Author: Lensyl Urbano

Jobs market update

Classroom jobs market trading board.

I pitched the jobs trading idea to the class today over lunch. Ever since our first immersion, when couldn’t figure out how to sit down together for dinner, I’ve been working on getting them to think of mealtimes as a time for community building. Yesterday and today we had group discussions while we ate, which actually worked quite well for having a civil conversation.

I set up the basic jobs table for the next two weeks and established that the jobs supervisor would be the only person with the ability to authorize trades. We’re using the whiteboard above, which I like because it’s a bit like the Iraqi stock exchange right after the invasion.

My biggest concern was about how students would try to game the system. Fortunately, before I could even finish my pitch one student offered another a dollar to do their job for them, so I could go into great, loving detail that the rule is that the only commodity that can be traded are the jobs.

So we’ll see what happens. The market had its first trade this afternoon, though it might have just been for the novelty of the thing. It did become apparent that we need to post the details of the classroom jobs somewhere since the students are not yet familiar with the intricacies of each job. I plan on keeping track of the market volume to see how things develop. It would probably be interesting to survey the students in about a month to see what they think about the market, and if it achieved its objectives of making the classroom cleanup more efficient and enjoyable.

More mitosis resources

Onion root tip cells, with chromosomes stained to show cells in different stages of mitosis. Image from uafcde.

One of our small group activities is to look at mitosis in onion cells. Anna Clarke, recommended the University of Arizona site which has an Online Onion Root Tips activity for those without access to the slides or microscope. It also provides a good review even if you do have those resources. Dr. Paul’s page on onion cell division is a good supplement to the Arizona site because of its great cell images.

If you’re feeling ambitious and want students to make their own slides, you can try the SAPS page on Mitosis in root tips.

Mitosis resources

Our assignments for natural world usually combine some reading and some type of activity, but all the short video clips available online are a great resource, so I’ve been adding them to the studyguides as I find them.

The above two-minute, cell division video is a great example. Mitosis is a process, so it makes a lot of sense showing it as an animation, rather than discrete pictures in a figure. The video makes deciphering what’s going on in the diagram in the textbook a whole lot easier to understand, while the textbook diagram fills in the detail so the whole thing makes more sense.

There are also a number of useful interactive animations online. John Kyrk’s is quite nice. I like how the CellsAlive animal cell mitosis page lets you step through each frame in the animation.

Anaphase: Lengthening microtubules push the two sets of chromosomes further apart. (from Wikipedia)

Wikipedia, as is so often the case, also has some nice images.

Spore: Lamarkian in the subtexts

Playing Spore.

During our last immersion, one of my students brought in the computer game, Spore. Although the game subtly indicates that it’s your progeny that gains evolutionary advances, the fact that you get to choose what you want (extra horns, poison sacks), and the fact that you can see yourself (or do I mean your creature) evolve on the screen, really smacks of Lamarckism. While it’s appealing to think, like Lamark, that you can pass on traits gained during your lifetime to your kids, despite some fascinating new research, that’s just not how evolution works.

Evolution is not directed by the organism but by their environment. In a population of organisms of any particular species there is going to be some variability due to simple, random genetic mutation. Some lucky members of the species might have a mutation that makes their muscles better at burning oxygen during sprints, making them able to run faster to get away from the lions. So they survive and pass their genes on, with their genetic mutation. Of course, if lions become extinct (disease maybe) then this trait may no longer be beneficial and something else, like maybe intelligence, would be selected for.

The game can capture your interest, however, so I’ve asked the student who brought in the game to come up with a presentation explaining why it would be useful to have the game in the classroom. I am, after all, not instinctively opposed to using computer games in class. I’m really curious to see what this game looks like from the student’s point of view.

Creating a market in the classroom

The Tragedy of the Commons has been on my mind of late, and something serendipitously popped up in class today that’s started me thinking of new ways to introduce some important economic concepts and make classroom jobs work better at the same time.

You see, one way of preventing abuse of shared resources is to assign the rights to the resource to someone, anyone really, and allow them to trade and regulate the use. Who gets control of the resource does not ultimately matter for conservation. As long as the owner and their rights are clearly defined they will try, in a rational world, to get the most for them, and make them last as long as possible, thus preventing overexploitation.

But what’s necessary for this to work is some form of goods or services that’s worth trading. The miracle of capitalism is that it allows people to do what they’re best at and trade with others for the other things they need (or don’t want to do). I’m not about to start letting students pay cash to each other, but I’m trying to think if there’s any reason to not let them trade their classroom jobs on a daily basis.

Say a student if done with their daily work and is feeling bored with a little time to kill at the end of the day. They take out the compost and clean up the microwave, their classroom job is done. Well, they could offer to do someone else’s job, someone who is, say, trying to finish up their math and don’t want to break away from it, and, in exchange, the student with the math work would do the microwave and compost job tomorrow while the first student takes a break. Everyone is happier!

Image by Katrina. Tuliao.

In theory, as long as the rights and responsibilities for each job are clearly defined, then students will be able to come up with the most efficient trading schemes for themselves. Once trading starts I’m sure students will come up with some interesting agreements and contracts will need to be enforced (fortunately we already have judges built into the classroom constitution). But we might just need a special white-board that would make it easier to trade jobs. Tadah, we now have a market in the classroom that makes doing jobs a little easier for everyone and brings some important economic concepts directly into the classroom. Why have I not thought of this before?

I am quite enthused by the idea, but I’m really curious to see if anyone can come up with any downsides.

School of One

Overspecification is something I wonder about when I hear about the School of One program in New York City, which I discovered via the Freakonomics podcast. There they collect a lot of data, multiple times a day to carefully observe the individual student and tailor their environment based on what works and what does not. This sounds like a great way to customize the environment for the student if used carefully. My own biases lead me to the suspicion too close of observation, and too much tailoring is likely to be detrimental in the longer term. It’s a bit quantum in that the more detail you have about a student at one snapshot in time, the less you know about that individual’s trajectory of learning. If something worked well today, maybe it will tomorrow, or maybe not. If the people customizing a student’s learning environment tailor it to what works today, then they’ll forever be trying to catch up to where the student needs to be. But they’ll certainly know there is a problem even if they don’t know why.

The constant testing should provide a wonderful dataset on how well different approaches to learning work with different students and to answer the questions I note above. I’d also be curious to see if there is some sort of half life where the effectiveness of certain learning methods deteriorate over time (in the same way perhaps, that test scores tend to converge on the mean).

I need to find out more about this program because it sounds so full of potential.

Montessori, cooperation and the Tragedy of the Commons

The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.
— Whitehead (1948) via Hardin (1968)

One of the greatest challenges in designing a cooperative environment is dealing with the potential for free-riding and abuse of shared resources. When dinner needs to be made but one member of the group will not participate everyone suffers, even those who contribute fully. Often, someone else or the rest of the group will step up and do the job of the free-rider, who has then achieved their objective. But what is the appropriate consequence? The social opprobrium of their peers is enough for some, others though seem unfazed.

Overuse of resources is a similar problem, which economists refer to as the tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968). When the extra-large bag of M&M’s is full, everyone can grab as many as they desire and everyone is happy. When resources are scarce, however, everyone grabbing is a recipe for disaster. Scarce resources need to be rationed in a way that everyone views as fair. Yet the rational behavior of the individual is to try to maximize their utility by taking as many as they need, regardless of the desires of everyone else, and especially if they’re first in line and no-one else is counting.

Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. … The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers.
— Hardin (1968)

The market solution to the commons problems is to make them not commons. This is usually done by assigning property rights to the previously common resource and allowing the owners to trade. This puts a price on what was once a “free” resource. Of course the price was always there; someone or someones had to go without when the M&M’s ran out (resource depletion). Unfortunately this is particularly difficult when you dealing with a non-currency economy, though I’m sure it could be done.

Reading through Hardin’s original Tragedy of the Commons article it seem that if the embarrassment of violating social norms is insufficient incentive for temperance then some sort of mutually agreed form of coercion is necessary. Interestingly, Hardin was arguing for population control, but the point still stands.

We’re due to have the small groups discuss how the worked together over the last cycle so we’ll see how that goes, but I think we’ll have to discuss the issue of the commons as a whole group when we next have our discussion of classroom issues. I’d like to raise the point that what happens in the classroom is a microcosm of larger society and get in a little environmental economics at the same time.

Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.
— Hardin (1968)