Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
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.
DNA interactive is another great resource for studying the history of genetics and how we manipulate and use it today (recommended by the indispensable Anna Clarke). They have lesson plans and nice pages on the modern techniques used to work with DNA.
I have not done much with genetic sequencing myself and I found the website interesting and informative. I have, however, written programs to get and work with the GenBank database, which is not that hard since they have some easy tools to work with. I would love to figure out how to get a sample sequenced and then run it through GenBank to identify it. It would so nicely integrate the curriculum, using a practical exercise to solve a problem (like what species are on the nature trail), while using the same tools and resources that scientists use, and tie wonderfully into the short stories in Mirable.
One of Larry Sanger‘s new projects is WatchKnow, a website that rates online educational videos. It has a nice age filter that, while not very useful right now, may be very useful as the site develops.
The video above is the currently the top rated video (4 out of 5 stars) in the category on the writing process. Its WatchKnow page is here.
