Earth Ecology and Terraforming Mars

I’ve been thinking about science fiction, like Mirable and The Chrysalids that tie into the Natural World (science) curriculum. While I’ve not read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars triology, Red Mars, Blue Mars and Green Mars, they’ve won a number of awards and I’ve heard good things about them.

I’m looking for books that address global ecology, so stories about terraforming Mars would seem to fit. The Mars triology books are also supposed to be fairly rigorous and consistent about the science, something I look for in good science fiction. There are also some good articles discussing the science that can be used for supporting information, like this one by Margarita Miranova (2008) about the actual feasibility of terraforming Mars.

100624141934 — Feature identified by students from Evergreen Middle School. Image from NASA.

Given Mars’ proximity and the fact that space agencies have orbiting satellites and ground rovers makes the idea of colonizing Mars an intriguing one for the more adventurous adolescents. In fact, the recent news that 7th graders discovered a new feature on Mars’ surface might also inspire some interest. The 7th graders’ project was part of the Mars Student Imaging Program (MSIP), which might also be of interest. MSIP actually allows students to use the camera on board the Mars Odyssey satellite, by identifying locations for detailed images.

Tree of Life Project

The Tree of Life web project is a growing online collaborative project to:

to contain a page with pictures, text, and other information for every species and for each group of organisms, living or extinct.

direwolf — Direwolf distribution in the U.S. from Faunmap.

It’s a great starting point for looking at the tree of life because each page has links to a wealth of online resources. One of the links on the Mammalia page, for example, is to Faunmap, an online database that produces maps of where different modern and extinct mammalian species can be found in the United States.

All the pages on the Tree of Life website are linked by the branches of the tree of life. The Class Mammalia links up to its parent Therapsida and down to the its Orders such as Monotremata (one of my favorites) and Eutheria, the placenta mammals.

The site is authored by professional scientists and science educators so has that credibility. Most of the images also allow free, non-commercial use. Thanks to Anna C. for the link.

Censorship!

I spent an hour yesterday censoring Larry Gronick’s, “Cartoon History of the Universe“. I always feel a little dirty after doing it, but the section on the origins of life, particularly the comparison of the relative advantages of asexual and sexual reproduction, does go a little too far with the puns (in my opinion at least).

I do, however, like the book a lot, especially the section on the origin of the universe and history of life on the Earth throughout the Cambrian. I tend to use the bit up till the appearance of humans about 200,000 years ago. Despite being written in 1990 the information is still very accurate. The art is excellent and a pleasure to observe.

Of course, censoring tends only to increase students’ interests in finding out what was blacked out. Fortunately, there’s nothing in the Cartoon History that’s too terrible even if they should decipher it.

Montessori Homeschool

I ran into the blog Somewhat in the Air by a parent who is doing Montessori style Homeschool for a couple boys (hat tip to Ms. De La Cruz). The kids are in elementary but approaching middle school age and they have some great links to resources that they use for projects that would also work well in the classroom or for individual projects.

The blog also contains some of the students’ work and the author’s reflections on Montessori philosophy. It’s a fascinating read and I’m really looking forward to seeing how it evolves as the kids grow older.

Class Insecta

dragonfly — Dragonfly in flight. Image by Luc Viatour.

Since we’re focusing on the life sciences this year I want to complete the nature trail. Part of this project is to catalog the biodiversity on the trail. I’d like to have students specialize on the different types of organisms we find. Undoubtedly, the Class Insecta will be well represented. The site, Entomology for Beginners is a great basic resource. It starts with very simple cartoons of insect parts but also has a great key to insect orders which walks you through the comparisons you need to make to identify the Orders in which a particular insect belongs.

The site also has a page on simulating the dynamics of insect populations using a simple model. This may be for the more advanced student however.

A more general guide to bugs (Phylum Arthropoda) can be found at Bug Guide. Their Clickable Guide to the left of the page is a great starting place.

marie-mouchon18 — Insect. Image by Luc Viatour.

Luc Viatour has a large gallery of macro images of members of the Phylum Arthropoda.

Timeline of life

This year the theme is life. My central organizing structure is the timeline of life on Earth. I plan to link all of the discussions of taxonomy, phylogeny and genetics to this timeline over the course of the year.

The timeline above will be the first lesson. As with these things the trick is deciding how much detail to keep in and how much to keep out.

What I like is that it gives the general overview of when important things happen while leaving a lot of space for students to investigate. Most of what we’ll be seeing this year happened in the Cambrian and this timeline conveys that this is a very small part of the whole history of life. In fact, it’s only when we cover the biochemistry of genetics that we will be talking about the origins of life.

earth_nucleobases — From the Exploring Earth's Origins website.

The website Exploring Life’s Origins has a great timeline. It also has some really neat sections, with very useful videos, on the formation of protocells and the origin of RNA on the early Earth that lead to life as we know it.

The Magnetic Field?

The one thing I left out that I’m still conflicted about is the Earth’s magnetic field. Recent research indicates it has been around since 3.2 billion years ago and its presence or absence may have had profound effects on life.

Having a magnetic field protects the Earth from the charged particles spewing out of the Sun, the solar wind. This makes life on land a lot easier since the solar wind’s particles are quite damaging to DNA. However, prior to the magnetic field forming all this damage to DNA may have also accelerated mutation and thus evolution.

Insects up close

insect-water — Photo by Luc Viatour from the Réserve naturelle Marie-Mouchon.

A change of perspective can give the most amazing insights. I find macro photographs, particularly of insects, to offer a stunningly refreshing view of these nuisances. Luc Viatour, whose image is posted above, has some wonderful, copyright permissive, pictures.

Alternatively, Miroslaw Swietek has some amazing images of insects covered in droplets of dew (taken at around 3:00 am).

John Kimbler also has some spectacular photos as well as a nice article on how to do macro photography. The Wikipedia page on macro photography is also quite useful in that it goes into how to adapt your camera to take these photographs.

Photography, with it extensive use of refraction and reflection is a great avenue to talk about waves and their properties. Macro photography can be quite effective at striking the imagination and getting into taxonomy and entomology.

Fostering creativity

We know creativity is important, but how do we teach it? Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman have a fascinating article in Newsweek that is a superb advertisement for Montessori education. It posits, with extensive citation to back it up, that the increasing use of standardized curricula and testing is leading to decreased creativity in the U.S..

Of course you don’t teach creativity. Indeed, the arts, which are typically thought of as the first avenue for developing creativity, have no monopoly on the ability.

The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly. – Bronson and Merryman, 2010.

Creativity can be developed with practice. When we’re being creative the brain starts by shifting through a whole bunch of different, vaguely relevant ideas at the same time. At some point some these ideas click together as the brain quickly recognizes some pattern and it focuses, focuses, focuses, encapsulating the pattern into some new insights and evaluating its possible effectiveness. It’s this mental shifting of gears from vague to precise, and the ability to focus attention on the specific problem that we improve on with practice. How:

… alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves. – Bronson and Merryman, 2010.

They outline the steps to a project that practices creative thinking to solve solve a problem:

Start with fact-finding – what do we need to know to solve the problem.
Next scope out the possible problems.
Generate ideas.
Identify the best ideas.

Here the steps alternate from divergent thinking to convergent, general idea collection to focused thinking. They generate facts and ideas, then evaluate them rigorously. Creativity requires both types of thinking because either one is ineffective on its own.

In Montessori

The foundation for fostering this type of creativity in the classroom lies in developing a safe community. Clear rules reduce anxiety but leave room for exploration and curiosity. In the language of Montessori, this translates to developing a prepared environment and allowing freedom within boundaries.

Bronson and Merryman say this about the teacher:

When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. – Bronson and Merryman, 2010.

And they note this about the students:

They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world. – Bronson and Merryman, 2010.

I really like how the authors integrate the cognitive and neuroscience research into the article, to the great benefit of the more detail oriented among us. I always find remarkable how all this new science just continues to demonstrate Maria Montessori’s perceptiveness. The Montessori method is fundamentally designed to foster creativity.

This is a clear argument for the Montessori Method. I’ll certainly use this for my parent presentations and recruiting. As a teacher, however, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of the importance of creating space for creativity. I like the way Bronson and Merryman put it:

In the space between anxiety and boredom was where creativity flourished. – Bronson and Merryman, 2010.