Author: Lensyl Urbano

Block Schedules

Jenny Anderson has an interesting article on a New York school that changed from the typical 45 minute class periods to longer 130 minute “blocks” (thanks to Kara D. for pointing this one out). The whole idea of set class periods is one I’m having to get used to again as I move out of my one-teacher, one-classroom middle school at Lamplighter where time management is a lot more fluid.

Block time allows for in-depth student presentations.

Apart from Spanish class (30 minute class period), everything was pretty flexible at Lamplighter. In theory, I would have a short, spark-the-imagination type lesson at the beginning of each week for math, language, and social/physical science. Then, for the rest of the week, students would use the two hour morning and afternoon blocks to do whatever individual or group work they needed to get done.

In theory at least.

In practice, my lessons would tend to last a lot longer; I like to promote discussion, and once you get them going, adolescents often find it difficult to stop talking. So, almost inevitably, a quick review of the novel chapter they read last night would devolve into a discussion of something like Mutually Assured Destruction and continue onto the potential for accelerated evolution due to nuclear fallout, and then to the parts of atoms and why some elements are radioactive and some are not.

I also found that I would have to assign specific blocks that prioritized group work. It’s hard, apparently, to arrange everyone’s schedules to do group work, even when you’re with the same group of people, in the same classroom, all day at school. Part of this though is that, in giving students so much control of their time, students find their own rhythms to the days, with, say, math in the mornings and language after noon, that may not match up well with each other. So I’d find myself saying, when we restarted after lunch, “Remember your group projects are due tomorrow, so you might want to get on that.” And, typically, they did, getting the group work done before going back to their individual work.

The key difference with a set time period for each class, is the tendency for the teacher to feel that they have to stay on subject for the entire period. There are, of course, different topics and subjects that need the full period or block, and I certainly favor having a longer time period to work with, but there are times when you might feel the urge to artificially stretch the work just to fill in the time. This problem was mentioned in the article:

Another complaint: boring 45-minute classes became boring two-hour classes. Robert Ronan, a senior, said, “There are some classes that lend themselves more easily to 2-hour-and-15-minute classes and teachers that can do that, but I sort of feel like a lot of the classes are the same, just stretched.”

–Anderson, 2011: At Elite School, Longer Classes to Go Deeper

It seems to me, that if you don’t want to lecture or have a discussion for entire two hours, which could get boring if not done really well, and you want individual or group work, which some students will complete faster than others, you are going to be faced with students who have time on their hands. You’d prefer that they spent that time productively, and definitely don’t want them distracting other students, so there need to be clear expectations about what they should be doing in these interstitial moments.

Sometimes you just need a nap to rest and recuperate.

I’d lean toward making sure they know how much time they have before you need their attention again (or they have to leave) and then giving them the choice of what to do: they could start on homework for this or even another class; they could take a quiet break to relax and recuperate (journaling might be a good idea); or they could do what you’re probably doing, and go around helping their peers with the work at hand.

Within the same block of time:

Within the same block of time, peer-teaching (math in this case) occurs at one end of the classroom.

The group splits and reforms around individual work, but with company close by. These students are working on the same subject, and will occasionally ask each other small questions about the work, but are working individually.
At the other end of the classroom a pair of students work on their small group project (science).
And another student works on something completely different (his research project) in a different, quieter space.

Blind Sampling of the Subsurface

Extruding sediment from the corer into the sieve. Dashed lines indicate where the piston and metal rod extend inside the barrel of the corer.

On the first morning of the Coastal Science Camp, between dip netting and seining at the estuary, we tried sampling beneath the seabed using a little coring device which I seem to have to forgotten the name of.

Some students were quite excited about the chance to sample beneath the surface of the sediment. Student displays the sampling device is in his right hand.

Usually, they can see the little holes in the seabed where the benthic macrofauna live, but not this time. All the sediment pouring into the Mississippi Sound from this spring’s swollen rivers had made the waters too turbid to see through. So we were coring blind.

The corer is simply a metal (stainless steel) barrel with a rubber piston inside. The piston is connected to a handle at the top with metal rod. To sample, you put the tip of the barrel at the sediment-water interface and push the barrel into the sediment at the same time holding the handle steady to keep the piston from moving into the sediment. Holding the piston steady provides a little suction on the inside of the barrel, which helps the barrel move into the sediment, and keeps the sediment in the barrel when you pull it out. However, it does help to put your hand on the bottom of the barrel as soon as possible to keep the sediment from falling out, even if that means sticking your hand into the sediment itself.

Keeping you hand on the bottom of the barrel keeps the sediment from falling out before it gets to the sieve.
Vague layering is visible in the sediment.

Once you’ve recovered the sediment, you extrude it into a sieve. Sometimes you can see a little layering in the extruding sediment, but we did not take the time to try to interpret it since our focus was on finding benthic fauna.

The sieve’s mesh is pretty coarse, so anything sand sized or smaller is washed out as you gently rock it back and forth in the water. We did not find much. Mostly small pebbles. Without being able to see the seabed our sampling pattern was pretty random.

Small pebbles in the sieve.

The more persistent groups (the class had been broken into groups of two or three) did find a couple things, including a polychaete, which is a segmented worm.

A polychaete.

They also turned up a small, clawed, lobster-like organism:

We also found the burrow of an unknown organism, surrounded by a clayey cast. It looked very much like some of the fossilized burrow casts we saw at Coon Creek.

Burrow, with surrounding cast.

This type of sampling was not everyone’s cup of tea, however. Fortunately, the water was shallow and warm, so a good time was had by all.

Some groups were less successful at finding benthic macrofauna than others. They had other things on their mind.

Building the Machine: The Role of the Teacher in a Montessori Middle School

With students working on different things at the same time, sometimes collaborating, sometimes working individually, a fluidly function Montessori classroom is somewhat akin to a complex but well-oiled machine: there are lots of individually moving parts that sometimes interact and sometimes not, in an ever-changing configuration. As a result, the job of the middle school teacher is less to convey information than it is to develop a successful classroom culture and ensure its efficient working.

Building the machine starts with the teacher as a role model. The teacher is a role model at all levels, but in middle school this takes on a slightly different color. After all, your adolescents are furiously figuring out how to be adults, so they’re taking a lot of clues for their behavior from the adults in their presence. The key things they’re looking for are, in Montessori’s (1948) words, “a sense of justice and a sense of personal dignity.” The trick is that underneath all the cynicism, they’re all idealists.

Justice is a particularly important and delicate concept because students want justice badly, but they tend to see it as distributive justice, where everyone is equal and get equal rewards and punishments. Unfortunately, this view tends to lead to an over-expansive expectation of rights and often to a sense of entitlement: the belief that if that person is getting something, I should get the same thing too. What’s too often missing, is the recognition that beyond the basic human rights, rights and privileges have to be earned.

This is something I find that I have to explain again and again for everyone to internalize what it means. It does not help that adolescents’ frontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for critical thinking and impulse control, are not yet fully developed. What makes things even more interesting is the fact that girls tend to cognitively mature a lot faster than boys.

In addition, my own philosophy is that there are two key things I want to impart to my students: a love of learning and the willingness to try new things. This is somewhat contrary to where students are going developmentally. Adolescents tend to chase certainty as they change physically and mentally, all the while trying to establish their personal identities and place in the world; their focus tends to narrow toward what they’re good at and where their interests lie; there is “an unexpected decrease in intellectual capacity” (Montessori, 1948).

To encourage independence and creativity, and to build the sense of personal dignity through accomplishment, I sometimes break the pattern of the Montessori three-part Lesson (introduction, practice, application), and throw them assignments that they should have most of the background tools and knowledge to deal with, but have never encountered in this particular way. The Student Run Business is great for this, as unexpected problems are always cropping up, and, in case of emergency, it’s easy to create extra problems and challenges if you need to. When our bread-baking ovens started acting up, the oven calibration provided a great opportunity. It needed to be done, and students could figure it out on their own. Mostly. Eventually.

Developing a good classroom culture is probably the hardest challenge for those new to Montessori, especially with early adolescents who tend to have their own ideas and know everything already. However, with a few carefully designed lessons and exercises, the machine takes care of most of the teaching and learning of math and science and social studies and whatever else the curriculum requires students learn, peer-teaching and collaborative learning are all part of the classroom culture. The best part though, is that, once well established, the teacher ends up with a lot less work to do, and with a culture that propagates itself from year to year in our multi-aged classrooms.

So while we want to create a well organized, fluidly functioning classroom, it’s sometimes useful to introduce a little extra friction to keep things interesting. Of course, most often you don’t have to do this yourself. A lot of friction will come from the students themselves, and then the trick is anticipating it, allowing students the chance to deal with it, and then finally using it as a lesson so students learn from their experience if it gets beyond them. All the while, you must recognize that your every word and action is being carefully scrutinized with an eye for justice, even though you and they may not have the same definition for the word.

References

Grazzini, C., 1996. The Four Planes of Development, The NAMTA Journal, 21 (2), 208-241.

Montessori, M., 2005. From Childhood to Adolescence, The Montessori Educational Research Center, Trans. New York: Schocken. (Originally published in 1948).

Longshore Drift and Pufferfish

A groin strains to hold back the longshore drift. It is, as always, only partially successful.

It was about 1.5 kilometers from the Research Lab to the estuary where we spent our first morning sampling (overview of the trip is here).

Elevated beach house.

Walking along the beach to get there, we could see the beach houses to the right of us, across the narrow road of East Beach Drive, standing tall on columns to keep them above the reach of the storms. According to Stephanie, our guide, the storm surge from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, reached awfully close to the tops of the columns. The research lab, which is not elevated, lost an entire building to that hurricane. Indeed, much of the coast is still recovering from Katrina’s damage.

The white sandy beach, on the other hand, looked beautiful, which was a bit odd. After all, how did it survive the storm? Furthermore, when you think about it, this beach is located behind a string of barrier islands, which protect the coast from the full force of the waves coming out of the Gulf of Mexico, so how come there is enough wave energy to maintain a sandy beach. The relatively calm waters should allow finer grained sediment, like clay and silt, to settle out, and this area really should be a marsh. The answer, it seems, is that this is an artificial beach. Every few years, thousands of tons of sand are dumped along the coast to “replenish” the beachs.

Without beach replenishment the beaches would revert to salt marshes like this one.

This coastline really should be a tidal marsh, like the one we found when we got to the estuary. These Gulf-coast salt-marshes are fronted by a relatively short version of smooth cordgrass (spartina alterniflora), backed up by the taller, and more common black needlerush (Juncus roemerianus Scheele) .

Longshore Drift

Now, if this is a low-energy environment that allows silt and clay can settle out of the water column, where does the sand go so that it has to be replenished every so often? It is gradually moved along the coast by longshore drift.

Longshore drift moves sand along the coast in the direction of the wind. Image via the USGS.

Waves hit the beach at an angle. As they break, the turbulent swash pushes sand up the beach at the same angle as the movement of the waves. As the wave retreats, the backwash, drawn by gravity, pulls sand perpendicularly down towards the water. The net effect, is that sand gradually moves down the coastline with each swash and backwash of the waves.

Since dumping tons of sand is expensive, engineers try other things to prevent the sand from running off down the beach. Someone, a very long time ago, had the great idea to build a wall sticking out from the beach to impede the sand in its unwanted migration. This type of wall is called a groin (or sometimes a groyne in polite company), and it does stop the sand. In fact, the sand builds up on the upwind side of the groin. Unfortunately, it does not stop the longshore drift on the downwind side, and that results in the erosion of a bay on that side.

A groin impedes longshore drift. Note that the waves approach the beach at an oblique angle.

Pufferfish

Beaches are also great places to find random things washing up. We lucked upon an unusually large pufferfish (family: tetraodontidae). It was quite puffed up. It was also quite dead.

Pufferfish.

Pufferfish are famous for being extremely poisonous. According to the National Geographic page on pufferfish, their tetrodotoxin over a thousand times more poisonous than cyanide, and there is no known antidote.

Seining in the Sound

Setting up the seine.

After surface sampling with the dip nets, and subsurface sampling with the little corers, we tried sampling the water column using a small seine.

Seining requires teamwork, and I was pleased to see everyone working well together, focused on the job at hand.

Working together to bring in the catch.

Hauling on the nets, with the smell of salt in the air, resurrected long neglected memories of fishermen at work on tropical, Atlantic beaches. Back then they were going after fish for the market, here, with our much finer meshed net, we were looking for anything interesting in the water column.

Examining the catch.

Everyone got touch a ctenophore (comb jelly), which I will note is not a jellyfish, and is also not poisonous.

If you look carefully you can just make out a comb jelly in the jar.

Students also had a chance to hold a croaker (a fish of the family Sciaenidae), and feel it croak.

Feeling the croak.

Our guide was great. She was quite knowledgeable about the fauna we ran into, and very good at sharing information.

Stephanie T. pointing out the finer points of piscine morphology.

Interestingly, we were not the only ones out seining that morning. There was a small group from the research lab looking for skates for a research project. I think they said that this was their third time out looking, but like us, they did not find any elasmobranchs (not counting the one dead specimen we ran into while dip netting).

Remains of a skate, lying in the grass at the edge of the beach.

Dip Nets in the Estuary

Dip nets in action.
Sampling in the estuary.

Doing the “sting ray shuffle” through the shallow waters of the estuary of a small stream and the Mississippi Sound, we used dip nets to collect organisms from the sediment-water interface.

We found mostly invertebrates. There were lots of small white crabs. Most, but not all, were too small to pinch.

We also grabbed quite a number of translucent shrimp.

You can very clearly see the entire gastro-intestinal system of this small shrimp.

And there were a lot of hermit crabs.

An understandably shy hermit crab.

A couple students also picked up some small snakes, but they quickly slipped through the dip net’s mesh and escaped.

Simple and effective, dip netting was a nice way to start the Coastal Sciences Camp.

Moving on

Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

–Tennyson (1842): Break, Break, Break via the Poetry Foundation.

I feel as if I’ve been posting more poetry than normal. I know I’ve been reading a lot more. It’s a habit I fall back into at major transitions. I’m leaving Lamplighter Montessori in Memphis and instead of doing everything in the Middle School, I will be taking a more Math and Science oriented position at the Fulton School at St. Albans near St. Louis. I’ve really enjoyed being the Middle School teacher at Lamplighter, so it is hard to leave, but the hardest part of moving on is that, in my multi-age, single-teacher classroom, there are seventh graders who I won’t be able to take through the full cycle.

It’s particularly hard because I’m leaving behind an exceptional group of students that any teacher would love to have in their classroom. They’re kids who love to learn, are serious about their work, and are well-balanced, “normalized” Montessori students; the epitome of constructivist education. For this reason, I know they’ll do well, which is some consolation (I also have a lot of confidence in their new teacher), but I will miss not being able to work with them.

Saying goodbye to the graduating students was also more difficult than I expected. There’s always some sadness in seeing them move on, but it is part of the normal progression of things, so it is a sweet sorrow. Now, however, my moving to another city introduces another element to a naturally traumatic change, especially for the kid who have had a harder time making the transition. Part of the safe anchor back to middle school, which some students need during that first year of high school, has become untethered.

At least, with the blog and email it is harder to loose all contact, but electronic communications cannot always satisfy the need to know that there is something, somewhere, safe behind you, somewhere that will provide a little unconditional positive regard we all need sometimes. Admittedly, this is often an illusion, institutions evolve, but I think it is a useful fiction we all need sometimes.

There is a lot to commend my new position, which I will undoubtedly be writing a lot about over the summer as I prepare classes, but after talking to my students individually today, I feel like I need to take a moment to reflect on what has been a few, wonderful years. Hence my need to resort to poetry.

Coastal Science Camp at the Gulf Coast Research Lab

Dip netting in a small estuary.

As you may have guessed from the previous posts about waterspouts and the dolphin, we’ve been on the Gulf coast for the last few days. Specifically, we were visiting the Gulf Coast Research Lab‘s Marine Education Center for two days for our end-of-year trip.

It was excellent. The weather was perfect; sunny with lots of cumuliform clouds for shade but little rain. However, the what really made the trip work was that we had a good, interesting, and varied program, directed by an excellent instructor, Stephanie T..

Stephanie T. pointing out the finer points of piscine morphology.

For reference (to link all posts about the Coastal Science Camp):


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