journal – Page 5 – Montessori Muddle

Cognitive diversity in the classroom

Since different student learn better in different ways, would it make sense to separate schools and classes by different learning styles? A countervailing argument, and the one upon which my Montessori middle school program (which is based on the Coe model) is predicated, is that students need to learn about different ways of learning and be able to interact with peers with different learning styles because creative endevours, especially in the future, will rely heavily on making connections between diverse fields and groups. The importance of having students interact in a diverse environment is particularly important if we can observe that students will, eventually, self-select in different fields based on their native talents, which are related to their learning styles. Students with a mathematical aptitude may tend to become engineers, more so than their peers.

So intellectual and cognitive diversity is important, yet the program also requires some uniformity. I’ve heard that, in general, students without experiences in Montessori-like environments can have a hard time adapting to the Montessori Middle School because we expect an awful lot of independence and time management that students are often not exposed to in traditional schools.

At any rate, accounting for learning-style diversity is essential, and sometimes I wonder if today, with so many more opportunities and temptations available for early specialization, if we’re not seeing further diversification in the cognitive continuum. What precisely is the point where students should begin to specialize. Matt Might model (pictured below) has specialization of education beginning at college, but it really starts earlier, at least in high school, but I wonder where the is the most appropriate initiation actually is. Historically, at least, kids were apprenticed at a very early age.

knowledge — The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. by Matt Might.

The meaning of life?

A key premise of the Montessori approach to education is that, given children’s innate drive to learn, learning is its own reward. Extend this to adults and you realize that the “work” should provide its own motivation. Cristin O’Keefe notes that in 1847, Thomas Dent Mutter pointed out:

The world is no place of rest. I repeat, it is no place of rest but for effort. Steady, continuous undeviating effort. Our work should never be done and it is the daydream of ignorance to look forward to that as a happy time, when we shall wish for nothing more, and have nothing more to accomplish.
–Thomas Dent Mutter (1847) via Cristin O’Keefe via Harriet via The Dish.

I sometimes wonder, with our adolescents being somewhere between childhood and adulthood, if sometimes neither set of rules apply. For some students, they’ve not yet discovered the “work” that inspires them and, without that overarching objective to drive them, can’t find the motivation for learning.

Adolescence can last a long time.

Words you shouldn’t say

Age-appropriate is quite the interesting phrase, particularly when it comes to adolescents. They are making the big transition to adulthood, but their maturity can vary widely even within the same age group.

Huck_and_jim_on_raft — Image by E.W. Kimble (via Wikipedia Commons)

Michael Chabon has a fascinating post on his, partially successful, attempts to read Huckleberry Finn to his pre-adolescents without the racial slurs. There is even going to be a edition of the book put out that replaces all the n-words with “slave”. I can see their point, but I’m not sure I’d go for it, even in the middle school.

The internet poses its own set of conundrums. One of my students mentioned a certain website on their blog that they, “do NOT recommend it for kids under 12 due to foul language”. The recommended site is quite fascinating and entertaining (I got sucked into it for quite a while), if a bit harsh to the denizens of the website, etsy, but the writing can be quite adult. I’m not quite sure how to address this. I really appreciate how forthright the student was with the (convenient?) age recommendation, but I’d probably make the cutoff a bit older myself.

Differentiating what’s age-appropriate and what’s not is so terribly subjective. I guess the key difference between the website and Huck Finn is in its purpose and relevance within the text. Twain’s harsh language to makes a specific point about race relations that’s relevant to middle-schoolers. The website takes uses a more adult language to relate to an older audience.

Boys, girls, and blogs

There’s a curious and clear gender difference when it comes to my student’s use of their blogs. All the girls have them and most are posting things right now, but the boys don’t.

This is in large part due to the way I rolled out the student blogs. I started with a couple students (girls) who were most interested, and since then I’ve been setting up blogs for students as they’ve been requested. The process has been slow because I’ve been trying the multi-user version of WordPress (WPMU), which is not nearly as easy to set up as a stand-alone WordPress installation (like the one used for the Muddle). I think, however, that I have the setup process worked out now, so I could accelerate the rollout if necessary.

Since the two students I started with were girls, it’s perhaps not too surprising that it’s the other girls who were most interested in getting their own. That’s the way the social connections are arranged in our class.

Brain_dev_Lenroot_2007 — Scattergram showing how girls' (red) brains mature differently than boys' (blue). Data from Lenroot, 2007.

Though there’s no real evidence for it, I do wonder, however, if there is a gender component to it too. Since girls tend to develop more quickly than boys at this age (see Sax, 2007 for a general description, and NIH, 2010 for a recent overview of adolescent brain development), so perhaps they’re more self-reflective. Girls also tend to emphasize interpersonal relationships more (e.g. Johnson, 2004), and are generally more communicative.

… females (1) develop more intimate friendships, (2) stress the importance of maintaining intimacy, and (3) expect more intimacy in their friendships than do males. — in Gender, grade, and relationship differences in emotional closeness within adolescent friendships by Johnson, (2004)

At any rate, I’m curious to see how this develops. I think I’m going to remind the whole class about the blogs though.

(Excel Spreadsheet used to create the brain volume scattergram: here.)

Symbols versus ideas

Where facts exceed curiosity, we end up relying on symbols and symbolic language that are weighted with emotional meaning that are detached from ideas, according to Walter Lippmann as described by Geoffrey Nunberg on On The Media this weekend.

I think you can see this fairly clearly with adolescents. When they lack the interest, motivation, curiosity and information they tend to resort to slogans and cliché’s instead of looking up information or making thoughtful, logical arguments.

It also may be a marker for cognitive development, though interestingly, in my experience, it seems that more abstract thinking leads to less use of symbology and more reasoning. Partly, I suspect, its because they’re also acquiring the language to express more complex ideas, but adolescent education needs to include lots of opportunities for logically taking apart symbols.

I’ve started a pattern in class that I’ve noticed students picking up with each other.

If someone says something like, “It was good,” I ask, “Why?”

If they say, “I liked it,” I say, “Because?”

Often the first answer is along the lines of, “Because it was good,” but persistence with the whys’ and becauses’ will usually lead to some actual information and ideas. Over time, the mining process gets easier as students come to expect it and realize what you’re aiming for.

On The Media: Waste, Fraud and Abuse: