Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
“I’d like you to do chlorine too.”
“But I shouldn’t have to do chlorine. Chlorine was extra homework last time. I got Argon. I’ll do Argon. I don’t have to do extra homework today, so I shouldn’t have to do chlorine too.”
“It’s true, you didn’t earn extra work today.”
“So I don’t have to do chlorine.”
“If you do chlorine we’ll have the full set of elements.”
“But do I have to do it?”
“I’d like you to do it.”
“But do I have to?”
“No.”
“OK I’ll do it.”
At the Heifer International ranch. Time spent weeding the herb garden. Not much weeding done (by me at least), but much photography. Pretty. A word designed for butterflies.
Butterflies are classified as:
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Lepidoptera
Maggie Eisenberger, personal communication.
Opler, Paul A., Kelly Lotts, and Thomas Naberhaus, coordinators. 2011. Butterflies and Moths of North America. Bozeman, MT: Big Sky Institute. http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/ (Version 10/08/2011).
Flynn, J., 2007. Georgia Butterflies, Bibb Co. GA. http://www.shrike.net/butterflies/0-regions/bibb.htm (Accessed 10/08/2011).
Flowing Data has a nice post that gets at how to make good images of data. It’s called, “5 misconceptions about visualization“.
The misconceptions:
We’re off to the Heifer International farm near Little Rock for a week. I have not been there before, but I suspect I’ll be disconnected, loosing contact with the part of my brain that has all the details.
I could program during some of my downtime, but all the reference documentation is online. I could do some reading about pedagogy – I’ve been meaning to get to the book about homework – but I suspect it would be extremely frustrating to not be able to look up the references and follow thoughts with some online research. And I can’t really blog.
I’m not even sure I’ll have phone service.
So instead I’ve brought a book of poetry. It’s the same one I used to take on long trips before I was so fully committed to the internet. I’ve read it through a number of times, but there’s always something new to discover.
And it should provide the time I need to finish memorizing a few favorites. At one point I could recall the first three parts of the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, but I think I’m back down to one now.
At any rate, there might be some slow blogging for the next week. I’ve scheduled a few posts but not enough to cover the time I’m gone, so this might be the first significant break for a couple years. We’ll see how it goes.