Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Go back in time and see who would have won the last presidential election. BuzzFeed has an excellent set of maps showing who would have won the election if voting was restricted as it was in the past.
The video below gives a quick history of when voting rights were extended to different demographic groups.
Our middle and high school students tried their hands at geocaching on our visit to the Audubon Center at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.
They got their GPS units and instructions on how to use them: basically just choose the right waypoint and follow the arrow. They were told that they wouldn’t need to walk through the prairie.
But the arrow pointed toward the prairie.
The results were scratched legs and quite a number of boarders.
Afterwards, our guide pointed out that they could have found all the caches by using the paths.
I was talking to Mr. E., one of the upper school history/geography teachers about the historical significance of tea. Then I ran into this: Alan Rickman makes a cup of tea (by David Michalek). Observe the awesome teacup.
Portraits in Dramatic Time (Alan Rickman) from Moving Portrait on Vimeo.
Say I wanted to get from Alexandria, Egypt, to Constantinople, I don’t trust boats, and it’s 1800 years ago. Well, instead of mapping it with Google I’d have to use ORBIS instead. ORBIS tells me that it would take two and a half months and cost me 3000 denarii (about $30,000).
Which seems like a bit much. But, since I absolutely have to get to the capital, I think I’ll price out a coastal boat route. That reduces the price by 80%, and the time to three weeks.
If I was really cheap, and was willing to risk the open Mediterranean, the time could be chopped down to less than two weeks, at a cost of only 374 denarii.
In ORBIS, Walter Scheidel and Elijah Meeks have created a fascinating resource for the study of the geography and history of Roman civilization.
NASA’s Perpetual Ocean visualizations are excellent animations of the oceans’ surface currents.
In Missouri, between 1981 and 2010 the average date at which trees first showed their leaves was two days earlier than the average between 1951 and 1980, according to this graphic by Climate Central.
You’ll also note the north-south trend, where change is greater as you go north. Most models predict that global warming/climate change due to increasing carbon dioxide will result in bigger changes as you get toward the poles.
The map is based on data from the National Phenology Network. The National Phenology Network has a good educational resource page, as well as access to their datasets.
Andrew Sullivan compiles some interesting commentary on the extent of global cotton production (40% of all agricultural land), and the argument that all this production for cheap clothes is exacerbating hunger problems around the world.
Note: the history of cotton makes for a fascinating read.
Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has been a brutally destructive force in central Africa since the 1990’s. In the last few years the Army has been decimated and pushed out of Uganda, but it still exists and is still kidnapping children and destroying families.
My former students, Sutton and Sage, brought to my attention this video from the human rights organization, Invisible Children, that is making a final push against Kony and the LRA: