Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Sometimes beauty is in the details. The World of Technology blog has a wonderful collection of close-up images of mushrooms. One of my students is working on an Independent Research Project on the fungi on our nature trail. Hopefully this might help spark the imagination.
While we were working on the needs of living things a couple weeks ago, we acquired two fish; goldfish, fifteen cents apiece.
It was supposed to only be a mental exercise. If you put a water plant, Egeria densa in this case, in an enclosed jar and left it in the sunlight, the plant should use the carbon dioxide in the water to produce oxygen during photosynthesis. A similar jar kept in the dark would produce carbon dioxide and use oxygen as the plant respired.
That was the practical part. Students measure the pH of the water before and after a day in the light and dark. The pH of the jar in the dark should go down as the added carbon dioxide makes the water slightly more acidic. Bromthymol blue solution in the water changes color very nicely within the pH range of this experiment, but, in a pinch, you can also use the pH color strips that are sold for testing aquarium water.
My students did the experiment, made their observations and came to conclusions. Then the lab activity asked them to think about what would happen if you put a fish into each of the jars, to see if students are able to extrapolate based on a well rounded knowledge of respiration and photosynthesis.
My students did the mental experiment, but the next day our two fish turned up, uninvited at least by me.
I’d anticipated something like this so I’d picked up a small fish tank at a yard sale over the summer. I’m not opposed to keeping animals in the classroom, as long as I don’t have to take care of them. Fortunately, since we’re studying life, keeping organisms and attending their needs is something the kids are learning and there is no better way to learn that via practice.
Our fish are surviving. The students have added some gravel and structures to provide habitat. The waterplants, still in there to provide oxygen, seem to be thriving despite some browsing by the goldfish.
One of the few rules is that anything added to the tank should have some purpose to help support the needs of the fish. I’m also encouraging the students to think of ways of maintaining conditions in the tank which would minimize their work. Hopefully some filter feeders, maybe small clams, and similar organisms will turn up and we can talk about ecology. I may have to nudge them in that direction though.
I’m not sure what the fish’s names are as there seems to be some controversy among the students. With a little luck they’ll survive until we start comparing religions. Two years ago we had a frog who passed away at just the right time for us to have to figure out what religion he/she was so we could perform last rites.
And no, I did not kill the frog.
Lunch on Wednesdays follows our main block of Student Run Business time. It’s after they’ve delivered pizza, prep-ed for a week of bread, completed finance and its reports, prepared and processed order forms, and sorted out the plants.
Over the last couple weeks I’ve started having my students discuss the business over lunch (including finance reports presentations) and it’s turning into a regular board meeting.
Today they started assigning seating.
We usually sit around two long tables set end to end, with the main supervisor on one end and myself at the other. Today the main supervisor started laying out plates and positions. Pizza supervisor to his right, bread to his right, finances one down from bread and sales across from finances. Everyone else could find their own spot.
I was a little surprised at this unprompted expression of hierarchy. Pizza is our most involved part of the business and the core of the the enterprise so its supervisor, P., has a very important post. She was placed on the right hand of the main supervisor!
I asked the main supervisor why he did it. He said, “I don’t know.” I even had to explain the meaning of the term, ‘right hand “man”‘.
It ended up with the supervisors at one table and everyone else (and myself) at the other.
Except for the plants supervisor. Plants have been going slowly, lately, including some seedling failures. The plant supervisor sat all the way down the table, next to me.
…
I can feel it in my bones that there are some interesting lessons in all this. From organizational structure to non-verbal communication.
But since we’re dealing with positions around a table, and we’ve been talking about the importance of place in geography, the best context to discuss this right now might just be one of the importance of geography and place in the interactions among people.
In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever. – Robbins (2010), This is a news website article about a scientific paper
If you’ve ever thought that science articles in major newspapers all seem to follow a similar pattern you should read this article by Martin Robbins, the Guardian’s “Lay Scientist”. It’s hilarious.
Despite everything, the Personal World lesson on being proactive-versus-reactive seems to have made an impression. I keep hearing students point out reactive behavior to each other. Someone even cited the reading from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens. Changes in actual behavior are, however, a little more difficult to quantify.
I’m quite happy for students to use their handheld devices if they’re being productive. They’ve used them to take text-based notes (I’m still not sure how they are able to type so fast), make flashcards (I need to find or make an app for notecards and bibliography cards for the IRP), and now they’ve discovered one for making graphic organizers called Idea Sketch (thanks go to J. for showing me, and M. for finding it).
I’ve been using graphic organizers (GOs) a lot at the beginning of the year and students are getting the idea that we will inevitably put one together to summarize the weekly themes. So today, during our Needs of People discussion/lesson, when I did a quick spot check to see what the the iPod users were doing with their devices, they showed me that they were already putting together GOs. Because I really want them to develop the skill themselves, I’ve not been giving them GOs ahead of time, and we’ve been practicing putting them together. I was quite happy to see them being proactive. Maybe the lesson helped after all.
Idea Sketch is simple, seems to work pretty well, and is a free download at least at them moment.
So now I want to use video games in the classroom. My head of school is politely opposed. I argued it would be useful for integrating our work on the themes of geography and needs of people. She allowed me to pick up a copy of SimCity if I could come up with some sort of evidence that it actually works. Quantitative evidence. You’ll be hearing more about that in a later post.
However, while I was shopping I also picked up a cheap copy of Civilization IV because while it also goes into city building, it does so from a more regional perspective. I’d played older versions of the Civilization games before (a long time ago in a galaxy far away) so I was somewhat favorably familiar with how it works.
Unfortunately, the fourth version is too sophisticated. There are so many variables to deal with that it would be difficult to use on the relatively short time-scale that I want students to spend on this. Whereas before, founding a city on a river gave very obvious benefits (a bonus in the productivity of the land around the river), there are so many different types of land surfaces and changes that can be done to them that the advantages of the river, while still there are much less obvious.
On the plus side, if students find the game enjoyable, succeeding will take a lot of historical research and understanding the geography of cities. It would also take a lot of time, not necessarily wasted time, but a lot of time nonetheless.
[googleMap name=”Memphis, TN” description=”35 N, 90 W” width=”480″ height=”400″ mapzoom=”1″ mousewheel=”false” directions_to=”false”]35, -90[/googleMap]
Google Maps are a great tool for introducing the five themes of geography because it allows you, as you zoom-in from a distance, to observe things in different ways. The different views, terrain, satellite, map, offer a nice introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) layers; GIS is one of the most powerful technological developments of the information revolution and we’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the next year or so as the political parties try to gerrymander congressional districts into more favorable boundaries.
If you start zoomed out all the way, like in the map above, you get to see your location from a global perspective. Note that if you sign up to the google maps site itself, instead of embedding the map like I have it here, you can select an option so that the cursor shows the latitude and longitude. The largest scale view is best for talking about hemispheres and latitude and longitude. Even better would be to use Google Earth which will show the world as a sphere.
Zooming in a couple times will begin to highlight features of topography and land surface cover, two important physical components of space. Both the terrain and satellite views show this, but sometimes one works better than another so this is a good time to switch back and forth between the two and mention that this is GIS. Looking at North America, the satellite view shows the Rocky Mountain region quite nicely, while the terrain view shows the climatic gradient from the snowy northern Canada to the green Gulf Coast.
Switching to map view and zooming in a little more, the highway network and to some degree the river networks become more apparent. Google Maps is designed for general use so there’s no easy way to emphasize the importance of the river networks and ocean ports without pointing it out yourself.
As you get down to the scale of the city itself, a little of the human geography of place becomes visible if you know what you’re looking for. In the case of Memphis, as well as a lot of other cities, the loop highways don’t just direct highway traffic around the city but separates the city itself from its suburbs. There are often significant class, racial and other demographic differences between the populations living within the loop and those outside.
At a scale that covers both the city and its surroundings, the satellite view nicely shows the effects of development on the urban, undeveloped and agricultural environments. In the Memphis region (see the image directly above), the Mississippi River separates the flat, lowland, agricultural floodplains of Arkansas in the west, from the urban and suburban development atop the river bluff to the east; the difference is strikingly obvious. You may also notice the tree lined channels of the east-west flowing tributaries to the Mississippi. They’re relatively narrow but the dark green of the trees are a striking contrast to the light colored concrete and asphalt of the rest of the city.
[googleMap name=”River port” description=”River port” width=”490″ height=”400″ mapzoom=”15″ mousewheel=”false” directions_to=”false”]35.0895, -90.106[/googleMap]
You can use the closer view (especially if you switch the map above to satellite view) to point out the importance of water transportation in most cities by focusing on the port. The railyards are also good to look at because all the material they transport they tend to be hidden away despite their sheer volume.
Finally, the street view lets you take a look as some of the ways people adapt to the environment. To truly understand adaptations you really need to contrast different places, which is why the small groups are asked to do this type of analysis for different cities around the world, but if you’re giving a lesson and know what to look for the street view can be a nice introduction. In Memphis, apart from the very southern style of many buildings, we have the shotgun houses that are long and narrow, with front and back doors lined up to permit air flow in the hot humid summers.
So to sum it all up, I’ve put together this graphic organizer for the five themes of geography for Memphis. It’s not complete of course, but it should have all the examples mentioned in this post. I’ve asked all of my groups to include a similar graphic organizer in their presentation to help pull everything together. We’ll see how it goes.
