Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
SOHO scientists think that coronal mass ejection that happens right after the comet hits the Sun was probably not caused by the collision. But it looks really cool.
SOHO has a nice glossary of terms for understanding the Sun that’s specifically for middle school students (there is also a more general one). They also have some much higher quality video.
[…] the whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.
Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of seeing S.S. officers kicked and humiliated? But when the thing becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and disgusting.
–Orwell (1945): Sour Revenge in the Tribune. (Found via Megan McArdle).
Over the last couple of weeks, students have been reading and presenting newspaper articles every morning, so, inevitability, we had a few good opportunities to discuss the death of Osama bin Laden.
The discussions were remarkably mature, and quite edifying to hear, because it was pretty much what one would hope to occur among Montessori kids who’ve been dealing with the peace curriculum since pre-school.
There was remarkably little jubilation. So much so, that one student asked, “Are we not supposed to feel happy?”
The answer was that yes we can feel happy and relieved but we shouldn’t “spike the ball”, letting the celebration get so out of hand that it antagonizes bin Laden’s supporters even more, and makes us seem as arrogant as they caricature us to be. If we want to achieve peace we need to be better than that.
Their broader perspective is somewhat akin to what Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen monk, expressed a couple weeks after the September 11th attack (thanks to Julie H. for the link to the interview by Anne A. Simkinson).
All violence is injustice. The fire of hatred and violence cannot be extinguished by adding more hatred and violence to the fire. The only antidote to violence is compassion. And what is compassion made of? It is made of understanding. When there is no understanding, how can we feel compassion, how can we begin to relieve the great suffering that is there? So understanding is the very real foundation upon which we build our compassion.
[…]
There are people who want one thing only: revenge. In the Buddhist scriptures, the Buddha said that by using hatred to answer hatred, there will only be an escalation of hatred. But if we use compassion to embrace those who have harmed us, it will greatly diffuse the bomb in our hearts and in theirs.
–Thich Nhat Hanh (2001): What I Would Say to Osama bin Laden (Interview by Anne A. Simpkinson on BeliefNet.com)
There’s also a poignant reflection by Megan McArdle, a New Yorker, who was, at first, extremely angry and eager for revenge, but has become much more reflective, and cognizant that we share both humanity and mortality with even Osama bin Laden.
McArdle elaborates more here.
If I present information to you orally, you’ll probably only remember about 10% 72 hours after exposure, but if I add a picture, recall soars to 65%.
–Alex Lundry (2009): Chart Wars: The Political Power of Data Visualization
How you present visual information is important. And my students are discovering this as they work up their Independent Research Projects (IRP’s) this week.
In the spring they are fairly free to pick their topic and style of IRP. Some choose research projects, others term papers, and a few do things that strike their fancy, like writing fiction or programming games.
In the end, they submit a written report and give a presentation.
For research projects, I have one student who did a great job of coming up with a hypothesis and testing it. He even compiled a nice table of his data for his results section, but was reluctant to go through the effort of making a graph. After all, he claimed, anyone reading his report (or watching his PowerPoint presentation) could just look at the table and read the data off there themselves.
My response was that people absorb the data much more effectively when it’s presented graphically. Fortunately, Alex Lundry has a nice little presentation that reinforces this point. It also gives a few tips about what to look out for in graphics, because they can be used to mislead.
The key quote (via The Dish) is this:
Vision is our most dominant sense. It takes up 50% of our brain’s resources. And despite the visual nature of text, pictures are actually a superior and more efficient delivery mechanism for information. In neurology, this is called the ‘pictorial superiority effect’ […] If I present information to you orally, you’ll probably only remember about 10% 72 hours after exposure, but if I add a picture, recall soars to 65%. So we are hard-wired to find visualization more compelling than a spreadsheet, a speech of a memo.
–Alex Lundry (2009): Chart Wars: The Political Power of Data Visualization
Here’s Lundry’s five minute presentation.
The U.S. census bureau has a quite interesting interactive map showing how the U.S. population has moved westward since 1790.
The center is determined as the place where [a] map of the United States would balance perfectly if all residents were of identical weight.
–U.S. Census (2011): Center of Population
The weather has not been nice to our soccer pitch. There’s a bare patch in front of where we put the goals that kicks up a lot of dust when we play. But this also means that the ground is nice an smooth, making for a decent wicket. So we’ve been playing cricket.
I explained the rules and demonstrated batting and bowling, but the habits of a lifetime (even when you’re an early teen) are hard to shake. We’re going through a period where we’re playing an intriguing amalgam of baseball and cricket. Batters are currently straddling the crease with a baseball like stance, which works out pretty well for them at the moment because the bowlers are only just discovering that bouncing the ball makes it harder to hit.
Although I’ve tried to explain LBW, I’m not even going to try to get into some of the more wonderful terminology of the game. The BBC’s cricket Laws & Equipment and Skills pages are quite detailed.
Kris Hundley has a disturbing article on how faculty positions at Florida State University were bought and controlled by a wealthy businessman.
What’s most disturbing is that the dean, David W. Rasmussen, does not see anything wrong with giving control of who is hired to someone with an agenda to push, and having to send annual reports, “about the faculty’s publications, speeches and classes” to maintain funding.
The claim is that this adds to the diversity of ideas, but so is introducing intelligent design into a biology class. When certain ideas are promoted not on their merits but because of the money behind them, that is a fundamental corruption of the idea of academic freedom. It is certainly possible that the people hired for these positions are sincere in their beliefs and intellectual arguments, but it’s going to be just a tiny bit hard for them to change their minds given where the money’s coming from.
Indeed, the main problem is likely not that certain ideas might become more accepted in the scientific community when they shouldn’t be — the peer-review process does a fair job of safeguarding against this, at least in the long run — but that in the interim it introduces erroneous, agenda-driven ideas to policy-makers. Ideas that now have a semblance of academic credibility because they come from a university (which is supposed to have some allegiance to truth and impartiality), and can be used to bolster arguments that come from other sources that might be more known for their bias. If you say something loud enough, using enough different voices, it begins to sound like consensus.
This seems another sad, brazen step in the corruption of universities as bastions of intellectual thought and freedom.
The BBC has a fascinating article on the Finnish educational system; specifically, why it consistently ranks among the best in the world despite the lack of standardized testing. A couple things stand out to me as a Montessori educator.
The first is the use of peer-teaching. There’s a broad mix of abilities in each class, and more talented students in a particular subject area help teach the ones having more difficulty. It’s something I’ve found to be powerful tool. The advanced students improve their own learning by having to teach — it’s axiomatic that you never learn anything really well until you have to teach it to someone else. The struggling students benefit, in turn, from the opportunity to get explanations from peers using a much more familiar figurative language than a teacher, which can make a great difference. I give what I think are great math lessons and individual instruction, but when students have trouble they go first to one of their peers who has a reputation for excelling at math. In addition to the aforementioned advantages, this also frees me up to work on other things.
A second thing that stands out from the BBC article is how the immense flexibility the teachers have in designing their teaching around the basic curriculum coincides with a very progressive curriculum. This seems an intimate consequence of the lack of assessment tests; teachers don’t have to focus on teaching to the test and don’t face the same moral dilemmas. Also, this allows teachers to apply their individual strengths much more in the classroom, making them more interested and excited about what they’re teaching.
E.D. Kain has an excellent post on the video The Finland Phenomenon that deals with the issue specifically. It’s full of frustration at the false choices offered by the test-driven U.S. system.
(links via The Dish)
“Very few sports stars, other than Lance Armstrong, actually donate to their own charities,” says a tax adviser. “Most of them say, ‘My fans will donate.’ Their attitude is ‘I’m contributing my celebrity to this cause.’”
— Vanessa Grigoriadis (2011): Our Lady of Malawi in the New York Magazine.
Andrew Sullivan extracts the crucial point in Vanessa Grigoriadis’ article on the failures of many celebrity charities.
As we work on social action this cycle, it’s important to consider why we’re contributing, and what it takes to make a meaningful contribution.