Lensyl Urbano – Page 121 – Montessori Muddle

Breaching the Morganza Spillway

Memphis mobile home park after — Flooded mobile home park in Memphis on May 10, 2011. © 2011 Google, GeoEye

The worst of this spring’s flood has passed Memphis, but they’re still dealing with the water downstream on the Mississippi.

PBS has before and after pictures of the opening of the Morganza Spillway, which is intended to stave off flooding in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

The Coastlines Project blog is also aggregating a lot of information about the effect of the flooding. I found the post on the effect of the flooding on New Orleans) to be particularly provocative. It’s probably a good candidate for a Socratic dialogue, because it points out the tradeoff between the ecology of the Mississippi delta and the health and utility of New Orleans. The Corps of Engineers have been regulating the Mississippi along its present course for the last half a century, but this has prevented the river from avulsing and flowing down the Atchafalaya river instead of its current course. This would leave New Orleans high and dry (but not for long) but be a great boon for the Atchafalaya part of the delta.

ms-river — The current Mississippi River is in blue, while the Atchufalaya River is in green. The Atchufalaya takes a much more direct route to the Gulf of Mexico, and that is the route the Mississippi would take if it were not for the levees. This map also shows the different deltas built up by the Mississippi River as it has changed its course over the last 10,000 years (the Holocene). Image adapted from Aslan et al. (2005; pdf).

Coastlines Project also deals with other issues, such as how the lingering effects of the BP oil spill, affecting the Gulf coast. It’s an interesting blog to follow, especially since we’ll be on that coast next week for our end-of-year trip.

Consider Camouflage

Consider just how effectively this octopus camouflages itself.

Self-compassion: Learn from Mistakes, Don’t Beat Yourself Up

Compassion is sensitivity to the suffering of self and others and a commitment to do something about it.

— Paul Gilbert (a researcher at Kingsway Hospital in the United Kingdom) in Nixon (2011): Self-compassion may matter more than self-esteem

Robin Nixon has an excellent article on why “[…] self-compassion may be the most important life skill, imparting resilience, courage, energy and creativity.”

She cites the work of Kristin Neff who says self-compassion has three parts to it:

mindfulness: accepting your thoughts and feelings without being carried away by them,
common humanity: the recognition that everyone goes through similar hardships, frustrations and disappointments, and,
being kind to yourself: by being aware (mindful) of your anguish, and recognizing that others have shared similar feelings, you can commit to actions that reduce suffering in the future.

And a Comet Hits the Sun

cme-150-sk1 — Comet colliding with the Sun coincides with a coronal mass ejection. Image from the NASA SOHO Observatory.

SOHO scientists think that coronal mass ejection that happens right after the comet hits the Sun was probably not caused by the collision. But it looks really cool.

SOHO has a nice glossary of terms for understanding the Sun that’s specifically for middle school students (there is also a more general one). They also have some much higher quality video.

Osama bin Laden: A Montessori Discussion

[…] the whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of seeing S.S. officers kicked and humiliated? But when the thing becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and disgusting.

–Orwell (1945): Sour Revenge in the Tribune. (Found via Megan McArdle).

Over the last couple of weeks, students have been reading and presenting newspaper articles every morning, so, inevitability, we had a few good opportunities to discuss the death of Osama bin Laden.

The discussions were remarkably mature, and quite edifying to hear, because it was pretty much what one would hope to occur among Montessori kids who’ve been dealing with the peace curriculum since pre-school.

There was remarkably little jubilation. So much so, that one student asked, “Are we not supposed to feel happy?”

The answer was that yes we can feel happy and relieved but we shouldn’t “spike the ball”, letting the celebration get so out of hand that it antagonizes bin Laden’s supporters even more, and makes us seem as arrogant as they caricature us to be. If we want to achieve peace we need to be better than that.

Their broader perspective is somewhat akin to what Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen monk, expressed a couple weeks after the September 11th attack (thanks to Julie H. for the link to the interview by Anne A. Simkinson).

All violence is injustice. The fire of hatred and violence cannot be extinguished by adding more hatred and violence to the fire. The only antidote to violence is compassion. And what is compassion made of? It is made of understanding. When there is no understanding, how can we feel compassion, how can we begin to relieve the great suffering that is there? So understanding is the very real foundation upon which we build our compassion.

[…]

There are people who want one thing only: revenge. In the Buddhist scriptures, the Buddha said that by using hatred to answer hatred, there will only be an escalation of hatred. But if we use compassion to embrace those who have harmed us, it will greatly diffuse the bomb in our hearts and in theirs.

–Thich Nhat Hanh (2001): What I Would Say to Osama bin Laden (Interview by Anne A. Simpkinson on BeliefNet.com)

There’s also a poignant reflection by Megan McArdle, a New Yorker, who was, at first, extremely angry and eager for revenge, but has become much more reflective, and cognizant that we share both humanity and mortality with even Osama bin Laden.

McArdle elaborates more here.

Multi-modal IRP’s

If I present information to you orally, you’ll probably only remember about 10% 72 hours after exposure, but if I add a picture, recall soars to 65%.

–Alex Lundry (2009): Chart Wars: The Political Power of Data Visualization

How you present visual information is important. And my students are discovering this as they work up their Independent Research Projects (IRP’s) this week.

In the spring they are fairly free to pick their topic and style of IRP. Some choose research projects, others term papers, and a few do things that strike their fancy, like writing fiction or programming games.

In the end, they submit a written report and give a presentation.

For research projects, I have one student who did a great job of coming up with a hypothesis and testing it. He even compiled a nice table of his data for his results section, but was reluctant to go through the effort of making a graph. After all, he claimed, anyone reading his report (or watching his PowerPoint presentation) could just look at the table and read the data off there themselves.

My response was that people absorb the data much more effectively when it’s presented graphically. Fortunately, Alex Lundry has a nice little presentation that reinforces this point. It also gives a few tips about what to look out for in graphics, because they can be used to mislead.

The key quote (via The Dish) is this:

Vision is our most dominant sense. It takes up 50% of our brain’s resources. And despite the visual nature of text, pictures are actually a superior and more efficient delivery mechanism for information. In neurology, this is called the ‘pictorial superiority effect’ […] If I present information to you orally, you’ll probably only remember about 10% 72 hours after exposure, but if I add a picture, recall soars to 65%. So we are hard-wired to find visualization more compelling than a spreadsheet, a speech of a memo.

–Alex Lundry (2009): Chart Wars: The Political Power of Data Visualization

Here’s Lundry’s five minute presentation.

Cricket

The weather has not been nice to our soccer pitch. There’s a bare patch in front of where we put the goals that kicks up a lot of dust when we play. But this also means that the ground is nice an smooth, making for a decent wicket. So we’ve been playing cricket.

I explained the rules and demonstrated batting and bowling, but the habits of a lifetime (even when you’re an early teen) are hard to shake. We’re going through a period where we’re playing an intriguing amalgam of baseball and cricket. Batters are currently straddling the crease with a baseball like stance, which works out pretty well for them at the moment because the bowlers are only just discovering that bouncing the ball makes it harder to hit.

Although I’ve tried to explain LBW, I’m not even going to try to get into some of the more wonderful terminology of the game. The BBC’s cricket Laws & Equipment and Skills pages are quite detailed.