The Toilet Paper Timeline of Earth History worked as well as I’d hoped. The beginning was a bit boring, it was a challenge keeping the kids focused, since nothing much happens for a very long time. It helped that we had to unroll the toilet paper back and forth across the room, so I had a different student take over every time we had to turn around.
That was not quite enough though to keep them from getting distracted, however, so I also assigned people to stand at the location of major events. This worked out nicely in the end because it let me ask them, at the end, whose event was the most important? Most of them made some argument without any prompting; the group is already pretty comfortable with each other and are not afraid of speaking up.
During the unrolling, most events occur in the final two turns. Students did notice this fact, which is the ultimate point of the exercise. Getting them to talk about different events, like the time of the first multicellular organisms or the extinction of the dinosaurs, helped students own the work. All together, it seemed to strike their imaginations.
How I envy your youth, your tremendous energy, ready to conquer all the possibilities of the world or die in the attempt. Tell me about your novel, but above all write it. Without fear. But in addition, and this may matter, with a humility worthy of San Francisco or at least Giacopone da Todi. With every day that passes, I am more convinced that the act of writing is a conscious act of humility. Well, I await your reply. In the meantime, receive a strong embrace.
Bolaño
The letter above was written by the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño to an aspiring writer, Diego Trelles Paz. Found in the magazine n+1 via the Dish.
The cycle of work. Within each subject area there are different types of assignments designed to provoke learning in many different styles.
The lessons, the individual works, the different group works, the reading; they’re all set up in this elaborate combination so that different students with different learning styles can get the information they need in the way that’s most meaningful to them. But the students also get to experience a wide range of learning styles so that they can become acclimatized to the different styles while actually figuring out which ones work best for them.
The logic behind this approach comes from Howard Gardner’s ideas on multiple intelligences. He argues that we have aptitudes for different ways of learning, and learning is easier and faster if students take advantage of their preferred learning styles. Whether we acquire these preferences through nature or nurture is an intriguing question, but by middle school I’ve found that it does not take long to recognize that some students have rather strong preferences.
[T]here exists a multitude of intelligences, quite independent of each other; that each intelligence has its own strengths and constraints; that the mind is far from unencumbered at birth; and that it is unexpectedly difficult to teach things that go against early ‘naive’ theories of that challenge the natural lines of force within an intelligence and its matching domains. – Gardner (1993)p. xix.
The learning intelligences have been defined in a number of different ways (see Smith, 2008 and BGfL for examples). We parse them like this:
Linguistic intelligence – learning from the written word or hearing words (auditory).
Logical/Math – using numbers and logical reasoning.
Bodily-kinesthetic – learning from doing.
Visual/Spatial – emphasizes images and relationships in space.
Interpersonal – learning from/with others.
Intrapersonal – introspective learning.
Musical – rhythm is important
Naturalistic – comprehending of the environment.
I prefer students to discover their preferred intelligences via the variations convolved into the curriculum, however, the BGfL has an online, multiple intelligences test that I’ve used in the past. However, as with standardized tests, you don’t want to stereotype students or have them stereotype themselves. All the intelligences interact. Different challenges force us to take different approaches, using different combinations of our intelligences to best effect. As always, a growthmindset is best. With their mental plasticity, adolescence is the best time to explore different learning approaches.
San foragers of the Kalahari would probably look at these two red lines and say they were the same length. (Image adapted from Fibonacci on Wikipedia)
The small window into the effects of modern life on the way we think was opened just a little wider recently by an interesting article by Joseph Heinrich and others. They sift through a large number of studies of people living the industrialized life and their more rural counterparts to find real differences in they way these different groups think.
San village
In the image above, the San foragers would be right, the two lines are the same length, but your typical Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) person would need to the left line to be about 20% longer for them to say they were identical. Why this is, I can’t say, but it might be that our visual perception is colored at an early age by the carpentered edges we see around us. Or maybe not.
And it’s not just in vision. WEIRD people think of fairness and co-operation in decision-making, and where things are relative to the self differently too, and their kids tend not to be able to identify easily with other species. The latter result is likely because of the “nature deficit“. The article clearly demonstrates that people think very differently, in very fundamental ways, if they come from modern environments.
The paper, found via Big Questions Online and Edge, is a fascinating read, and not too bad coming from a technical journal. There are a lot of interesting results summarizing a lot of behavioral science research. As a reminder to remember that one scientific article, no matter how good it is, remains just one perspective. the paper’s pdf has a number of commentaries and criticisms attached from other behavioral science researchers.
Where the WIERD people are. (Image from Wikipedia)
What I’m still trying to process, are the implications for Montessori educational philosophy. Because there are these significant, large differences in the way people see the world, we need to be aware of the perspectives of our audience. Students also need to appreciate how cultural differences affect the way we think and see the world that influence how we argue and how we behave. Yet they also need to recognize the there are some subjects, say the physical sciences, that are objective; there is a single, definite truth (for some value of definite) about the composition of a water molecule.
This is a great demonstration because as you unroll the toilet paper you get a great feel for the long spans of time in the preCambrian when nothing much happens, and then, as you approach the present, events occur faster and faster. There’s 300 million years between the formation of the Moon and the formation of the Earth’s atmosphere. That’s 60 sheets! while modern man only turns up about 10,000 years ago, which is 0.002 sheets; about the width of the line drawn by a pen. Even the dinosaurs went extinct only 14 sheets from the end.
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.
-Martin Niemöller
I used the Martin Niemöller poem in our lesson on “marking-up” today and, in groping for modern analogies, I ended up asking what if “they” started rounding up Muslims in the name of preventing terrorism. My students voiced the opinion that it would be a violation of their rights and we got into a little discussion about how they could “speak-up”, which was a nice precursor that I’ll have to refer back to when we have our upcoming civil-society/governance projects.
38 percent of Americans in 2006 said they would never vote for a Muslim for president, just about the number who said they would never vote for a gay person. In December of 2004, Cornell released a survey showing that half of Americans consciously told a pollster that they would favor a curtailment of civil rights for Muslims. – Armbinder, 2010 (my emphasis)
(I’m not sure where he gets the 38% from, but Armbinder does cite a Gallup report on the topic.)
I was curious to see what my students thought about the possibility that half of Americans would favor less rights for Muslims. They seemed somewhat surprised. They seemed to think that adults should know better.
Regarding Niemöller poem, Harold Marcuse has an interesting webpage dedicated to the history of the words quoted above. There is some controversy, since Niemöller used different groups at different times, trading out Communists for socialistist or trade unionists for example. This is a nice illustration of the fact that although the words change, the meaning remains the same.
