Lensyl Urbano – Page 16 – Montessori Muddle

Bloom’s Taxonomy

From Wikimedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BloomsCognitiveDomain.svg

Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy offers a useful model for defining learning objectives. You start with the basic knowledge of the subject that requires some memorization: fundamental constants like the speed of light; fundamental concepts like conservation of mass and energy; and basic equations like Newton’s laws. On the second level, you use these basic facts and concepts to extrapolate and generalize with questions like: is the Earth an open or closed system with respect to mass and energy? And then we can start to apply our knowledge and understanding to problem solving: determine the average temperature of the Earth based on conservation of energy. Finally, at the highest level, we can analyse our models and evaluate their advantages and disadvantages.

Climatic Warming Visualization

Ed Hawkins posted this extremely useful visualization of month-by-month, global temperature changes since 1850.

Grit versus Passion

David Brooks argues that grades discourage students from following their passions (they have to spread their attention to keep up their GPA). And grit is easier to have if you’re following your passion.

Suppose you were designing a school to help students find their own clear end — as clear as that one. Say you were designing a school to elevate and intensify longings. Wouldn’t you want to provide examples of people who have intense longings? Wouldn’t you want to encourage students to be obsessive about worthy things? Wouldn’t you discuss which loves are higher than others and practices that habituate them toward those desires? Wouldn’t you be all about providing students with new subjects to love?

In such a school you might even de-emphasize the G.P.A. mentality, which puts a tether on passionate interests and substitutes other people’s longings for the student’s own.

— Brooks (2016): Putting Grit in its Place

Handwritten Notes are Better

A good NPR article based on a 2014 paper that finds that students who hand-write their notes have to think more about what they choose to write and so remember better than students who just transcribe lectures on their computers.

DIY Plastic Recycling Workshop

Thanks to Natasha for sending me this link. Precious plastic shares the technology to build your own modular plastics recycling workshop.

Volumes of Revolution

It can be tricky explaining what you mean when you say to take a function and rotate it about the x-axis to create a volume. So, I made an OpenScad program to make 3d prints of functions, including having it subtract one function from another. I also 3d printed a set of axes to mount the volumes on (and a set of cross-sections of the volumes being rotated.

The picture above are the functions Mrs. C. gave her calculus class on a recent worksheet. Specifically:

$y = e^{-x}+2$

from which is subtracted:

$y = 0.5 x$

The Rules of Cricket

Our students organized an International Day and asked me to demonstrate cricket. Here’s a good introduction to the rules of cricket.

Chessboard Project

For our annual fundraiser’s silent auction, I made a chess board. The structure was made of wood–I learned how to use dowels to attach the sides–but the black squares were cut out of the material they use for matting the borders of pictures. My student drew “cheat sheet” diagrams of each of the black squares in bright gel pen colors. The squares were laid on a white grid and the entire top epoxied with a clear glass-like coat. We also made two sets of chess pieces with the 3d printer (rounds versus squares).

It turned out quite well.