Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
One of the largest natural disasters in history, the change in the landscape from the Pakistani flooding is astounding when viewed from space.
Images are from the area around Jacobabad in Pakistan.
[googleMap name=”Pakistani Sindh” description=”Flooding” width=”450″ height=”400″ mapzoom=”6″ mousewheel=”false” directions_to=”false”]Jacobabad[/googleMap]
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.
Coincidentally, I ran into an interesting post on anti-Muslim prejudice.
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.
Exactly 200 years after he wrote them, the Massachusetts Historical Society is posting John Quincy Adams’ diary entries as Tweets. By posting a sentence or so with every tweet, the diary works very well in the new format. It makes for a fascinating read.
8/16/1810: Letter to Secy State sent to Hixon. Captain Delano here. Note to Balacheff for Everett and Gray. Dinner. – from JQAdams_MHS
While there are quite a number of single-celled microbes that live in environments without oxygen (they’re anaerobic), multicellular organisms have now been discovered, living near the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, that also do not need oxygen.
What’s really neat, and creates a great teaching point, is that these anaerobes don’t have mitochondria in their cells, so they can’t use oxygen for energy:
The creature’s cells apparently lack mitochondria, the organelles that use oxygen to power a cell. Instead they are rich in what seem to be hydrogenosomes, organelles that can do a similar job in anaerobic (or oxygen free) environments. – Vogel, 2010.
The conclusion paragraph of the journal article, would make a nice piece for students to mark up and process. It might even work better for use on a vocabulary test because you’ll need to understand the vocabulary to understand the text.
This is the first evidence of a metazoan life cycle that is spent entirely in permanently anoxic sediments. Our findings allow us also to conclude that these metazoans live under anoxic conditions through an obligate anaerobic metabolism that is similar to that demonstrated so far only for unicellular eukaryotes. The discovery of these life forms opens new perspectives for the study of metazoan life in habitats lacking molecular oxygen. – Donavaro et al., 2010)
The article, by Donavaro et al., (2010) also has an intriguing image of suspected “endosymbiotic prokaryotes”. Some organelles in cells are believed to have once been separate organisms that developed symbiotic relationships with their host cells. It’s nice to see an example of it in real life. Even if it’s a bit hard to interpret.
The ultimate implication of this discovery, is that there are probably a lot more anaerobic environments on other planets so the chances of finding extra-terrestrial multi-cellular life might not be as low as we’ve thought.
Wilderdom has a wonderful set of cooperative games and icebreaking games that they share for free. They also have a book of optical illusions that would work well for a challenge during morning community meetings.
Their material is copyleft so as along as you attribute them and use the same licensing terms (and cite their Creative Commons License) . You are free to use their stuff as you like.
Calvin and Hobbes is one of the most deeply interesting and intellectually hilarious comics. It ran from 1985 to 1995 when Bill Watterson decided it was time to stop, so it retained a persistent quality throughout its run. Watterson was very serious about the newspaper comic form and did a lot of experimenting with C&H. His thoughts are nicely documented in the paper collections.
Though I have the books, it’s nice to have archives of the entire series online. Even better, Michael Yingling recently created a Calvin & Hobbes Search Engine that can find key words in the dialogue, so now you can quickly find that more obscure script to brighten up your day.
I really hope that Yingling has finessed the copyright issues because this is a great resource for teachers looking for that little something to spark the imagination. The strips often go into issues at such depth that some of the series make great examples for literature discussions. I find the issues resulting from the transmogrifier/duplicator to have a powerful, though more light hearted, equivalency to the novel Frankenstien. I also am partial to the philosophical world-view of Calvin’s father.
Matt Might, a computer science professor, has a wonderful article posted called The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.. I like how it illustrates the broad base of knowledge you should acquire through high school.
I appreciate how much you more of the weather you can observe using time lapse photography, but its astonishing when you don’t even need the time lapse.
While this storm seems like something out of the movie “Day After Tomorrow”, I wonder how much more freaky weather we’re seeing just because of the new ubiquity of video cameras.
