Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
We face a lot of advertising. All the time. According to Martin Lindstrom, the author of Brandwashed, “the average American 3-year-old can recognize 100 brands” (NPR Staff, 2011). I usually discuss advertising at the same time as we’re talking about propaganda.
Guy Raz has an excellent interview with Lindstrom on All Things Considered.
The one rotated piece represents the volta of the sonnet, the moment at which the poem pivots from exploring a dilemma to developing a resolution. Volta translates from Italian to turn in English so the physical translation of that structural device is quite literally done.
— Bert Geyer (2011).
Last year, my middle school class spent a fair amount of time looking at sonnets: pulling them apart; comparing similarities and differences; discovering their poetic form; and then each creating their own.
Bert Geyer took this type of analysis to the next step. He created a visual translation of a Petrarchan sonet using color and shape to represent the patterns of the sonnet.
The artist’s description of the piece is quite fascinating.
The varying stains at the ends of the lines indicate rhyme scheme. I chose to use the Petrarchan format–abbaabbacdcdee. Overall, every feature of the piece takes precedent from the composite structure of a sonnet (not any specific sonnet). But the piece isn’t an exact analog. My aim through this piece is to observe the nuances and complexities of translating from one medium to another. How certain features may be reproduced in another medium, albeit differently. And how translation to a new medium has limitations and new opportunities.
— Bert Geyer (2011).
I particularly appreciate that the statement so clearly demonstrates the care and effort that went into the details of the piece. The illustration that the creation of art requires just as much thought and energy as in any other field.
This should make an excellent, spark-the-imagination, addition to any discussion of sonnets. Indeed, it can also serve as a template for how to analyze different types of poetry to look for their forms. And the meaning of all the different parts should just jump out to Montessori (and any other) students who’ve used geometric symbols to diagram sentences.
To Doodle: to make spontaneous marks to help yourself think.
–Sunni Brown (2011): Doodlers, unite! (at 3:19) in TED.
Doodling on a notepad is often seen as evidence that a student is not paying attention. Very much to the contrary, argues Sunni Brown in this TED talk:
Studies show that sketching and doodling improve our comprehension — and our creative thinking.
— TEDtalksDirector: Sunni Brown: Doodlers, unite! on YouTube.
She describes doodling as a, “preemptive measure to stop you from loosing focus.” In addition, doodling helps integrate all four modes of learning (visual, auditory, reading/writing, kinesthetic) as well as helps provoke an emotional response, all of which greatly aid retention of information and creative thinking. Finally, doodling is most useful when we’re trying to process a heavy, dense load of information.
Brown has more details in her article in .net, Why the Doodle Matters.
(hat tip: The Dish)
View Ameren’s Coal Power Plant in a larger map
Jeffery Tomich had a good article last month on the leakage from the coal ash pond at a coal burning power plant near to our school. While the leakage appears to pose no real risk to us, it is a serious environmental issue at a local site that a number of students drive by on the way to school.
I’ve annotated the following excerpt from the article based on the questions my students asked when we talked about the it.
Since Since 1992, a coal ash pond next to the Ameren power plant here has been … hemorrhaging up to 35 gallons a minute [into the local groundwater].
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At many [other] sites, trace metals in coal ash including lead, mercury, arsenic and selenium have been found in groundwater at levels that exceed drinking water standards.
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In 2007, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report identified 63 sites in 26 states where the water was contaminated by heavy metals from coal ash dumps. That was more than a year before an estimated 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash sludge escaped an impoundment in Kingston, Tenn. The sludge spread across 300 acres, and 3 million cubic yards spilled into a river.
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The waste is created from burning coal to create electricity. At Labadie’s ash ponds, it’s composed of fly ash, a fine, talc-like powder that’s captured by filters in the plant’s stacks to reduce pollutants released into the air, and bottom ash, a coarser material that falls to the bottom of coal boilers.
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a report prepared by Robert Criss, a Washington University professor, identified several dozen private wells along the bluffs near Labadie Bottoms that could be at risk of contamination. Contaminants could infiltrate from shallow alluvial soils to the deeper Ozark aquifer [(see also USGS, 2009)] tapped by residents for drinking water, according to the report.
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Ameren believes the leaks don’t pose an environmental threat. But because of ongoing concerns, and because the EPA has asked the utility to monitor them, Ameren will make repairs to the ash pond by the end of the year— Tomich (2011): Leaks from Ameren toxic waste pond in Labadie stir fears in St. Louis Today.
More information from the local environmental group, Labadie Environmental Organization:
The ash overflow in Tennessee: see Dewan, 2008.
Part of the afternoon chores at the Heifer Ranch was milking the goats. It was not something required of the students, but since our barn was located right next to the goats’ milking barn, a lot of them volunteered to try it out.
Most used the somewhat dainty, one handed technique, and I’ll confess I was among that group, but a few students (see first image) really got into it.
After milking, the goats’ teats are dipped in iodine solution (25 ppm recommended by McNulty et al., 1997) to kill any germs and prevent infection.
As for the green splotches on the backs of the goats. On our first morning at the Heifer Ranch we had walked past a paddock with about half a dozen goats. A student noticed the green and asked why. Fortunately, we had a guide to explain a little about the basics of animal husbandry – apparently, the marks indicate which goats are likely to be pregnant.
The galaxy cluster MACS J1206. Galaxy clusters like these have enormous mass, and their gravity is powerful enough to visibly bend the path of light, somewhat like a magnifying glass.
These so-called lensing clusters are useful tools for studying very distant objects, because this lens-like behaviour amplifies the light from faraway galaxies in the background. They also contribute to a range of topics in cosmology, as the precise nature of the lensed images encapsulates information about the properties of spacetime and the expansion of the cosmos.
–NASA, ESA, M. Postman (STScI) and the CLASH Team: Hubble image of galaxy cluster MACS J1206
One of the highlights of the Heifer Ranch trip was the chance for students to spend a night in their global village. It’s really a set of villages, each simulating a life in an under-developed part of a different developing country.
The Guatemalan house is pretty nice; it keeps you out of the elements, you have actual beds, and running water. The Thai houses are actually pretty awesome. They stand on stilts next to the open fields, giving good air circulation and elegant views. They remind me a lot of some of the older houses from where I grew up. The refugee camp, on the other hand is pretty decrepit. The slums aren’t much better but at least have one house with a wooden floor, though the door was so broken it was pretty useless.
Our students were assigned villages at random, but varying numbers were placed in each village to replicate the population densities more accurately. One adult was assigned to each village. We were supposed to act as if we were incompetent (not hard I know), either as two-year-olds or senile elders.
I ended up in the high population slums.
On the positive side, I was not the only adult there. Mrs H., who had joined our group with her daughter for the week of activities at Heifer, was also assigned to the slums. On the negative side, she and the girls commandeered the one “posh” building that had an actual floor to sleep on. The boys and I had to sleep on the hard, stony ground.
It didn’t help that one of the boys was “pregnant”. One person in each group been given a water balloon in a sling and told to keep it with them, safe, until dinner, when they would “give birth”, at which point the others in the “family” could help take care of the “child”. A key objective was for the child to survive until morning.
The boys scouted all the houses in the village and scavenged a large piece of metal grating to sleep on. It was not great, but it was doable. Better, at least, than the concrete-hard, uneven ground.
There was a lot more that happened on that night. None of the groups was given enough to be comfortable on their own. There was a lot of haggling, trading and even commando raids, but, in the end, they pulled together and made something of it.
The experience was quite useful, I think. Conditions were uncomfortable enough to register with the students, though a single night is not enough to really internalize all the challenges of urban slums where over one billion people spend their lives. But it does provide some very useful context for the poignant images of Jonas Bendiksen (Living in the Slums) and James Mollison (Where Children Sleep).
In my last physics exam, I asked how many bananas would it take to deliver a fatal dose of radiation. This question came up when we were discussing different types of radiation and looking at this graph. One banana gives you about 0.1 microSieverts, while the usually fatal dosage is about 4 Sieverts. That means 4 million bananas. Michael Blastland uses the instantly fatal dosage of 8 Sieverts to make his estimate of eight million.
My students were insistent, “Would eating four million bananas really kill you with radiation?”
My answer was, “Yes. But other problems might arise if you try to eat four million bananas.”