Author: Lensyl Urbano

Ngram: The history of words

Graphs of the words Montessori and muddle created with Google Ngram.

If you take all the books ever written and draw a graph showing which words were used when, you’d end up with something like Google’s Ngram. Of course I thought I’d chart “Montessori” and “muddle”.

The “Montessori” graph is interesting. It seems to show the early interest in her work, around 1912, and then an interesting increase in interest in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Like with all statistics, one should really be cautious about how you interpret this type of data, however, I suspect this graph explains a lot about the sources of modern trends in Montessori education. I’d love hear someone with more experience thinks.

Alexis Madrigal has an interesting collection of graphs, while Discover has an article with much more detail about what can be done with Google’s database.

Dinner and a Show

At the end of each year, the Middle School puts on Dinner and a Show. As has become traditional, the students performed a play for the Show, and, for dinner, this year they did a Mediterranean themed meal: lasagna, baklava and some sort of cherry drink. The overwhelming feedback from the not necessarily impartial audience, of family members and faculty, seems to be that food and performance were quite a success. And, I have to say, the same applies from my point of view as well. The students did a great job putting everything together and pulling off the performance.

We usually work on Dinner and a Show for the entire second cycle. The first five weeks revolve around choosing the play, learning lines, and planning the meal. Our director, for the second year running, Ms. Jessica Parker, did a wonderful job with the adaptation, staging and working with the kids.

I was extremely lucky this year that I had two students who were really interested in the project. One, an eight grader, had been planning on taking charge since last year. The other, a seventh grader, really wanted to do the food. What was really nice was that, most of the time, they were the ones pushing me to get stuff done.

I’d ask questions like, “Have you started on the playbill yet?”

“Yes,” they’d reply, with exaggerated patience, “We’re still waiting for you to help with the images.”

The sixth week of the cycle, our immersion week, was dedicated entirely to the event; lots of practicing and food preparation. That’s when the students really shone. We had some help making the baklava (thanks Dr. Jen), but the next day, which was spent assembling two (and eventually three) types of lasagna, I only had a couple queries about what to use to boil water for the pasta (an electrical skillet works fairly well).

Everyone had a part in the play, but were also involved in setting things up. Apart from the cooks, there were separate crews for lighting and the backdrops. Once the crews got going, I spent most of my time staying out of the way. While I’d so like to jump in and help with everything, this is the way I think the middle school should work. I count this week as a really good one.

Connecting themes among texts

XVIII

Oh, when I was in love with you
Then I was clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
How well did I behave.

And now the fancy passes by
And nothing will remain,
And miles around they’ll say that I
Am quite myself again.

– A.E. Housman -from A Shropshire Lad.

Over the last two days, I’ve been trying to focus a little on how different texts can be connected by their shared themes. Poetry is one of the options for students’ presentations during the community meeting every morning, and, to speed things up a little, I’ve been insisting that students have their presentations ready and approved by the facilitator, be it a poem or leading a discussion of one of George Washington’s Rules of Civility, before the meeting starts. Otherwise, I get to choose the poem they present.

So yesterday I chose Shelly’s Ozymandias, and this morning I picked Housman’s Oh, when I was in love with you.

When we do a poem or a rule of civility, the presenter leads a short discussion of the work. For poems this means identifying interesting aspects of the language, but mostly I’ve had them focusing on extracting themes. They’re getting better and better at that with practice, so today I explicitly asked, “What themes do today’s and yesterday’s poems share?”

It took us a while to unpack the two pieces, they had to hear them again, and finally I ended up giving them my opinion.

We need to work on these intertextual comparisons a bit more, but, hopefully, they’ll improve with practice.

I’m considering having them read the lyrics of James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful (the “clean” version) tomorrow, because it fits nicely with the other two poems and a contemporary work might offer them an additional connection to the work. We’ll see.

– Ozymandias – Percy Bysshe Shelly (via poets.org)

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

On Rabbit Digestion

Figure 1. Undigested fiber from rabbit fecal pellets.

One of my favorite things is when my students teach me something I didn’t know. One of those things is that rabbits eat their own poop.

Well not exactly. According to Dana Krempels, from the University of Miami, rabbit fecal pellets (poop) are different from the other type of droppings that lagomorphs actually eat, which are called cecotropes (Kempels, 2010; Rabbits: The Mystery of Poop). Cecotropes apparently have lots of helpful bacteria and nutrients. Rabbits that don’t get to eat them tend to suffer from malnutrition.

Figure 2. Rabbit fecal pellets, with one mostly dissected, in a standard petri dish.

Independent Research Project

For her Independent Research Project (IRP) this term, one of my students researched rabbits, and, as was required, tried to find them on our nature trail. She found indirect evidence. Small fecal pellets in the grassy area next to the trail’s exit, just where her research said they might be (which was quite nice). The pellets were brought inside, dissected, and examined under the microscope (see Figures 1 and 2).

The magnified image showed what appeared to be a partially masticated (chewed) piece of fiber, probably grass. This is where I was informed about the double eating called cecotrophy. My student hypothesized that this sample might be something that had not been fully digested and the rabbit would come back and eat it another time.

The Scientific Process

I really like the scientific process that went into this project, even though I’m not sure I agree with the final hypothesis. The project started with background research that yielded a plan for field observation. The field observation resulted in samples being collected and returned to the lab for analysis. The analysis produced some interesting, enigmatic results, which lead to a proposed hypothesis that integrated the observations based on the original background research.

The only things I would like to add to this type of IRP is to have students include a detailed scientific sketch, much like the sketches of the early botanists and naturalists. I really like how these drawings integrate acute observation and artistic interpretation.

Visuwords: a visual dictionary

The definition of parasite on Visuwords.

Visuwords is a great visual dictionary. It not only gives definitions, but shows the links between antonyms, synonyms and etymology.

I plugged in a few of the words from this cycle’s vocabulary lists (parasite, circumnavigate, host, viceroy etc.) and the results were quite neat.

Also, if you double click a word/node it expands to show you the things it’s connected to. This can lead to a quite complex diagram. It would have been great to use it for the word navigator, because it gives a graphic organizer that pretty much covers what we talked about for social world this cycle.

Definition of eukaryote. Notice it links to the word prokaryote (the red line indicates that it's an antonym).

Insects with solar cells

The yellow stripe on the oriental hornet's abdomen may act as a solar cell. (Photo by MattiPaavola via Wikimedia Commons).

We’ve seen that autotrophs get their energy from sunlight or chemical reactions, while heterotrophs get their energy from eating other organisms. We’ve also seen that some protists, called mixotrophs, can do both.

We have not yet discussed reptiles, which are heterotrophs (as are all members of the Domain Animalia), but use the sun to regulate their internal temperature (they’re ectotherms).

According to a recent article, the yellow pigment on the oriental hornet’s belly can convert sunlight to electricity, and is believed to have some role in photosynthesis in some plants.

The researchers used the pigment to make their own solar cell, but it proved to be quite inefficient, only converting 0.335% of the incoming light to electricity. However, the microscopic ridges on the hornet, and the layering of the insect’s cuticle, suggest that the hornet itself is more efficient.

I’m not quite sure how the hornets would use the electricity if that’s what they’re doing, but they are more active in sunlight than in the dark, so some type of “solar harvesting” is probably going on.

How to disagree

Paul Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement (image adapted from Wikipedia).

Faced with the rapidity at which anonymous conversations on the internet deteriorate, Paul Graham’s broken things down into six levels of argument. It starts with name-calling at the bottom and ends with the Refutation of the Central Point at the top.

This is a wonderful model. I especially like the diagram because it’s really easy to pick out which level your argument is on. I’m going to make a poster sized version of this and post it on the wall. And, there’ll be a lesson.