DNA –> proteins

Learn.Genetics have some very nice animations and exercises that deal with DNA, genes and protein synthesis. At the moment, I’m finding the following particularly useful:

Instruction on how to extract DNA from anything, (I’m going to use this as a lab and perhaps to make pea soup too) and specifically, from people (inside of your cheek).
What makes a firefly glow animation. It’s a bit dense, but complements the transcribe and translate a gene exercise nicely.
The Observable Traits Slideshow identifies some of the same traits we look for in our exercises: dimples, handedness, etc. (they have a quick reference pdf.
There are a bunch of great traits activities, including family tree building, and traits bingo.

Haiku Finder: Haikus are everywhere

Haiku Finder is a quick and extremely dirty way of finding haiku’s in any texts.

You may not want to let your students find out about this site, or, alternatively, having them plug in their existing texts might make for an interesting way of introducing haikus.

I’m not particularly poetic (tell me something I don’t know), I have to go back through a month of posts to get my first Muddle haiku:

One of those things is
that rabbits eat their own poop.
Well not exactly.

— from On Rabbit Digestion

Nuclear Fallout: Chernobyl pictures

Just in time for us to start reading The Chrysalids, David Schindler has a frightening gallery from the abandoned surroundings of Chernobyl, twenty-five years after the accident with the nuclear reactor.

The YouTube video below shows the same images as the gallery.

Boys, girls, and blogs

There’s a curious and clear gender difference when it comes to my student’s use of their blogs. All the girls have them and most are posting things right now, but the boys don’t.

This is in large part due to the way I rolled out the student blogs. I started with a couple students (girls) who were most interested, and since then I’ve been setting up blogs for students as they’ve been requested. The process has been slow because I’ve been trying the multi-user version of WordPress (WPMU), which is not nearly as easy to set up as a stand-alone WordPress installation (like the one used for the Muddle). I think, however, that I have the setup process worked out now, so I could accelerate the rollout if necessary.

Since the two students I started with were girls, it’s perhaps not too surprising that it’s the other girls who were most interested in getting their own. That’s the way the social connections are arranged in our class.

Brain_dev_Lenroot_2007 — Scattergram showing how girls' (red) brains mature differently than boys' (blue). Data from Lenroot, 2007.

Though there’s no real evidence for it, I do wonder, however, if there is a gender component to it too. Since girls tend to develop more quickly than boys at this age (see Sax, 2007 for a general description, and NIH, 2010 for a recent overview of adolescent brain development), so perhaps they’re more self-reflective. Girls also tend to emphasize interpersonal relationships more (e.g. Johnson, 2004), and are generally more communicative.

… females (1) develop more intimate friendships, (2) stress the importance of maintaining intimacy, and (3) expect more intimacy in their friendships than do males. — in Gender, grade, and relationship differences in emotional closeness within adolescent friendships by Johnson, (2004)

At any rate, I’m curious to see how this develops. I think I’m going to remind the whole class about the blogs though.

(Excel Spreadsheet used to create the brain volume scattergram: here.)

Lessons from the Arizona Shooting: Connecting texts and inflammatory rhetoric

The attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords will come up tomorrow, (I have one student who is extremely interested in politics who is sure to recognize the importance of this), so I’ve been trying to figure out how to approach the issue. The New York Times’ Learning Network Blog has an excellent resource on, “Ways to Teach About the Arizona Shootings” that starts with allowing students to have a personal response, provides lots of great links relating to political violence and inflammatory rhetoric, and ends with a review of the history of assassinations in the U.S..

For my class, however, the two places I see the most relevant connections, that are developmentally appropriate, are in our ongoing discussion of rhetoric and argument, and in the language lessons focusing on connecting issues in texts.

Reading List

In the wake of the shooting, as everyone’s been trying to make sense of the attacker, his reading list has been a key focal point for trying to understand his motives.

There are lots of ways to link Mein Kampf, Animal Farm, and Brave New World; the latter two are secondary school staples for one thing. However, considering the issues in these texts, here’s one interesting observation by adriejan from Light Sound Dimension, “While these are all masterpieces, they have in common that they deal with the topic of reality perception being controlled by higher powers.” Does this hint at someone struggling with their identity and feeling powerless in the face of a complex world? Perhaps. This is what Jacob Mooney at Vox Populism calls “forensic bibliography”.

Whether we recognize it or not, we most often connect with the themes of books, even more than the quality of the writing I think (how else to explain the success of the early Harry Potter books, or Twilight). So our preferred reading lists tell us a lot about ourselves.

Inflammatory Rhetoric

I’m glad I’ve started on rhetoric and argument this cycle, because that’s another key intersection with the curriculum given where my early adolescents are morally and philosophically. There two points about extreme rhetoric that need to be made here (at least). The specific point deals with the direct consequences of the language you use. Extreme language like the statement, “I’m going to kill you for that!” limits your options, even if meant as hyperbole. If it’s taken seriously, backing down from the threat diminishes your reputation, tempting you to try to back up your unintended extremism. And when it’s not taken seriously, you’re requiring the content of your statement to be ignored, which sets a precedent for everything else you say.

The more general point about using inflammatory rhetoric, that it’s bad for the political and social culture, is probably the harder one to get across, because in insisting on temperate language you’re ultimately arguing against free-speech. Free-speech is fundamental principle that idealists latch onto easily. Adolescents have a predilection for idealism. Principles also offer good, solid, defendable positions when dealing with complex issues. Put free-speech against the idea that inflammatory language helps create a culture of violence, especially when it’s difficult to find any clear link between the language and the action, and I have no idea where the discussion will end up. Yet I have some confidence that my students will see the point, even if they don’t concede it. They have dealt with this type of ambiguity before, especially when they’re arguing about the limits of my power in the classroom (“Let’s vote not to have any math this cycle”).

We’ll see how it goes.

Montessori in the internet age

Sarah Ellison’s excellent article in Vanity Fair about the collaboration between the Guardian newspaper and Wikileaks in publication of leaked documents, has got me thinking about how teaching needs to adapt to the internet age.

The most interesting theme in Ellison’s article is the contrast between old and new media: Julian Assange’s web-based Wikileaks and the 200-year-old British newspaper, the Guardian (which, I will confess, has a wonderful football podcast).

The conflicts between the two organizations’ cultures has apparently lead to a lot of friction and miscommunication, but also resulted in a fairly effective collaboration. The Guardian has been one of the more active newspapers in exploiting the internet, but it provides the institutional integrity and journalistic tradition that seems to be able to temper some of the manic enthusiasm of Wikileaks’ zealous idealists.

It is no surprise that Wikileaks and Wikipedia share a core precept; transparent organizations work better (of course Wikipedia has put this into practice in its own organization, while Wikileaks aims to reduce the opacity of other organizations). And it should be no surprise that Wikileaks’ model has many supporters who are digital natives. What is interesting is how much the new media needs the old media, and how a forward thinking organization, like the Guardian, can adapt to, and take advantage of, the new opportunities that come from new organizations like Wikileaks.

Which takes us back to education and the internet. If we can agree with Daniel Pink and myriad others (like Ken Robinson) that traditional schooling is not effective at developing students’ creativity, and that constructivist approaches like Montessori do a much better job, then the parallel with the Guardian-Wikileaks collaboration, is that programs like Montessori are ideally placed to blossom if it can take full advantage of the new, developing, technological innovations (like Saguta Mitra‘s).

Like the Guardian, Montessori needs to embrace the new techniques the internet allows, but it is essential it is done with the same care and consideration that Maria M. applied her observations of what works in teaching. The Montessori method, has almost 100 years of tradition that needs to serve as ballast in an era when many are looking for new approaches to education, and we are trying to strike the right balance between what we know works and what we hope will.