Category: Classroom Notes

Facilitating Movement in the Classroom

… the part of the brain that processes movement is the same part of the brain that processes learning.

— Jensen (2005): Movement and Learning in Teaching with the Brain in Mind.

I’m setting up a new classroom this year. How it’s arranged is very important to me. Montessori classrooms are designed for open movement and having different things going on in different places at the same time. Unlike last year, I won’t have to manage the entire middle school in the same room for the entire day. Instead, middle and high-school students will come in for two-hour periods for math and science.

Two hours is a long time for anyone, so I don’t expect them to be able to sit still for the entire period. In fact, just like in last year’s middle school classroom, I intend that the class devolve into smaller groups for most of that time. Students will need to be able to move around freely and associate freely, so long as they respect each others ability to work. I’m trying to arrange the room to facilitate that.

So how to arrange the furniture?

I need open spaces for students to walk and move. Eric Jensen has an entire chapter of Teaching with the Brain in Mind dedicated to how important movement is to learning. His focus is primarily on the need to save time for recesses and PE in increasingly regimented school days, but he also talks about integrating movement into everyday learning: energizers to wake kids up; stretching for more oxygen; and so on. I certainly know that I do a lot of pacing when I’m trying to think.

David Walsh also sees movement in the classroom as particularly important for boys.

Adolescent boys can have five to seven surges of testosterone every day. … And because testosterone is geared towards quick release, adolescent boys are prone to follow any impulse that might release stress. [p. 62]

…

Some experts think that making students sit still at a desk all day isn’t good for either sex, but girls are better able to tolerate it. Boys are more likely to get frustrated by school and loose interest. [p. 100]

— Walsh (2004): Why Do They Act That Way.

So no rows of desks. Instead, I’ve tried to make different work areas.

  • There’s one big area with a set of tables along three sides of a rectangle facing the whiteboard; students can be inside or outside of the rectangle depending on their needs.
  • Another area is centered around the couch, which may seem highly desirable, but I’ll be curious to see how they use it to work.
  • Toward the back of the room, there’s a solitary, larger-than-normal desk for a larger group that need space from the big set of tables.
  • I also have a smaller table near the window, that I envision would appeal to smaller, quieter groups, or even individuals sharing the same table.
  • And, finally, there is a bank of individual work spaces along the back wall.

That’s the plan, anyway. Classes have not started yet, so we’ll see how it holds up when it meets the enemy students. I am always happy to let them rearrange things, but most often they don’t seem to want to spend the time and effort.

Quote for the Day: On Power

The measure of a man is what he does with power. — attributed to Plato

It’s quite fascinating how character traits are highlighted when students gain the rights and responsibilities of the student run business supervisor. Certainly, some students become a bit over-enthusiastic about exercising their rights; though that’s never been much of a problem for the main supervisor because I try to make sure that anyone who gets to be the main supervisor has spent some time supervising a division. Also, Montessori students get a lot of practice working in their small groups, so leadership positions are usually not too much of a shock to them. Those that do try to throw their weight around excessively, provide the class with the opportunity to discuss worker rights, and a deepening of their understanding of the needs for checks and balances.

What I find most interesting, however, are the students who see only the responsibility of leadership and get bogged down and stressed out trying to manage all the details. For them the practice of leadership does a lot to help build character.

Setting up a Computer with Free Software

[Updated: 7/22/17] The open-source and free-software movements have matured to the point where a teacher or student can reliably outfit a new computer with software that is free and compatible with their proprietary cousins.

The first place to look for free software for whatever purpose you need should probably be SourceForge. It feels odd having to say this, but it’s legal, free software. Mind you, it has a lot of programs that are still in development, many are not terribly polished, and not everything will be available for your operating system. Add in a few other pieces, like Firefox and OpenOffice, and you have all the basics you need for a basic loadout. I typically find these to be most useful.

  • LibreOffice or OpenOffice: Free, but not as powerful alternatives to MicroSoft Office. They can open and save MS Office files, but also has some of the irritating auto-formatting issues as Office. So for text editing I usually prefer Smultron (on Mac) or Atom (on Windows). Also, Gnumeric is an excellent alternative to Excel.
  • Atom (Windows and Linux): An extremely versatile text editor that a lot of my students like for coding.
  • Smultron (Mac): for writing text and only text, forget the formatting (and also useful for writing computer programs).
  • Firefox: For web browsing.
  • GIMP: instead of PhotoShop for editing images.
  • Inkscape: For drawing diagrams (like this one).
  • VUE: For mindmaps (like this) and flow charts.
  • Audacity: works well for sound editing (I’ve only used it a little for trimming sound files when I was trying to create sound effects). Unlike SOX (see below) Audacity has a user interface.
  • OpenSCAD: For creating 3d models using basic shapes (spheres, boxes etc.) for 3d printing.
  • VPython: I usually introduce my students to programming with VPython, which is a Pythno library for creating 3d visualizations. The VPython downloads pages include instructions for installing Python.

There are other odds and ends that you’ll find on my computer, like vlc for playing DVD’s, Combine PDF for rearranging pages in pdf documents, and TexShop for really nice typsetting, but there are a lot of good, free alternatives out there. Not a whole lot of games however.

Command Line Programs

If you’re comfortable using the Linux command line there are a number of programs, most of which have been ported to the major operating systems (and you can use the Cygwin program to use a lot of Linux commands if you’re on Windows), that can also be very useful:

  • SoX: For generating sound tones and notes (e.g.),
  • ImageMagick: the convert command is particularly useful for working with images (their example page is excellent). The GIMP is based on this program.
  • gifsicle: for help making animated gifs (particularly for optimizing them).

At the Closing of the Year

‘Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

— Alfred Housman (1896): from A Shropshire Lad via USCC.

Individual Research Project Presentations

My students just presented their Individual Research Projects (IRPs) to their peers and their parents, and, I have to say, they did quite a good job.

Image by Ryan W.

They’re called IRPs, but while they are independent projects, they actually don’t all have to be research. This year we had a number of research papers, a few experiments, a short story, and computer program. The last two were by graduating eight graders, who I like to encourage to do something different that aligns with their interests: one wants to be a writer, while the other is really interested in programming.

Now you’re thinking, “That family is mean!” You could say that, but that’s not why we do it.

– From “Beverly” by P.Z.

Graph by Ben T.

It helped that it was a friendly audience who’d just been fed (food always helps), but it was nice to see how confident they were, and, as one parent remarked to me, how much progress they make from year to year. Even my shyest student had everyone laughing with her short story.

Even better still, was the fact that although I did not have the time to review all the presentations in great detail (students have to write a report first, which tends to be the focus of my reviews), the peer-review process, and the experience they’ve had doing presentations all year, really paid off.

And on average, an increase of .100 OPS adds 2 million to the player’s salary. So players on steroids on average get $12,512,630 more throughout their career.

-Michael F. in ” ‘roids”

Tomorrow is graduation, which I always find to be anticlimactic; after all, it’s the work that important and interesting, not so much the diploma at the end. These excellent presentations however, were a great way to cap off the year.

Learning is Fractal: “It’s boring,” does not compute.

Fractal trees.

The more you learn about something, the more detail reveals itself. It’s a bit like walking down a single path of a fractal pattern. Wherever you go, no matter how much you know, new branches open up before you. Within every little thing is an infinity of discovery.

It’s one of the reasons why I don’t accept, “It’s boring,” as an excuse for not wanting to do something. Boredom is when you don’t use your imagination. You can never get bored because of all of the interesting things in world.

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,

— from William Blake (1863): Auguries of Innocence, via Art of Europe.

I still have not tried my fractal writing exercises, but I think I’ll try to work one into the next cycle. Perhaps start with describing a tree, then a leaf (or a section of bark), then cells under the microscope.

Or perhaps a better subject, since we’ll be looking at organ systems, would be a fish.

And Women Inherit the Internet

Women are the routers and amplifiers of the social web. And they are the rocket fuel of ecommerce.

–Aileen Lee (2011): Why Women Rule The Internet on TechCrunch.com.

Last month I observed that the girls in my class were blogging a lot more than the boys. It’s still true, and now there’s an informative, if somewhat hyperbolic, article by Aileen Lee that asserts that the blooming of social media websites is driven, primarily, by women.

I’m always a bit leery about articles like this one. There are lots of statistics, a few anecdotes, and a brief reference back to some scientific research (Dunbar numbers), but the overly excited language coming from a venture capitalist is enough to remind me of the irrational exuberance of the dot-com bubble.

The writing is so over-the-top, that I’m truly surprised that there isn’t a single exclamation point in the entire article! Although, based on Ms. Lee’s first words in the comments section, this might be due to the herculean efforts of a good editor.

My antipathy might also be due to my irrational, visceral distaste of the language of business and commerce, which is so geared toward breaking people into faceless demographic groups to be marketed to that it verges on being dehumanizing. I suspect my feelings are truly irrational because I’ve seen scientists do similar parsing of demographic statistics and have had no trouble; although, perhaps, I may have been a little more empathic because the scientists were looking at issues of vulnerability to disease, infant mortality, and the like.

However, since the article’s anecdotes correlate with my own anecdotes, I find it hard to disagree with the underlying premise: women are more inclined than men to make and nurture social connections so they are a key demographic in understanding the future of the internet.

It’s also a reminder that the social atomization typified by the dominance of the nuclear family at the expense of extended family, is now being ameliorated by social networking, which suggests some interesting social and cultural changes in a, possibly, more matrifocal future.

(hat tip The Daily Dish).

Boys, girls, and blogs

There’s a curious and clear gender difference when it comes to my student’s use of their blogs. All the girls have them and most are posting things right now, but the boys don’t.

This is in large part due to the way I rolled out the student blogs. I started with a couple students (girls) who were most interested, and since then I’ve been setting up blogs for students as they’ve been requested. The process has been slow because I’ve been trying the multi-user version of WordPress (WPMU), which is not nearly as easy to set up as a stand-alone WordPress installation (like the one used for the Muddle). I think, however, that I have the setup process worked out now, so I could accelerate the rollout if necessary.

Since the two students I started with were girls, it’s perhaps not too surprising that it’s the other girls who were most interested in getting their own. That’s the way the social connections are arranged in our class.

Scattergram showing how girls' (red) brains mature differently than boys' (blue). Data from Lenroot, 2007.

Though there’s no real evidence for it, I do wonder, however, if there is a gender component to it too. Since girls tend to develop more quickly than boys at this age (see Sax, 2007 for a general description, and NIH, 2010 for a recent overview of adolescent brain development), so perhaps they’re more self-reflective. Girls also tend to emphasize interpersonal relationships more (e.g. Johnson, 2004), and are generally more communicative.

… females (1) develop more intimate friendships, (2) stress the importance of maintaining intimacy, and (3) expect more intimacy in their friendships than do males. — in Gender, grade, and relationship differences in emotional closeness within adolescent friendships by Johnson, (2004)

At any rate, I’m curious to see how this develops. I think I’m going to remind the whole class about the blogs though.

(Excel Spreadsheet used to create the brain volume scattergram: here.)