Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
In the early solar system, 4.5 billion years ago, the planets were still coalescing, something enormous hit the Earth.
After it formed, huge impacts shaped the surface of the moon into what we see today. NASA takes up the story:
These videos are awesome introductions to the early history of the Earth, Moon, and solar system.
The Guardian paints a fascinating, chaotic, and terrifyingly feasible, picture of the future of journalism.
(via The Dish).
When my verbal students complain about having to do diagrams (or vice versa) I try to explain that it’s useful for them to see, and be able to learn from, different points of view. There also a body of research showing that breaking familiar routines enhances creativity.
Actively doing something different, just by changing your routine for example (milk first then cereal instead of the other way around), seems to improve people’s cognitive flexibility (see: Ritter et al., 2011), but you have to do it yourself.
… being exposed to simple unconventional events, such as preparing breakfast in the “wrong” order, increased cognitive flexibility. Furthermore, these effects were found only when people actively participated in the unconventional activities. Just seeing someone else perform the activities was not enough (my emphasis).
— Damian, R., 2012: Why Would Doing Something Unconventionally Make Us More Creative? in Science + Religion Today.
These findings also suggest that greater diversity also promotes creativity — periods of greater immigration have been followed by increases in innovation.
It also suggest one reason why a little challenge is essential for motivating students to get into the flow zone for learning. People learn more, and become more engaged, when they’re challenged, have to struggle a little, and think differently, while figuring things out for themselves.
An interesting interview with Csikszentmihalyi is here.
I’ve fielded the question about if the world is going to end in 2012. My first-order answer has been to cite the poor level of success that previous predictions of apocalypse have had. NASA has had to address the problem, while C.G.P. Grey has a nice little video explaining the sources of the hysteria (he’s not very happy with the History Channel).
This is the first of an excellent series covering the history of English from The Open University. They make for a great spark-the-imagination lesson for etymology.
There’s lots more interesting videos at The Open University’s YouTube channel.
(via The Dish)
Except that you can hear the dust and small rocks banging on your spacecraft.
from JPL.
This cute, little, true story of how a bunch of kids (they look like adolescents) living on rafts in a lake built their own soccer field (on rafts), and eventually created the Panyee Football Club, is actually an advertisement for the Thai Military Bank (TMB), but it’s quite inspirational nonetheless. The setting and videography are also superb.