Tag: writing

Montessorian on the web: Dr. Sarah Baird

Sarah Baird, from the Sea Pines Montessori Academy‘s Middle School, has recently started posting articles on K-12 education at Savannah K-12 Examiner. Dr. Baird was a research scientist (chemistry) before getting into Montessori so she’s not afraid to delve into the scientific literature to support her articles, yet her writing is targeted to a general audience.

“I am doing it to write (because I love it) and educate teachers and parents outside Montessori about our philosophy…. I feel like Montessorians keep all the info to themselves. We need to share and be proud to even have a little positive impact on our public schools,” Sarah Baird (2010) personal communication.

Having been blogging here for a few months I can say I greatly appreciate this sentiment, especially since one of the things I’ve been most impressed about with the Montessori approach is how it encapsulates so much of the modern pedagogy about constructivist education.

Score one for adding another intelligent voice with a Montessori perspective to the web.

Apprentice Essays

Apprentice texts short pieces, a sentence or a paragraph long, that introduce students to the style of good writers. Remember that wonderful turn of phrase or vivid image that just leaped out at you? Students find the cadence and the style and mimic it with a topic of their own.

Another similar approach is to type out entire texts, word for word, just to get a feel for the rhythm of good writing. It’s something to try with essays.

Boredom in a fractal world

Brazilian butterfly Doxocopa laurentia (from Wikipedia)

A few of my students have been complaining that we don’t do enough different things from week to week for them to write a different newsletter article every Friday. PE, after all, is still PE, especially if we’re playing the same game this week as we did during the last.

So I’ve been thinking of ways to disabuse them of the notion that anything can be boring or uninteresting in this wonderful, remarkable world. A world of fractal symmetry, where a variegated leaf, a deciduous tree and a continental river system all look the same from slightly different points of view. A counterintuitive world where the smallest change, a handshake at the end of a game, or a butterfly flapping its wings can fundamentally change the nature of the simplest and the most complex systems.

“Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.”
— Terry Pratchett (Interesting Times)

Fractal trees (from Wikimedia Commons)

There are two things I want to try, and I may do them in tandem. The first is to give special writing assignments where students have to describe a set of increasingly simple objects, with increasingly longer minimum word limits. I have not had to impose minimum word limits for writing assignments because peer sharing and peer review have established good standards on their own. Describing a tree, a coin, a 2×4, a racquetball in a few hundred words would be an exercise in observation and figurative language.

To do good writing and observation it often helps to have good mentor texts. We’re doing poetry this cycle and students are presenting their poems to the class during our morning community meetings. It had been my intention to make this an ongoing thing, so I think I’ll continue it, but for the next phase of presentations, have them chose descriptive poems like Wordsworth’s “Yew Trees“*.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

The world is too interesting a place to let boredom get between you and it.

* An excellent text for a Socratic dialogue would be the first page of Michael Riffaterre’s article, Interpretation and Descriptive Poetry: A Reading of Wordsworth’s “Yew-Trees”. It’s testing in its vocabulary but remarkably clear in thought if you can get through it.

Writers’ rules for writing

The Guardian newspaper interviewed authors for their rules for writing fiction. The lists are quite interesting, and we try to instill many of the rules in our language curriculum:

Read it aloud to yourself because that’s the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK (prose rhythms are too complex and subtle to be thought out – they can be got right only by ear). – Diana Athill

Keep a diary. The biggest regret of my writing life is that I have never kept a journal or a diary. – Geoff Dyer

Do it every day. Make a habit of putting your observations into words and gradually this will become instinct. This is the most important rule of all … – Geoff Dyer

Cut (perhaps that should be CUT): only by having no ­inessential words can every essential word be made to count. – Diana Athill

Some are a little odd:

Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils. Margaret Atwood

And many make you think:

Finish the day’s writing when you still want to continue. – Helen Dunmore

Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire. – Geoff Dyer

Only bad writers think that their work is really good. – Anne Enright

I still have not gotten through the whole list, but Graeme Wood summarizes, “the rules sound haughty and dismissive, which is about what you should expect when you ask skilled craftsmen to reduce their craft to a few simple rules.” Yet to me, looking at a few of them at a time makes for a nice space for reflection on my own writing. It’s also the sort of semi-random trivia that my students seem to like. I know they’ll take issue with some of these rules, but that in itself would be make it useful.

For this reason, I like Jeffrey Tayler’s advice (which is not on the list):

[R]emember: None of us gets out of here alive. So don’t fear risks. Rebel. Be bold, try hard, and embrace adversity; let both success and failure provide you with unique material for your writing, let them give you a life different enough to be worth writing about.

Citing websites

Yale University's writing center's site on citing websites.

My students are very good at putting the list references on their presentations, however, websites usually turn up as simply a link to the site. I’m now working on rectifying this. Because there are a lot of different types of online resources Yale Library has a few different ways to cite them. What I like the most, however, is that they give very clear examples of how to use them in the MLA, APA and Chicago styles. My preference is for the APA but to make sure and include the URL (like the citation at the bottom of this post).

How much technology in the classroom?

The title of Mark Bauerlein‘s book is somewhat provocative. It’s called, “The Dumbest Generation, How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.” As I am very much an advocate for incorporating technology in the classroom, it’s not too unexpected that I disagree with large parts of his thesis.

Yes there is probably an important link between the brain and the hand that facilitates creative work. But it does not necessarily follow that, “Writing by hand, students will give more thought to the craft of composition. They will pause over a verb, review a transition, check sentence lengths …” (Bauerlein, 2010). As we work on habits of revision there seems to be no real reason why they should spend more time on improving a sentence they’ve hand written than one they’ve typed. True, if students are conditioned to write in short rapid bursts of texting it will translate into their other writing, but it is the role of the teacher to help them delineate these different genres of writing. I also have not seen the evidence that writing by hand is any less abstract than writing by typing on a keyboard. We are already expressing ideas using an abstract medium, words, why is one form of expression better than the other?

Where I do agree with Bauerlein is on the need to take breaks, even substantial ones, from technology and the online world. Where I see the greatest need for this is in aiding student’s comprehension of the natural world. You live too long in the virtual world and you begin to translate that experience into the real world. Yet the virtual world remains a model of the real one. It is simplified and enhanced to make it a more enjoyable experience, so the lessons you learn there do not truly apply to the real world. In addition, physical experience in the virtual world, at least for now, cannot create the kinesthetic, mind-body understanding of the laws of physics and biology that you learn from real-world games and just walking along the nature trail. This is why I am a firm believer in our week-long immersions every six weeks.

So I continue to allow my students to introduce new technology to the classroom, as long as they can show me that it is effective in helping them learn. The latest thing is the proliferation of iPod Touches. I like the iPods because of apps like iSeismo that lets you monitor vibrations in 3D. However, on our recent visit to the Le Bonheur Hospital a number of my students took their notes on their iPods. I personally don’t believe that these are more effective than pencil and paper because you can’t combine text and images very effectively on an iPod, but they did take copious notes (which they were quite proud to show me). I’m planning on giving them a quick quiz to see what they learned from the trip so we’ll see just how effective their note taking was.

We’re all swimming in a sea of new technologies, and we can’t really tell what will benefit and what will hinder without trying them out. So, I at least conclude that the key goal of middle school education should be to create in students a core competence and confidence that will help students navigate steadily in this world of much information and rapidly changing fads. A fundamental understanding of the mechanisms that underlie people’s behavior is key. Know yourself and understand how societies behave. The first is not trivial and the second requires drawing general conclusions from a lot of historical data, which is quite challenging for most adolescents, but that’s why we teach the way we do.

Note: There is an interesting discussion of the use of technology in the traditional classroom going on now on Will Richardson blog post “The Big Questions: Now What?“

Citing a blog

Because my students use a lot of online sources I always emphasize the importance of watching out for copyright infringement and making sure they cite their references. This is easy enough to say but for a lot of internet content there is a lot of conflicting information about how to write citations.

Blogs in particular are difficult to cite, so I thought it would be useful to add the citation to the bottom of each of my blog posts as an example (it also allowed me to figure out how to write a WordPress Plugin). After looking at a number of referencing styles I finally settled on the Yale University Writing Center’s APA format.

You should be able to see what it looks like below. I’ve made parts of the reference links, which help connect directly to the post and the website, but do not greatly affect the official style.

Publishing: The Blue Pencil

In searching for venues where my more literary-minded students might get a start in publishing their work, I came across The Blue Pencil. It’s student edited and produced, so it fits the Montessori Philosophy very well. My thoughts based on their website based on my own criteria for publishing literary work:

  • The Blue Pencil “is edited and produced by the students in the Writing & Publishing Program at Walnut Hill School for the Arts“. It is aimed at young writers (12–18) around the world. You submit online and your work is evaluated on an ongoing basis during the school year and they say the try to respond within a month. Unfortunately you typically do not get feedback if your work is not accepted. On the plus side, they only have a one month embargo of your work after they’ve published it before you reacquire the publishing rights.