Month: January 2011

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.

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.

Revolution

One of my students expressed an interest today in learning more about the French and Russian revolutions. Coincidentally, there’s a piece by Josef Joffe that makes the connection between the recent Tunisian revolution and Marx’s ideas about the recipe for a successful revolution.

A country needs to have a certain level of education and wealth to overthrow a tyrant:

If you are poor, you have neither the time nor the energy to engage in politics. If you are not educated, you lack the cultural skills to articulate your demands—to agitate and organize.
— Joffe (2010) in Why Tunisia Isn’t a Tipping Point for the Arab World

Samuel Huntington, took this idea forward in his book, The Third Wave. He looked at democratic revolutions between 1974 and 1989 from around the world and found that 75% of countries had a revolution when they developed to the point where the per-capita (per person) income was between $1,000 and $3,000. Tunisia’s per-capita income is $1,000 (when adjusted for inflation).

P.S.: The Boston Globe’s Big Picture has an excellent picture series from the last few weeks.

Recessive genetic diseases can be useful!

Misha Angrist, who is having his entire genome published online, argues that extricating genetic diseases from the population can have unintended consequences:

“… the genome is a dynamic thing, and a balancing act. Sickle cell trait has persisted because carrying it protects one from getting malaria. Who’s to say that carrying one copy of a cystic fibrosis mutation doesn’t similarly protect us against cholera or various diarrheal illnesses? If we eliminate those mutations from the population, are we opening the door to a future of intestinal problems?
–Misha Angrist in an interview with Maud Newton, A Conversation with Misha Angrist, Publisher of His Genome

(via: The Daily Dish)

Minorities working together

One night in Georgia in the summer of 1962, Dresner and King were trapped with other activists in a house surrounded by hundreds of members of the local White Citizens Council.

While they were waiting for help, King told Dresner about the Passover seder he’d attended that spring at a Reform synagogue in Atlanta. He particularly recalled reading the Haggadah and hearing the phrase “We were slaves in Egypt.”

“Dr. King said to me, ‘I was enormously impressed that 3,000 years later, these people remember their ancestors were slaves, and they’re not ashamed,” Dresner said. “He told me, ‘We Negroes have to learn that, not to be ashamed of our slave heritage.’”
— Fishkoff (2010) in A half-century later, rabbis recall marching with Martin Luther King

Prejudice is one the major themes that’s come up in our discussions of the novel The Chrysalids. Students raised the idea that different minority groups might band together to fight for rights. I offered the examples of Jews in the civil rights movement in the 1960’s. Just in time, Sue Fishkoff has an article on rabbi’s who worked with Martin Luther King Jr.

The rabbis who joined these efforts were arrested, jailed and sometimes beaten, protected by the color of their skin from the worst physical dangers, but nonetheless threatened on a daily basis.
— Fishkoff (2010) in A half-century later, rabbis recall marching with Martin Luther King

The positive side of teasing

Teasing, under some circumstances, might actually help people bond. At least according to Dacher Keltner of the Greater Good Science Center.

Teasing can be a way to diffuse embarrassing situations, but its effect depends very much on the context and the culture. The outstanding question is how we differentiate positive teasing among friends from verbal attempts to bully. Part of the answer to this question lies in the effect: does the teasing contribute to group cohesion, or does it isolate and exclude?

Food and Nutrition

Darya Pino from Summer Tomato has a cute little flow chart to help you identify “Real Food” in the supermarket. It takes the conservative approach to eating shared by Michael Pollan, who recommends only eating thing your grandmother would have recognized as food, and Food Politics‘ Marion Nestle’s interdiction against foods with more than five ingredients.

POV-Ray: 3d rendering

Giles Tran’s amazing rendering of glasses on the counter inspired me to check through my own POV-Ray generated library. Nothing nearly as good, but some of it is still might be useful.

Demonstrating the axial tilt of the Earth, this image shows the Earth at the northern hemisphere's summer solstice.
Rotating Earth at the northern hemisphere's winter solstice.

You build 3d models in POV-Ray and then export 2d images from whichever point of view you want, so once you have the model set up you can easily change the perspective or even move objects to create animations.

POV-Ray does not have any useful sort of user interface; you’re usually creating your models with computer code. It can therefore be challenging to use, and, as with any 3d programming language, a bit of geometry, trigonometry and algebra are needed.

However, the final results can be impressive. I’m continually amazed each year by the quality of the work added to their Hall of Fame.

For much easier, quicker and not so sophisticated 3d results, I use VPython, which is also a great way to learn programming that outputs 3d images.