Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Jason Shankel has an article on how we could go about changing the surface of Mars into something humans can live on. He does an excellent job of condensing the not insignificant literature on terraforming the red planet. Starting with an explanation of Mars’ geologic history, Shankel addresses Martyn Foggs’ list of critical challenges: The … Continue reading “Terraforming Mars”
National Geographic has a cute little game that lets you create a two-dimensional solar system, with a sun and some planets, and then simulates the gravitational forces that make them orbit and collide with each other. The pictures are pretty, but I prefer the VPython model of the solar system forming from the nebula. The … Continue reading “Build Your Own Solar System: An Interactive Model”
65 million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth just off the Yucatan Penninsula, kicking up enough dust in to the atmosphere (and perhaps setting off supervolcanos) to lead to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Geologists mark this mass extinction event as the end of the Cretaceous period and the beginning of the Tertiary; it’s … Continue reading “Surviving the Anthropocene”
My students will tell you that I’m never happier than when I have my cup of tea. On the night after our visit to Coon Creek, I put a tiny sample, about the size of a matchstick’s head, of sediment matrix on a microscope slide, and added a drop of water to disperse the grains. … Continue reading “Coon Creek Matrix Under the Microscope”
Just got back from our immersion trip to collect Cretaceous fossils at the Coon Creek Science Center, and hiking in Natchez Trace State Park. It was an excellent trip. Despite the cold, Pat Broadbent did her usual, excellent job explaining the geology of Coon Creek and showing us how to collect and preserve some wonderful … Continue reading “Coon Creek Immersion: Visiting the Cretaceous”
We could have been talking about the nuclear meltdowns in Japan, but I’m not sure. Our conversations tend to wander. I remember trying to explain where the carbon atoms, that are so essential for life, came from. It’s been a while since we saw this topic, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to go it … Continue reading “We are Stardust: Supernovas and the Heavy Elements”
If economics ultimately boils down to the study of human behavior, and our students are ultimately human (stick with me for a second here), then economic theory ought to be able to inform the way we teach. In fact, I’d argue that constructivist approaches to education, like Montessori, work for the same reasons that free-markets … Continue reading “The Montessori Method and Free Markets”
One of the easiest and most elegant ways of explaining the classification of organisms, the history of life on Earth, and the relationships between different organisms is to construct a phylogenetic tree. I have a great exercise I like that takes just some bits of colored paper, string, a poster board and some thumbtacks. To … Continue reading “Tree of life”