us pause. – Frans De Waal (2010).
Partially developed residential project in Florida. Image from Google Maps via The Boston Globe's The Big Picture.
Two poignant intersections of the foreclosure crisis and art came to my attention recently. One is the series of aerial photos of Floridian real estate developments that never came to fruition. The other, an article on photographers who document the insides of foreclosed homes.
Both are moving in very different ways. The former in showing unfulfilled potential (although there is a good argument that many areas should never have been developed in the first place), and the latter in illustrating the debris of dreams that were broken.
NPR’s On the Media has a fascinating interview with Paul Reyes, a reporter who’s covered the foreclosure photographers. Reyes points out that while there can be a certain aesthetic that makes for striking photography, the real poignancy, particularly in these examples, comes from knowing the tragic back-story behind the images.
