Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
We’ve discovered committees. Yesterday, after spending half an hour discussing the brand new bread bag prototype that one of the students came up with, they decided that maybe just the people interested in working on them should work on them. So we just, organically, created a committee.
As with all new discoveries we’re now using them for everything. Today the students decided on a committee to run Dinner and a Show. We’ll see where this goes.
WritingDEN‘s Tips-O-Matic is a great site on writing great paragraphs and essays. The pages are very simple and well organized, without all the distracting noise of ads and extraneous information.
The language curriculum focuses, in general, on developing good writing style and craft, but some of my students need to work on the basics of essays a bit more, particularly with high-school entrance essays coming up.
When sorting through the many issues around immigration and globalization it is nice to be able to highlight the small things that make it seem worthwhile.
The East Village Community School in New York City is selling a CD, as an arts fundraiser, of songs performed by its students. The songs and musicians have roots that span the globe, from Mauritius to Tibet to Spain to Ireland to name just a few.
The CD in $15 and you can order it from the School’s website.
NPR’s Weekend Edition had a nice article on the parent driven project:
In the field of cognition, the march towards continuity between human and animal has been inexorable — one misconduct case won’t make a difference. True, humanity never runs out of claims of what sets it apart, but it is a rare uniqueness claim that holds up for over a decade. This is why we don’t hear anymore that only humans make tools, imitate, think ahead, have culture, are self-aware, or adopt another’s point of view. – Frans De Waal (2010).
My students studied the question, what is life, last cycle, and through their readings and Socratic dialogue I’ve been trying to approach the question of what is sentience and what distinguishes humanity from other organisms (or robots for that matter).
We’ve found that the lines between us and them are very hard to draw.
Pushing the discussion into questions of morality, primatologist Frans De Waal has a wonderful post on where it comes from, and if there is any clear distinction between humans and other animals. He argues that morality is innate, a product of evolution, and there aren’t clear distinctions.
The full article is a worthy read, with good writing and well constructed arguments. It’s a bit too long for a Socratic Dialogue but might be of interest to the more advanced student, particularly those going through religious, coming-of-age, rites of passage, like preparations for confirmations and Bar Mitzvahs. While De Waal’s evolutionary reasoning has been used to argue against religion, he takes a much more subtle approach:
Our societies are steeped in it: everything we have accomplished over the centuries, even science, developed either hand in hand with or in opposition to religion, but never separately. It is impossible to know what morality would look like without religion. It would require a visit to a human culture that is not now and never was religious. That such cultures do not exist should give us pause. – Frans De Waal (2010).
Two poignant intersections of the foreclosure crisis and art came to my attention recently. One is the series of aerial photos of Floridian real estate developments that never came to fruition. The other, an article on photographers who document the insides of foreclosed homes.
Both are moving in very different ways. The former in showing unfulfilled potential (although there is a good argument that many areas should never have been developed in the first place), and the latter in illustrating the debris of dreams that were broken.
NPR’s On the Media has a fascinating interview with Paul Reyes, a reporter who’s covered the foreclosure photographers. Reyes points out that while there can be a certain aesthetic that makes for striking photography, the real poignancy, particularly in these examples, comes from knowing the tragic back-story behind the images.
The On The Media article:
I decided that we would read our memoirs, the ones my students had been working on for the last five weeks, on our immersion trip down to Mississippi. The idea of sitting around the fire, sharing memories was just too enticing to pass up.
I was a little surprised that no one objected, or even hesitated, when I made the suggestion the week before. We’d just come in from soccer and I was trying to figure out how we’d fit the projects, the tests and the presentations into the time we had left. There was a precedent. They’d read their first stories, the ones from the orientation cycle, on our first immersion and that had worked out well because it had given us an entire afternoon to have a great discussion. They seem actually to look forward to, what’s come to be called, “Teatime with Doctor.”
“What if,” I asked, a little quietly to one of the 8th graders, who’d been on the challenge course immersion the year before and happened to be walking by, “you read your memoirs around the campfire on immersion?”
“Yes.” Declarative and succinct. I raised an eyebrow, but he just continued on his way. I was a little surprised he did not have more to say. I’m always surprised when my students don’t have more to say. My students can be quite loquacious given any opportunity, and this one in particular tended to have strong opinions that he was usually more that willing to share.
The discussion with the rest of the class took barely longer. The larger the group, the more likely you are to have people who need to think out loud, but there were unanimous thumbs up in less than two minutes.
I think that there’s some primal need that gets stirred up by even the thought of sitting around a fire and sharing stories. Of course this plan of action also fulfilled that other fundamental need of the adolescent, the need to procrastinate.
We get to Camp H., have lunch, and an afternoon of community building games. Lamplighter’s been working with the camp leader here for years and Ms. A’s impressed by how well this group works together. No surreptitious sabotage, no subtle denigration, no stubborn unwillingness to participate.
We talk about the group, she and I, as we walk back to the cabin, red gravel crunching under our feet, oak leaves turning color overhead, and myself getting slightly out of breath on the last climb. I’m perhaps a little more impressed than she is because I can see the conflict in those by now familiar faces; glimpses of of baser instincts being overruled by the prefrontal cortex. It is a sight that is ambrosia to the middle school teacher.
I get back to our cabin and I find V., one of the two students I’d promised they could get the campfire going.
“Are you guys getting the fire started?” I ask.
“We’re just going to play football for a little while, then start on the fire,” he replies. V’s been our main supervisor for Student Run Business this cycle and it shows. He’s been breaking out his calm, clear, confident, supervisor voice on the challenges all afternoon.
“We have half an hour until dinner and it will probably be dark afterward,” I say.
He just nods, seething competence.
It’s 5:45 and they’re still playing football. I look at my watch more and more frequently. I’m not going to remind them of what they have to do. We’re Montessori after all.
Two of the girls start working on the fire pit. Aha, I think to myself, this is going to get interesting. I saunter outside and my path nonchalantly takes me down to the fire pit. I suggest more kindling, they never get enough kindling. The boys realize other people are working on “their” fire.
Dissension in the ranks. Conflict. I tell them they should work together. Harsh words are spoken. A covenant broken. The poignant cry of impassioned idealism, “injustice”. Things fall apart; the center does not hold; Bethlehem is apparently somewhere on the other side of the playing field.
Ten minutes later it’s time to go to dinner, but first it’s time to rebuild, time to remind them of the covenant they came up with that very afternoon, time to have a short, quiet talk about the use of language.
Over dinner the laughter starts up again. I’m at the other table with Ms. A and her family, all of whom work at the camp in some degree or the other. After the last fifteen minutes I’m extra impressed by the calmness of her teenagers.
When we get back to the fire pit the laughter is perhaps a bit too loud, but the group seems back together again. The fire is started without recrimination (eventually because they did not have enough kindling).
We sit around the fire, reading stories, finding issues, being helpful writing partners, and learning how important it is to be critical, brutal even, to our own work. There are some really good writers in the group, and there’s nothing better than learning from your peers.
“Can we put our memoirs in the fire when we’re done?”
“Sure,” I say. Sharing our writing is supposed to be a celebration. Something strikes me as just about right about liberating these memories in flame, letting them take on a new, ethereal life. Burning pages in dancing flame, marking the putting away of cherished, childhood things; an adolescent rite of passage.
As the last few stragglers work on putting out the fire I sit there, on a cool fall night, thinking about cycles and the seasons. I wish I was on the beach, watching the tide come in, small waves advancing and retreating, bigger waves pushing them farther from time to time, every time a little closer to where they need to be.
The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
‘Twas half past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t’other had slept a wink!
– From “The Duel” by Eugene Field
Metaphor for the cold war?
Children’s poetry can be simple yet contain intricate, layered meaning. Project Guttenberg has a number of nice poetry collections available. Since they’re free it’s mostly older stuff, but human nature hasn’t changed that much in the last few hundred years.
Mary E. Burt’s 1904 collection, “Poems Every Child Should Know“, contains quite the number of classics like the one excerpted above. I like it a lot because when we talk about themes and issues in texts it is usually better to start with things that are very obvious, with simple language and simple sentence structure, to reduce the cognitive load.
However, just because the language style is simple doesn’t mean we can’t very quickly get to the complex.
The meaning of art is partially, at least, subjective, depending on the values and experiences brought to by the individual. Thus we have Edna St. Vincent Millay writing about the extinction of the dinosaurs.
So. If we read “The Duel” one morning while during the cycle when we discuss the Cold War and Mutually Assured Destruction, will students make the connection?
I hope they do, because then we can broaden the context and talk about human nature and the power of the classics.
Adam Ozimek stirred some controversy last month when he suggested that, whatever the educational merits, if the objective is to get inner-city kids to eat better, then we should be teaching them how to cook delicious meals using, cheaper and almost as nutritious, frozen vegetables, and not get into the slow-food, organic, locavore ethic of the Berkley School Lunch Initiative
Ozimek may have a point from a very strict utilitarian position, but he misses the big picture so badly that even if his fundamental argument was not wrong, which I think it probably is, it would be moot anyway.
First off, leaving aside the other educational merits of the program seems to miss the point. Humans, adolescents, education, these are all complex systems that interact in surprising ways. Students’ motivation to cook something they grew, for themselves, in the garden, is orders of magnitude different from the interest in cooking something out of the freezer section. And they miss everything they learn from gardening itself.
Using organic gardening methods and purchasing food, to the best of their ability, from local sources brings everyone’s attention to important environmental issues that situates students in the global ecosystem, which is something I know I spend a lot of time trying to accomplish. We’re not trying to make students aware of environmental issues because of some insidious “progressive” political agenda. The issues are there irregardless of the differing political approaches to dealing with them.
I also have a problem with the argument that frozen vegetables are the best way to deal with nutritional issues. From an immediate perspective Ozimek is probably right, and I’d support making sure frozen veges are an important part of the program. But the slightly bigger, slightly longer term, picture is that the program successfully increases awareness of healthy nutritional options. As long as student are also aware that frozen vegetables can also be a healthy substitute then students will use what’s within their means.
As an aside, although gardens are difficult or sometimes impossible in urban environments, their benefits are numerous, and there are wonderful innovations, like Global Buckets that reduce their intractability. A couple of Montessori kids designed Global Buckets as a means of impoverished communities to get fresh vegetables. Now that the a new set of kids are inspired by gardens in the school and this healthier food program, what will they come up with?