One of the most powerful aspects of a multi-aged classroom is the institutional memory that develops and makes learning a whole lot easier than starting off, every year, from scratch. All the aches and toil of last year did not just disappear when the new crop of students started. The new kids look to the older students for cues about how to behave and it has been saving me a whole lot of time and energy.
That’s not to say that bad habits don’t persist too. But having a slew of new students mixes things up enough so that even the returning students are receptive to some change.
So now I have a bit more time and energy that I can now put into new projects and tailoring the curriculum to make life a little more interesting for one and all.
Well we’re on our first immersion now and I’m getting a little reflective. Probably because it’s close to 2 am and they’re still not asleep.
Well we watched Jurassic Park last night and concluded it with a discussion about the issues underlying the movie, the same way we’ve been studying analyzing the issues underlying texts. Discrimination based on race and obesity came up first (the fat guy and the black people “always” die), but I was able to coax a bit of discussion about the role and responsibility of science and scientists. Our discussion is summarized in the graphic organizer above, but there are many more subtexts to the story that we did not have time to explore.
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (the book).
I like both the movie and the book because, like most good science fiction, they explore some interesting issues that relate quite nicely to the curriculum. Jurassic Park has a nice little introduction to DNA and gene sequencing that is tied to some the history of life on Earth. As works of art in their respective fields, however, I prefer the movie. The novel has a lot of wonderful detail, and the scientist in me loves the detail, but the characters are not as well drawn and the story seldom strays from its main thesis, scientific hubris. What it has to say about that issue is well expressed and well researched so it does capture the interest of the reader. (The follow-up book, “The Lost World”, sails adrift of the science, is logically incoherent and has a proportionate deterioration in the quality of the writing.) I do however recommend the original Jurassic Park book to my students as a personal novel.
Steven Spielberg makes a great movie, extracting empathetic performances from the actors. Since the book’s author, Michael Crichton, also wrote the screenplay, the movie stays true to the core issues in the text. I think its a great example of a successful, dare I say synergistic, collaboration.
Tomorrow, instead of retelling around the issues in writing, my students are going to try to do so in a skit. This could get interesting.
Did you know that if you hold up a regular digital camera up to the eyepiece of a microscope you can take a great picture of a magnified slide! I didn’t. And I really didn’t think it would work when I tried it, but the results are remarkable. With a somewhat steady hand you can also make decent animations.
I’ve never been very good at identifying things (I’m a lumper not a splitter) so all I think I can say for sure is that there are algae and protozoans in the picture. BiologyCorner has a nice identification guide for organisms usually found in ponds, which is part of one of their lessons, Biodiversity of Ponds.
Daily life, for all its basic routine, is always popping up surprises. The human brain is attracted to mystery; it is after all just a fancy problem solving machine. David Mitchell gets up on his soap box to give a wonderful screed about how having sophisticated references tucked into childrens’ programming is a good thing and there should be more of it. Kids are naturally curious. If they’re interested enough they’ll look it up, and, in the age of the internet search engine and smartphones, the barriers to looking anything up are negligible. So include more Greek references in your discussions because although inciting curiosity in the internet age is a bit like opening Pandora’s box, you’re much more likely to get better results.
Binomial cube.
It also ties a bit into Montessori Philosophy. Students start “playing” with artifacts like the binomial cube in kindergarden, where the goal is to convey mathematical concepts is a solid, sensorial way. They don’t get into binomial formula until years later in algebra, but their familiarity with the cube allows them to take the step into the abstraction of algebra on familiar, safer ground.
This discussion also highlights one of the major advantages of using websites and hypertext for educational materials. References can be embedded in the text with links to credible sources even further reducing the transaction costs of the student having to search around the web trying to look something up. There is an argument to be had, however, on if hyperlinking is too distracting and reduces our ability to focus, but perhaps we need to work on study habits and using invisible hyperlinks rather than not using technology altogether.
(I discovered David Michell’s Soap Box via Somewhat in the Air, who notes that, “Few of David Mitchell’s posts are child friendly but the “Passionate about Sofas” is terribly funny, too.”)
Sparking curiosity with the Toilet Paper Timeline, then following up with the beautifully drawn Cartoon History of the Universe seemed to work pretty well to keep students interested and engaged in their work. However, in putting it all together in their presentations we needed a simple graphic organizer to point out the highlights.
The History of Life on Earth timeline I put together to start with gives the broad overview, but we need to telescope the Cambrian to observe the really interesting, broad patterns in the evolution of multicellular life.
There are two key ideas I want students to get from these exercises. The first is what the Montessori lessons call the Gifts of the Phylum, which boils down to the fact that different Phyla represent major milestones in evolutionary development. For example, Cnidaria, the phylum of jellyfish, are important evolutionarily because they mark the emergence of organisms with endoderms and exoderms.
The second important concept regards the cycles of extinction and diversification that can be found in the fossil record. Dinosaurs emerge after the Permian-Triassic extinction event and diversify; large and small species, carnivorous and herbivorous, land based and ocean based. Similarly, after the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction wipes out the dinosaurs, mammals take over and diversify to fill all the empty niches; elephants and mice, tigers and gazelles, rinos and whales.
Two years ago, the middle school’s flagship project was to put up a fully functional greenhouse (using this design). It took all year but we did it. On the way, we got to practice geometry, mapping and construction, while learning and growing plants and studying soil profiles. It was so successful that, with our spring plant sale we broke even on the entire project.
Last year, however, the greenhouse was somewhat neglected. My plans to add an automatic window opener, which would have been a wonderful tie-in to our electronics and Newtonian physics studies, did not work out; we just did not have the time. We’d taken the plastic covering off, so only the bare, forlorn PVC frame was left standing around a plot of waist-high weeds.
Though I could not have predicted it, this year we have a strong core group of students who are highly enthusiastic about resurrecting the greenhouse and making it work. My suggestion was that we try to grow produce this fall that we could cook in December when we do our Dinner and a Show. Well, two weeks in, they’ve already put together a menu plan, weeding is well on its way and I’m being harassed to hurry up and arrange a trip to Home Depot. The excitement is so infectious that another student has volunteered to bring in his electric weed-whacker during the immersion. It’s amazing!
I’m having the hardest time not butting in. There is a beauty in seeing a well oiled machine executing a project or solving a difficult problem. But there is another even more wonderful aesthetic visible in a the birthing struggles of a nascent team. The forward motion of infectious enthusiasm is pulling puzzle pieces into its wake, and the pieces just seem to click into place when the time is right. I have to keep reminding myself that my job is to prepare the environment and let the kids do the rest.
We’re focusing on the biological sciences in the natural world this year. I’m a great admirer of the sketches and illustrations in the notebooks of the great naturalists so that’s how I plan to integrate art. Our art teacher is a great help, and she started us up with sketching in pencil and our first exercise was to get a feel for the different soft pencils. The little panel we shaded in with B, 2B, 4B and 6B pencils is a nice metaphor for what we’re working on in middle school.
There was a bit of giggling though. Last year one of the poems presented was:
Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
I’ll draw a sketch of thee,
What kind of pencil shall I use?
2B or not 2B?
– Spike Milligan
This was just before we saw Hamlet in St. Louis. Though I don’t know if the poem make the famous line more comprehensible.
Yes, it’s probably just me. But I find this image somewhat mesmerizing. To me this little animation has lots of meaning. It represents an important culmination to a lot of work. Yet it has, on its own, an aesthetic independent of that context. At least to me.
