Uncategorized – Page 5 – Montessori Muddle

Montessori Science Fiction

One of my favorite books that ties in with the study of the life sciences is Janet Kagan’s Mirable. It’s a series of stories about colonists trying establish themselves on a new world. Because of an accident on the trip over from Earth, the plants and animals they try bring with them (or propagate from their recorded DNA sequences) tend to randomly, and all too frequently, produce offspring that are hybrids of all sorts of phylogenetically unrelated organisms. The hybrids then produce other hybrids until, eventually, they produce another “Earth-authentic” species. This was supposed to be a feature to add redundancy to their gene banks. The impetus for the stories comes from the fact that some of the hybrids are unexpected and quite interesting, like the kangaroo-rex.

k-rex2 — M. A. Buss' model of the kangaroo-rex. Note the sharp pointy teeth and claws.

Kagan writes a good story, entertaining, light hearted and easily accessible to early adolescents, but I particularly like her model of education on the new world. Since they need as much genetic diversity as possible, even people who don’t want to raise children need to have them. So kids are sent to live at a boarding school that’s really a hotel, which they run. Sounds a lot like Montessori’s Erdkinder.

The kids get training and regular visits from experts in a variety of fields. They get to help of the protagonist with her projects by tracking animals in the field and running genetic sequences through their equivalent of GenBank.

The best science fiction provides interesting models of society. Mirable, I believe, is a model of a society designed around the ideas of Peace Education. The Montessori spirit runs throughout the stories not just in the education system, but in the way characters interact one another, even in times of conflict.

I’m an unabashed advocate for using science fiction in the classroom because it delves into such wide ranging parts of the curriculum, Natural World, Social World, Language and, in this case, Peace Education. Of course the stories have to be chosen well. Mirable is one of perhaps only two books (the other is The Chrysalids by John Wyndham) that I use when we study the life sciences.

Osmosis and strawberry shortcakes

Osmosis is the movement of liquids through a membrane, from areas of high to regions of low concentration. So, if you sprinkle sugar onto ripe strawberries, the concentration of sugar on the outside of the berries becomes very high. The juices will seep out of the strawberries’ cells, through the cell walls (the membrane), and create quite the delectable syrup. Add a few shortcakes and some whipped cream and ….

strawberry-shortcake — Strawberry shortcake (gluten free).

Note to self: try strawberries in the greenhouse this winter. Life sciences are next year and osmosis is a key concept.

Note #2: This is also a large part of the answer to the question of, “Why do we get thirsty when we eat salty foods?”

Seeing temperature, kinetic energy and color

We read that temperature is the average kinetic energy of a substance but you can (especially if you’re a visual learner) nicely internalize this from simple videos or animations. UCAR has a little animation with their definition of temperature. I however, adapted an interactive, 3d animation that I think does a nice job, and also introduces a couple of other interesting concepts too.

I’ve also used this model, at different times, to show:

The relationship between temperature and color emitted by objects. The main way we know the temperature of stars is because blue stars are hotter than red stars. Blue light has a shorter wavelength than red light, and things that are at higher temperatures emit shorter wavelengths.
Absolute zero (0 Kelvin) – where (almost) all motion stops and the objects stop emitting light.
Pressure in a gas – you really get a feel for the force exerted by the particles on the side of the box (although it might be even more interesting once I figure out how to add sound).

It is an interactive model, but it’s pretty simple because the only control is a slider that lets you set the temperature.

Finally, in the age of 3d movies, like Avatar, the models can be easily shown in 3d if you have the glasses (redcyan).

The model is easy to install and run on Windows, but you have to install the programming language VPython separately on a Mac (but that isn’t very hard). I have this, and a bunch of other models, at http://earthsciweb.org/GeoMod/.

Apprentice sentences: Sarah Palin?

Slate has a great apprentice sentence contest called can you write like Sarah Palin. The Slate post dissects Palin’s sentences beautifully as having: “multiple references to local flora and fauna, heavy use of PSAT vocabulary, slightly defensive tone, difficult-to-parse meaning”. One example sentence, “As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the tall cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence, and meandered through willow branches that the moose munched on.”