Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Engine room,
It could never die, never,
Because it is nine months my mother make me check out she heartbeat.—David Rudder (1988): from Engine Room
Despite those nine months, scientists have identified a condition called beat deafness, where people just can’t find the beat.
The article claims it’s rare. My wife tells me it must be genetic.
… an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking [my emphasis].
–Leon Neyfakh (2010): The Power of Lonely in The Boston Globe.
Every day (almost) we have half an hour blocked off for Personal World. It’s a time for reflection, a time to collect ourselves, and a time to be alone. Adolescents in general tend to be social animals, but, as Leon Neyfkh points out:
… a certain amount of solitude has been shown to help teenagers improve their moods and earn good grades in school.
–Leon Neyfakh (2010): The Power of Lonely in The Boston Globe.
Neyfakh’s article provides a nice roundup of research into the importance of solitude.
The Shinmoedake Volcano erupted on January 19th after being dormant for two years, however, two days after the big Japanese earthquake, it began spewing ash once again. The two are not necessarily connected.
Volcanos and convergent margins go together. Typically, the plate being subducted melts as it is pushed deeper into the Earth and temperatures rise. It also helps that the water in the crust and sediment of the subducting plate makes it easier to melt, and makes the resulting magma much more volatile and explosive.
But although Shinmoedake is in Japan, it is not on the same tectonic boundary as the earthquake. The northern parts of Japan are where the Pacific Plate is being subducted beneath the Okhotsk Plate. This volcano is connected to the subduction of the Philippine Plate to the south.
This does not necessarily mean that the two occurrences are totally unrelated. Seismic waves from the big earthquake could have been enough to incite magma chambers that were just about ready to blow anyway.
The map below is centered on the series of craters in the region of the erupting volcano.
Pluralism … allows individual schools, educators, and providers to excel at something, rather than asking every school to excel at everything.
–Hess (2010): Doing the Same Thing Over and Over in AEI Outlook Series.
Frederic Hess’ new book advocates a diversity in educational formats. Steven Teles has a detailed review.
Hess shares the same basic premise of most progressive, constructivist, educational approaches like Montessori’s, that students learn differently so they need different educational approaches. However, he takes this need for diverse educational environments further with the recognition that teachers are different so they will have their own educational philosophies and methods that work best for them, and that parents are different, with very different expectations about what education should be and what it should accomplish.
… the basic components of schooling—parents, children, school leaders, and teachers—are irreducibly diverse. Parents have different ideas about what a “well-educated” child is, and children differ quite significantly in temperament, aptitude, habits, and interests. School leaders vary as to how they think schools should be run, while teachers have different skill levels, enthusiasm for different tasks, and ideas about what children should learn and know.
… Educators will always be less effective if they are made to teach in a way that they believe is wrongheaded or that they haven’t bought into. Students will have difficulty learning if they are forced to work at a pace that is too fast or too slow, or if they are taught in a manner that doesn’t match their individual learning styles. Parents can be disengaged or hostile if the pedagogy, discipline, or school culture differ fundamentally from what they think is right for their child. And schools as a whole will be incoherent and disorganized if they cannot count on some baseline of agreement as to what—and who—the school is for.
— Teles (2011): One Size Doesn’t Fit All in Washington Monthly.
Although Hess works for the conservative American Enterprise Institute his own thought on education are far from traditional:
[T]here is value in nurturing diverse intellectual traditions, models of thought, bodies of knowledge, and modes of learning. It is prudent to embrace a system of schooling that nurtures a diverse set of skills, knowledge, and habits of mind. This allows us to foster intellectual diversity that enriches civil society and … [i]t allows individual schools, educators, and providers to excel at something, rather than asking every school to excel at everything.
–Hess (2010): Doing the Same Thing Over and Over in AEI Outlook Series.
Furthermore, Hess argues, the world has changed since the inception of universal education, but the educational system has not adapted to the changing needs and technology. He points out new innovations allowed by technology, like the School of One program in New York.
All of this is hard to argue with. It’s almost the standard constructivist critique of the current educational system, although constructivists tend to focus on how we’ve not applied all the stuff we’ve learned about pedagogy since the 19th century (Lillard, 2005 lays out this argument eloquently in Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius).
Hopefully, this book broadens and advances the arguments for reforming the educational system. It is a progressive view from a conservative organization. Yet it still begs the question of how do we get there from here, while dealing the serious concerns that greater diversity may well lead to some failures as well as successes. Ultimately, we end up with the same fairly intractable problem. However, how do you measure success where there is such a diversity of expectations for education?
The tsunami spawned by the recent earthquake off Japan did most of the damage we know about so far. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Center for Tsunami Research uses computer models to forecast, and provide warnings about, incoming tsunami waves. They have an amazing simulation showing the propagation of the recent tsunami across the Pacific Ocean (the YouTube version is here).
They’ve also posted an amazing graphic showing the wave heights in the Pacific Ocean.
Of course, these are the results of computer simulations. As scientists, the people at NOAA who put together these plots are always trying to improve. Science involves a continuous series of refinements to better understand the world we live in, so the NOAA scientists compare their models to what really happen so they can learn something and do better in the future. Perhaps the best way to do this for the tsunami is by comparing the predictions of their models to the actual water height measured by tidal gages:
You’ll notice that NOAA did not do a perfect job. They did get the amplitude (height) of the waves mostly right, but their timing was a little off. Since it’s about 6000 km from the earthquake epicenter to Honolulu, being off by a few minutes is no mean feat. Yet I’ll bet they’re still working on making it better, particularly since some of the other comparisons were not quite as good.
Finally, if you were wondering, attempting to surf a tsunami is not a good idea. For one thing, there is no nice face to surf on:
… a tsunami wave approaching land is more like a wall of whitewater. …. Since the wave is 100 miles long and the tail end of the wave is still traveling at 500 mph, the shore end of the wave becomes extremely thick, and is forced to run far inland, over streets and trees and houses. …. And remember, the water isn’t clean, but filled with everything dredged up from the sea floor and the land the wave runs over–garbage, parking meters, pieces of buildings, dead animals.
— Natural Hazards Hawaii, University of Hawaii at Hilo: Why you can’t surf a tsunami
UPDATE: Terrifying video of the tsunami:
A wonderful and facinating interpretation of what pi sounds like if you translate the first 33 digits into sounds.
CNN has an informative interview on the explosion at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami.
Footage of the explosion from the BBC:
Nuclear disasters are so rare that they’re easy to forget about when we’re talking about the right mix of alternative (non-carbon based) energy sources for the future.
Right after the accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986, awareness of the dangers lead to a de facto moratorium on nuclear power plants in the U.S.. This was good in that people were now treating nuclear power much more respectfully, and incorporating the costs of potential accidents into their calculations. However, it also reduced the interest and effort of developing newer and safer types of nuclear plants.
We’ll have this discussion next year when we focus more on the physical sciences.
UPDATE:
1. More details on how nuclear plants work can be found in Maggie Koerth-Baker’s post, Nuclear energy 101: Inside the “black box” of power plants.
2. The Guardian’s live blog has good, up-to-date information on the status of the nuclear reactors at Fukushima.
With a little help to get started, the water erodes a channel, transporting sediment to the ocean.
For what it’s worth (and it seems a reasonable explanation to me):
The beach sits at the base of a valley which has a small stream running through it. Due to wave action, sand gets pushed up into a large hill in front of the stream each winter. This creates a natural dam that the stream water collects behind for months which is about 20 feet above the level of the ocean on the other side of the sand berm. Every year some one digs a trench through the sand releasing millions of gallons of fresh water into the ocean.
– YouTube User:Hackfleischhasser comments on the video Waimea River
