Reading poetry in the morning

Mrs. Z. donated two small books of poetry, The Best Poems Ever and Poetry Speaks (much thanks). The second comes with an audio cd, where many of the poems are read by the authors. Since some of the authors are adolescents themselves, their reading can be a little halting, but there is a nice authenticity.

The The Best Poems Ever has a lot of the classics. I read William Blake’s The Tiger as an example. The students though my reading was pretty lifeless so I recited it for them with a lot of emphasis and hand motions. They were pretty impressed that I’d memorized the poem so quickly, at least until I told them I’d memorized it years before (probably in middle school actually). I probably should have kept this secret. Sometimes you need the mystique.

We’ve come up with a schedule so someone different will read every morning at the end of community meeting. They’re required to choose their poem ahead of time and have practiced reading it before they present. We also take a little time for comments, the objective is to try to identify the issues and the subtexts. This is how I discovered, with much reasoned explanation, that Edna St. Vincent Millay metaphorically described the asteroid impact theory for the extinction of the dinosaurs over 30 years before scientists came up with the idea.

Edna St. Vincent Millay and the extinction of the dinosaurs

Travel
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

The railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn’t a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.

All night there isn’t a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.

My heart is warm with friends I make,
And better friends I’ll not be knowing;
Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,
No matter where it’s going.

I discovered today, during our morning poetry reading, that Edna St. Vincent Millay‘s poem Travel is a metaphor for the asteroid collision that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. The train is asteroid bearing down on the Earth, the smoke from the train is the dust and ash kicked up by the impact, while the whistling of the train is the moan of the dying dinosaurs.

Remarkably perceptive of St. Vincent Millay since the asteroid impact theory was posited by the Alverezs’ group decades after her death in 195.

Creating a market in the classroom

The Tragedy of the Commons has been on my mind of late, and something serendipitously popped up in class today that’s started me thinking of new ways to introduce some important economic concepts and make classroom jobs work better at the same time.

You see, one way of preventing abuse of shared resources is to assign the rights to the resource to someone, anyone really, and allow them to trade and regulate the use. Who gets control of the resource does not ultimately matter for conservation. As long as the owner and their rights are clearly defined they will try, in a rational world, to get the most for them, and make them last as long as possible, thus preventing overexploitation.

But what’s necessary for this to work is some form of goods or services that’s worth trading. The miracle of capitalism is that it allows people to do what they’re best at and trade with others for the other things they need (or don’t want to do). I’m not about to start letting students pay cash to each other, but I’m trying to think if there’s any reason to not let them trade their classroom jobs on a daily basis.

Say a student if done with their daily work and is feeling bored with a little time to kill at the end of the day. They take out the compost and clean up the microwave, their classroom job is done. Well, they could offer to do someone else’s job, someone who is, say, trying to finish up their math and don’t want to break away from it, and, in exchange, the student with the math work would do the microwave and compost job tomorrow while the first student takes a break. Everyone is happier!

trading-board — Image by Katrina. Tuliao.

In theory, as long as the rights and responsibilities for each job are clearly defined, then students will be able to come up with the most efficient trading schemes for themselves. Once trading starts I’m sure students will come up with some interesting agreements and contracts will need to be enforced (fortunately we already have judges built into the classroom constitution). But we might just need a special white-board that would make it easier to trade jobs. Tadah, we now have a market in the classroom that makes doing jobs a little easier for everyone and brings some important economic concepts directly into the classroom. Why have I not thought of this before?

I am quite enthused by the idea, but I’m really curious to see if anyone can come up with any downsides.

Montessori, cooperation and the Tragedy of the Commons

The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.
— Whitehead (1948) via Hardin (1968)

One of the greatest challenges in designing a cooperative environment is dealing with the potential for free-riding and abuse of shared resources. When dinner needs to be made but one member of the group will not participate everyone suffers, even those who contribute fully. Often, someone else or the rest of the group will step up and do the job of the free-rider, who has then achieved their objective. But what is the appropriate consequence? The social opprobrium of their peers is enough for some, others though seem unfazed.

Overuse of resources is a similar problem, which economists refer to as the tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968). When the extra-large bag of M&M’s is full, everyone can grab as many as they desire and everyone is happy. When resources are scarce, however, everyone grabbing is a recipe for disaster. Scarce resources need to be rationed in a way that everyone views as fair. Yet the rational behavior of the individual is to try to maximize their utility by taking as many as they need, regardless of the desires of everyone else, and especially if they’re first in line and no-one else is counting.

Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. … The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers.
— Hardin (1968)

The market solution to the commons problems is to make them not commons. This is usually done by assigning property rights to the previously common resource and allowing the owners to trade. This puts a price on what was once a “free” resource. Of course the price was always there; someone or someones had to go without when the M&M’s ran out (resource depletion). Unfortunately this is particularly difficult when you dealing with a non-currency economy, though I’m sure it could be done.

Reading through Hardin’s original Tragedy of the Commons article it seem that if the embarrassment of violating social norms is insufficient incentive for temperance then some sort of mutually agreed form of coercion is necessary. Interestingly, Hardin was arguing for population control, but the point still stands.

We’re due to have the small groups discuss how the worked together over the last cycle so we’ll see how that goes, but I think we’ll have to discuss the issue of the commons as a whole group when we next have our discussion of classroom issues. I’d like to raise the point that what happens in the classroom is a microcosm of larger society and get in a little environmental economics at the same time.

Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.
— Hardin (1968)

Mural

We’ve been really lucky to have the artist Mary Cour help us out with our classroom mural. She came up with the idea about two cohorts of students ago to paint students’ outlines on the wall and let the students fill them in with words and images that were meaningful to them. Early adolescence is a time of self-discovery and exploration, so this type of project is a wonderful way to encourage self reflection. I let students work on their silhouettes during personal reflection time, and they’re always eager; it’s easy to see why Facebook is so popular with this group.

The mural became quite the marker for the students and for the school, so now, every two years, we add the new group of students to the wall. The new outlines are superimposed over the older ones so you can still see previous generations of students, a tangible reminder of their legacy in the classroom.

Music in the morning

We did poetry in the mornings last year at the end of our community meetings as a substitute for musical appreciation. However, the inestimable Anna Clarke, sent me the link to NPR’s 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century. The 8-13 minute long pieces include excerpts of the music, an interview with someone connected to the music and commentary by the NPR reporter. First on the list is ‘Adagio for Strings’ by Samuel Barber.

I’ve also caught their series on 50 great voices which is a great place to discover some truly iconic voices from around the world that I did not even know about.

Optical Illusions

smudge-illusion — Look at the figure on the right. Stare at the black dot without moving your eyes. The smudge will miraculously disappear! Try the same experiment again with the smudge on the left. This time the smudge does not disappear. What is going on here? Why does the smudge disappear in one instance and not the other? (Illusion from the Wilderdom Store. Use under Creative Commons Attribution License)

Wilderdom has a wonderful set of cooperative games and icebreaking games that they share for free. They also have a book of optical illusions that would work well for a challenge during morning community meetings.

Their material is copyleft so as along as you attribute them and use the same licensing terms (and cite their Creative Commons License) . You are free to use their stuff as you like.

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.