reading – Page 2 – Montessori Muddle

Seeing Egypt in Ankh-Morpork

Egypt-barricades-front — Anti-government protesters guard their barricade at the Kasr al-Nil bridge entrance into the square. They erected a complicated defense wall, strung a heavy electrical cable around 10 meters in front of the wall, and scattered lines of debris another 10 meters ahead of that to break up any attacks. (Image and caption from Al Jazeera English)

Following the ongoing convulsions in the Egyptian streets, I’m becoming more and more impressed by the research and thought that Terry Pratchett must have put into his novel Night Watch.

Egypt-barricades-back — Anti-government protesters anticipating an attack man the barricade at the Kasr al-Nil bridge entrance into the square, where they had arranged complicated defense walls and stockpiled rocks to throw at pro-Mubarak men. (Image and caption from Al Jazeera English).

In typical Pratchett fashion, Night Watch has an amalgamation of influences, from fictional sources like Les Miserables, to historical events, like the Peterloo Massacre of 1819; however, the book follows a character immersed in the events that are remarkably parallel to what’s going on Egypt right now, especially with the Army trying to sit out events and things becoming somewhat medieval.

egypt-dibbler — A man sells koshari to anti-government protesters for three pounds a cup (around 50 cents) inside the barricade at the Kasr al-Nil bridge entrance into Tahrir. (Image and caption from Al Jazeera English).

This is the first time I’ve been able to follow a revolution so closely, and it’s largely thanks to the volumes of raw reports streaming across the twitterverse, blogosphere and media websites. Pratchett gives us the wonderful characters that highlight the inherent conflict in the revolution: the police with their conflicting allegiances; the secret police that have to be dealt with; the idealists whose high hopes are bound to be dashed on the rocky shoals of human nature; and even down to the men selling food to the protesters behind the barricades.

Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett — Night Watch

I think I’m going to have to add this book to our reading list for next year.

At the end of Night Watch, the protesters win, and barricades come down when the old dictator is deposed. However, he’s replaced by a new dictator, who turns out to be just as bad as his predecessor. To paraphrase Pratchett, they’re called revolutions because they go round and round.

egypt-campfires — In the center of the square, anti-government protesters sat around campfires and talked - as they have for the past nine nights of demonstrations. (Image and caption from Al Jazeera English - Feb 4th, 2011)

Extending Thinking with Calvin and Hobbes

My students have been asking to write “book” reports on movies or Dr. Seuss picture books instead of novels. I am not theoretically opposed. Our theme this cycle is literary essays, with a focus on extending our thinking about issues, which can be done to any type of media: books, movies, music or even art for example. A great example is of what can be done is Richard Beck’s series of essays on the theology of Calvin and Hobbes.

… given the fact that the two lead characters are named after John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes, Calvin and Hobbes presents a dim view of human nature. … a running theme in Calvin and Hobbes is why virtue is so hard and vice so fun.
–Beck (2008) in The Theology of Calvin and Hobbes, Part 1: Human Nature Chapter 1: “Virtue needs some cheaper thrills”.

Although he’s an experimental psychologist at Abilene Christian University, Beck’s essays are fairly easy to read, and are great in how they analyze the subject work, in this case the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, while drawing comparisons to other theological texts, from the original Hobbes’ Leviathan to recent analyses by authors like Alan Jacobs.

I think, as a condition for using an alternative to the novel, I’ll require students to read one of Beck’s essays. In fact, maybe I’ll have the entire class read the first one, “Virtue needs some cheaper thrills”, as an example of a literary essay.

Symbols in texts

Calvin and Hobbes’ wagon works well, I think, in the lesson on symbols in texts.

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.

Genetic testing: What it can do, and where we are.

“On average we found that each of us carries two or three mutations that could cause one of these severe childhood diseases.”
–Stephen Kingsmore, physician, Children’s Mercy Hospital in Greenfieldboyce (2010), New Genetic Test Screens Would-Be Parents.

NPR’s All Things Considered had two related articles on last night that deal with the specific topics we’re covering this week: genetic disease and recessive alleles.

The first one is about the latest in genetic screening technology, for determining if potential parents have recessive alleles that could combine to produce children with genetic diseases. Recent research has made this much easier.

The second touches on the ethical consequences of genetic screening. It could lead to an increase in abortion rates and leads us along the slippery slope of eugenics.

Beggars in Spain, by Nancy Kress — What if we engineered for intelligence?

This second story would make an interesting basis for a Socratic dialogue. As would, I think, the movie Gattica, which deals with the consequences of genetic screening and genetic customizations. I see it’s PG-13 so we may be able to screen it. Similarly, I may recommend Brian Stableford’s War Games to my eight graders who might like a military science fiction book that deals with genetic optimization. Alternatively, Nancy Kress’ Beggars in Spain might offer another interesting perspective on this issue.

Homo sapiens neanderthalensis?

In the binomial classification, modern humans are Homo sapiens (Genus and species). But you’ll frequently see us described as Homo sapiens sapiens, indicating that we’re a subspecies of Homo sapiens. One of the reasons for this is the still unresolved question of the neanderthals.

Some recent research suggests that 1-4% of our genes came from neanderthals. If true, this would mean that humans interbred, successfully, with neanderthals. Since one of the key parts of the definition of a species is that its members can produce fertile offspring, neanderthals would then be a subspecies of human. Thus we would be Homo sapiens sapiens and neanderthals would be Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, as opposed to being Homo neanderthalensis, a separate species in the same genus.

Sapiens_neanderthal_comparison — Skull differences between sapiens and neanderthalensis. Image by hairymuseummatt.

Perhaps even more interesting, the same researchers who did the gene work on neanderthal bones also sequenced some bones from Siberia, and found what may well be another subspecies of humans (the original article is at Krause et al., 2010). The genes are different from what’s been found before, but are in an area, and from a time period, shared both by modern humans and neanderthals. And, modern Melanesians (from the islands north and east of Australia) may share some of the genes of the new group. So this could even be another sapiens subspecies.

There are a number of caveats to this research, which is based primarily on gene sequencing and statistics. One key assumption that I’ve always been skeptical about is that DNA mutates at a fixed rate. However, this type of science ties very closely in to our discussions of evolution and themes of what it means to be human.

There are two great novels that address these two things, but I’ll only be using one of them. The one I’ll use is The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, which I’ve mentioned before (here and here). The other is War Games by Brian Stableford (aka Optiman). While the Chrysalids deals with accelerated mutation resulting from nuclear fallout, War Games considers the effects and moral implications of intentional genetic optimization (hence the other title for the book).