Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Since we just got back from an immersion trip to Corinth, MS and Shiloh, it was very interesting to find out the PBS has a new Exploring history program: Exploring History: Corinth, Mississippi and Shiloh National Military Park. Check your local station (as they say) or you can find the video online.
The BBC has an excellent video demonstration by Maggie Aderin-Pocock of how to demonstrate how additional carbon dioxide in the air results in global warming. She uses baking soda and vinegar to create the CO2 and lamps for light (putting the bottles in the sun would work just as well). You’d also probably want to use regular thermometers in the bottles if you don’t have ones that connect to your computer.
To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, … counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves. – Joan Didion (1961), via Word on the Street (2010)
Unlike Dalrymple, Joan Didion figured that self-respect is built on self-knowledge rather than the reflected assessment of others. She saw character, which is built upon self respect, as the ability to use that knowledge to be aware of and face consequences of your actions.
The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others – who are, after all, deceived easily enough; – Joan Didion (1961), via Word on the Street (2010)
What Dalrymple and Didion agree upon is that a sense of entitlement is diametrically opposed to self-respect:
I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships which hampered others. Although even the humorless nineteen-year-old that I was must have recognized that the situation lacked real tragic stature, the day that I did to make Phi Beta kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proved competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand. – Joan Didion (1961), via Word on the Street (2010)
Didion’s ideas are wonderfully expressed in her essay ‘On self-respect’ that has been reproduced by Mallary Tenore on her blog Word on the Street (found via The Daily Dish). It’s a long essay, written in 1961 so some of the references may be dated (though time and the Twilight Series have given some of the references potency again, at least for the middle school crowd). I don’t think I can recommend the whole essay for my students, but reflecting some excerpts might be a useful Personal World exercise.
People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. – Joan Didion (1961), via Word on the Street (2010)
Along the edge of Pickwick Lake are outcrops of sedimentary rock being slowly broken apart by the action of the waves on the reservoir. We stopped for lunch at Shelter #6 in Pickwick Landing State Park (see map) before finding our cabins for this immersion. Located at the eastern edge of a triangular ridge of land girded by drowned river valleys on two sides the shelter is almost surrounded by water. On a beautiful, clear day at the beginning of spring, with temperatures verging on t-shirt weather, tiny flowers blooming in the grass and tree leaves just sprouting, it was an almost perfect time and place to take a break after a long drive.
Yet despite the fact that we were eating later that we normally do, half the class walked right past the shelter and down the rough slope to the lake’s edge. There they found fossils. Beautiful crinoids were weathering out of thin (4cm thick) alternating layers of sandstone and limestone, their long fossilized necks resisting while the limestone around them slowly dissolved away. They also found bivalves partially exposed on the face of the broken cliff and in the small pile of tallus. There were even a few thin sandstone wedges sitting on the rocks at the edge of the water that looked like fossilized burrow molds. It was quite fascinating.
Neither the word “science” nor the phrase “natural world” was used, and they brought the questions to me, which I always consider better than me asking them. Next year when we study Earth History perhaps the subject will be considered boring when we see it in the classroom, but today, out there on the rocks at the edge of the water, they got a great primer.
This stop, planed solely as a lunch break was so successful that I now wonder if I should plan the immersion trips to introduce the topics we cover in class rather than using them to integrate what we’ve already seen. Let the outdoor experience be the “spark the imagination” part of the lesson. I’m not sure, but it’s something to think about.
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Not for the faint of heart, but interesting non-the-less, the Economic History blog has a nice series of posts on articles studying the Industrial Revolution.
This blog summarizes papers published on Economic History in major academic journals. The industrial revolution series includes an interesting post on why the industrial revolution happened in the North and not the South. An article by Earle and Ronald (1980) argues that it was because of the monoculture agriculture (just one crop) in the north, cheap labour was available for industry.
[S]elf-esteem is but a division of self-importance, which is seldom an attractive quality. That person is best who never thinks of his own importance: to think about it, even, is to be lost to morality. Self-respect is another quality entirely. Where self-esteem is entirely egotistical, requiring that the world should pay court to oneself whatever oneself happens to be like or do, and demands nothing of the person who wants it, self-respect is a social virtue, a discipline, that requires an awareness of and sensitivity to the feelings of others. It requires an ability and willingness to put oneself in someone else’s place; it requires dignity and fortitude, and not always taking the line of least resistance. – Dalrymple, 2010.
Self-respect is earned, while self-esteem is not. That at least is the argument of Theodore Dalrymple, who defines this interesting distinction between self-esteem and self-respect based on his observations as a prison psychiatrist. What people want is a “just appreciation of one’s own importance and of one’s own worth.” To assume that one is entitled to respect because of one’s intrinsic strengths is destructive because it says that you don’t have to do anything to get respect. But respect is earned. Both importance and worth are values that are ascribed by others, by society, and to earn them requires effort and achievement. Self-respect is the appraisal of oneself based on one’s contribution to society.
It’s an interesting argument in semantics at the very least, but the fundamental argument at least aligns with the proper way to use praise and rewards. By praising the effort you acknowledge the importance of work in achieving goals, building self-respect, rather that praising intrinsic abilities (“you’re so smart”) that engender a sense that the student is entitled to do well.
One has only to go into a prison … to see the most revoltingly high self-esteem among a group of people … who had brought nothing but misery to those around them, largely because they conceived of themselves as so important that they could do no wrong. For them, their whim was law, which was precisely as it should be considering who they were in their own estimate. – Dalrymple, 2010.
Theodore Dalrymple is a conservative in the dictionary sense of the word. He argues the importance of tradition and personal responsibility. He also strongly believes that healthy culture must satisfy the need of people to belong to something larger than themselves. So much so, that despite being an atheist, he argues that religions, some types of religions at least, have an important role in society.
An amazing set of images from Haiti, 70 days after the big earthquake – “Haiti, 70 days later“.
NOVA’s program The Elegant Universe has an excellent website where the entire three hour video is available for free (with a full screen option). They have also broken the video up into segments and have a great teachers’ page which summarizes what’s in each segment.
Created in 2003, when string theory was making it’s big splash in the popular consciousness, The Elegant Universe starts with Newton’s observations of gravity, shows Einstein’s separate explanations of why gravity works and the nature of the sub-atomic world, and finally delves into string theory which tries to reconcile Einstein’s two theories into a unified whole.
We don’t usually get past Newton in middle school, but this PBS program introduces such a wider and weirder view of the universe that it can help strike the imagination. It also presents complex concepts in an intelligible way.