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?
They have a very nice bread science page that explains what happens with the yeast and gluten as you mix, kneed and bake bread. There is a set of recipes, including sourdough and Ethiopian Injera, that my students might want to try. They even have a great links page to pretty much everything you might want to know about the science of bread and how to manipulate it.
Water droplets extracted from slices of squash by a sprinkling of salt.
This year we have a lot of food in the curriculum. My objective is to make sure everything is edible and add as much more as I can.
Sprinkling salt on slices of squash creates the concentration gradient necessary for osmosis to suck the liquid out of the squash cells, creating little water droplets.
Now we batter them and fry them up to make tempura.
The effects of placing freshwater plant cells (Egeria densa) in salt water solution.
For comparison, the image adjacent shows what happens to the cells of a plant when the water leaves (osmosis under the microscope).
Synthesizing Cycle 1’s theme of, “What is Life”, I’ve given the students the option of choosing a personal novel where the question of life and sentience are important themes. Frankenstein and Feet of Clay were two suggestions.
For our Socratic Dialogue, I’ve found a nice article (via The Dish) from MIT’s Technology Review, which deals with the cultural differences that affect how Americans and Japanese view robots. They suggest it’s because Americans come from a monotheistic, jealous god culture where only god can create life, while the animism that permeates Japanese culture makes them more amenable to having self-actuating beings around them.
Apart from the theme, the article’s vocabulary is complex enough for lots of marking up and discussion, but it starts with the hook of warfighting mecha.
One way to represent the process of mitosis is through dance. One of my students suggested they do an interpretive dance for their natural world personal project. I think they were mostly kidding, but with a fair bit of encouragement they did end up doing it.
The dance is much more literal than it probably needs to be since I helped a bit with the final product. I still think it’s pretty useful though because it’s abstract enough that you have to know the mitosis process to figure out what’s going on. So much so, I had them perform it twice at the end of our synthesis discussion. The second time through I narrated it so the steps would be clear to everyone.
I think it might make for a good “spark the imagination” lesson if one was needed.
Right now the dance needs four people, two for the chromosomes and two for the centrioles, but it would be really neat if the entire class participated by representing the cell membrane.
The diagram with the steps is: mitosis.svg. The instructions are below.
Steps
The DNA (DNA 1 and DNA 2) stand facing the audience with DNA 2 hidden behind DNA 1 since the DNA have not yet duplicated.
The centrioles (C1 and C2) just stand there with C2 pretending not to be there.
DNA 1 mimes touching the nucleus walls while DNA 2 pretends not to be there.
DNA 1 dances the DNA helix, which probably involves lots of hand motions and spinning around taking 23 steps to represent the number of chromosomes in humans.
Replicating: DNA 2 steps forward while C 2 moves around the two DNA to get to the other side
The DNA join hands and spin around (because it’s fun to do, apparently)
The DNA line up next to each other and lock elbows while the centrioles start extending their threads, which probably involves some type of waving hand motion.
The centrioles move in, with their threads, and grab the open elbows.
The centrioles pull the DNA apart.
The two DNA act out the reforming of their nuclear membranes.
The DNA-centriole pairs wave each other goodbye as they become separate cells. (This is where having the rest of the group as the cell membrane would be nice.)
… offered cooking and garden classes integrated with selected classroom lessons along with improvements in school food and the dining environment. – Rauzon et al. (2010)
The report, which followed 5th and 6th graders into middles school, found that they knew more about nutrition and had greater preferences for fresh fruit and vegetables than students in comparable schools.
The researchers did not go into all of the ancillary benefits of gardening and cooking in the school, because the lessons tie into science and social studies curricula. Of course these benefits should be familiar to the Montessori community since Montessori advocated the erdkinder farm school for adolescents.
Diagram of squash flowers.
The Hershey Montessori School seems to be a good example of what Montessori was aiming for (as is the glimpses we get of child rearing in Mirable). We do a lot ourselves in our little program. I’ve noted before how our greenhouse and bread baking tie into math, science, social studies and art.
Ontology does not recapitulates phylogeny, and my observations are probably just about as accurate, but the psychosocial development of early adolescents, who are just discovering who they are and realizing their place in society and history, parallels the fundamental reorganization of human societies brought about by the emergence of agriculture.
Figure 1. The ultimate vehicle. Produced in round 3 of the capitalisim simulation, this vehicle was carefully designed to match the preferences of the consumer. It earned 5 out of the 10 dollars spent in that round.
Abstract
The power of capitalism lies in the system’s ability to adapt to the needs of people. It does so by giving preferential rewards to those who best meet those needs as expressed in the market. As part his spring Independent Research Project, middle school student, Mr. Ben T., came up with a simulation game that demonstrates this advantage of capitalist systems over a communal systems that pays the same wage irrespective of the output.
Background
In either the fall or the spring term I require students to include some type of original work in their Independent Research Project (IRP). Most often students take this to mean a natural science experiment, but really it’s open to any subject. Last term one of my students, Ben T., came up with a great simulation game to compare capitalism and socialism. With his and his parent’s consent I’m writing it up here because I hope to be able to use it later this year when we study economic systems and other teachers might find it interesting and useful.
Procedure
The simulation was conducted with six students (all 7th graders because the 8th graders were in Spanish class at the time) who represented the producers in the system, and one student, Ben, who represented the consumers.
Simulating Capitalism
In the first stage, representing capitalism, the producers were told that the consumer would like a car or cars (at least a drawing to represent the cars) and the consumer would pay them based on the drawing. The producers were free to work independently or in self-selected teams, but only one pair of students chose to team up.
Producers were given three minutes to draw their cars, which they then brought to “market” and the consumer “bought” their drawings. The consumer had limited funds, 10 “dollars”, and had to decide how much to pay for each drawing. Producers were free to either accept the offered payment and give the drawing to the consumer or keep their drawing.
This procedure was repeated three times, each turn allowed the producers to refine their drawings from the previous round, particularly if it had not sold, or create new drawings. Since all drawings were offered in an open market, everyone could see which drawings sold best and adapt their drawings to the new information.
Simulating Socialism
Socialism was simulated by offering equal pay to all the producers no matter what car/drawing they produced. Otherwise the procedure was the same as for the capitalism simulation: students were told that they could work together or in teams; they brought their production to market; the consumer could take what they liked or reject the product, but everyone was still paid the same.
Assessment
At the end of the simulations consumer students were asked:
How did you change your car in response to the market?
Did it make the car better?
What do you think of a socialist system?
Which [system] do you prefer?
Results
Students showed markedly different behaviors in each simulation, behaviors that were almost stereotypes capitalist and communistic systems.
Capitalism simulation
Producers in the capitalist simulation started with fairly simple cars in the initial round. One production team drew a single car. Another made four cars with flames on the sides, while another went with horns (as in bulls’ horns rather than instruments that made noise) and yet another drew. When brought to market, despite the fact that almost all drawing were paid for, it quickly became obvious that the consumer had a preference for the more “interesting” drawings. The producer who drew six cars with baskets on top got paid the most.
Figure 2. Rocket launchers and shields were an important innovation in Round 2 of the capitalism simulation. It earned 4 of 10 dollars and influence all cars in the subsequent round.
In the second round one innovator came up with the idea of adding a rocket launcher (Figure 2) and was amply rewarded. In response, in the third round, the market responded to this information with enthusiasm, however, all the rocket launchers were trumped by a tank shooting fire out its back with, “Ben 4 Prez!” written on the side (Figure 1).
Figure 3a. Evolution of cars in response to consumer preferences. Example from paired producers: Capitalism. Round 1.Figure 3b. Round 2. This set of producers go with multiple cars.Figure 3c. Round 3. Train and cars with rocket launchers developed in response to the market's favorable response to weaponization in Round 2 (see Figure 2).
The producers responded the the preferences of the consumer. The best example of this was the work of the couple students who decided to pair-up.
Their first car was simple and straightforward and it only garnered one “dollar” (Figure 3a). In the second round they chose to go with quantity, producing a lot of cars (Figure 3b) as that had been a fairly successful strategy of another producer in Round 1. Their reasoning was that since there were two of them they would be able to outproduce the others. By the final round they had developed a train with rocket launchers in addition to a set of cars with rocket launchers (Figure 3c). Again, market pressures had an enormous influence on the final vehicles, but the individual philosophy of the producers also showed through in the vehicle production choices.
[UPDATE 5/17/2012]: The capitalism part of the simulation produces winners and losers, and a good follow-up is to do the distribution of wealth exercise to see just how much wealth is concentrated at the top in the U.S.. The second time I ran the simulation — with a different class — the students were quite put out by the economic disparity that resulted and ended up trying to stage a socialist revolution (which precipitated a counter-revolution from the jailed oligarchs).
Socialism Simulation
Figure 4. Cars produced under conditions of equal pay to all producers regardless of work.
Although three rounds were intended, time constraints limited the socialism simulation to a single round, however the results of that single round were sufficient for students to identify the main challenges with communal rewards for production. The producers decided that they would work together and produced two sets of basic cars (Figure 4). Half of the students did not even contribute, they spent their time just standing around. It was the stereotypical road construction crew scene.
Figure 5. Industrious capitalists very focused on their work.Figure 7. Socialists slacking off.
Survey Responses
All students who responded to the question preferred capitalism, the primary reason being injustice “… cause [during the socialism simulation] some people do nothin’ [and] other people do something.”
Discussion and Conclusion
Using only one consumer reduces the time needed for the simulation but limits students from seeing that markets can be segmented and different producers can fill different niches. It would be very interesting to see the outcome of the same simulation in a larger class.
The small class size also allowed the simulation to take place in less than half an hour. Most of the post processing of the information gained was done by the student who ran the simulation since it was part of his Individual Research Project. While he did a great job presenting his results at the end of the term, when I use this simulation as part of the lesson on economic systems I would like to try doing a group discussion at the end.
I’m also curious to find out how much more the cars would evolve if given a few more rounds. Which brings up an interesting point for consideration. Since some students have already done the simulation, it may very well influence their actions when I do it again this year. It would probably be useful to make sure that there are more than one consumers, or that there consumer has very different preferences compared to Ben T.. A mixed gender pair of students might make the best set of consumers.
Our school, Lamplighter, has started up a couple soccer teams to play in the local under-8 and under-6 leagues this year. I’m now one of the under-6 coaches, and the curious similarities between them and the middle schoolers is going to have to be the topic of another post; Montessori observed some interesting parallels between the first and third planes of development that are worth getting into. However, since the teams are new, we did not have lines on the practice field. And teaching throw-ins is kinda tricky with imaginary lines.
One of the parents/coaches of the under-8 team, Mr. Surbrook, offered draw out the lines. He also volunteered to give a lesson on geometry and let the middle school (and upper elementary) students help.
Refreshing ourselves on Pythagoras' Theorem.
To prepare the middle schoolers I did a quick review of Pythagoras’ Theorem using the 3×3, 4×4 and 5×5 squares (see above).
The lesson was interesting because the 7th graders had had a more recent exposure to the equation but, unlike the 8th graders, have not had any algebra yet, so there were some puzzled looks when I rearranged the equation.
Lesson on the geometry of rectangles.
That was in the morning. After lunch Mr. Surbrook came in and showed us how to use Pythagoras’ Theorem to make right angles and locate the center of the field. If stretch out six pieces of string, four for the sides and two for the diagonals (calculated with the equation,) at their fullest extent you have a rectangle with decent right angles.
Corner of the soccer field. Note the nice 90 degree angle.
After figuring out the theory inside, we went out to the field and help cut the string and lay out the lines. The kids were a bit disappointed they did not get to actually paint the lines, but we’d run out of time for the day.
Fortunately, they’ll get another chance at surveying when Dr. Houghton brings her class out to map the topography of the campus.
I very much liked how the whole procedure went, with my preparatory lesson first, then Mr. Surbrook practical lesson, and finally the actual practical application. We did something similar when we laid out the greenhouse the first time. That time we threw the kids in without a guide and without the practical lesson. It was a bit of a team-building exercise. It also took quite a bit longer.
