Timeline of life

This year the theme is life. My central organizing structure is the timeline of life on Earth. I plan to link all of the discussions of taxonomy, phylogeny and genetics to this timeline over the course of the year.

The timeline above will be the first lesson. As with these things the trick is deciding how much detail to keep in and how much to keep out.

What I like is that it gives the general overview of when important things happen while leaving a lot of space for students to investigate. Most of what we’ll be seeing this year happened in the Cambrian and this timeline conveys that this is a very small part of the whole history of life. In fact, it’s only when we cover the biochemistry of genetics that we will be talking about the origins of life.

earth_nucleobases — From the Exploring Earth's Origins website.

The website Exploring Life’s Origins has a great timeline. It also has some really neat sections, with very useful videos, on the formation of protocells and the origin of RNA on the early Earth that lead to life as we know it.

The Magnetic Field?

The one thing I left out that I’m still conflicted about is the Earth’s magnetic field. Recent research indicates it has been around since 3.2 billion years ago and its presence or absence may have had profound effects on life.

Having a magnetic field protects the Earth from the charged particles spewing out of the Sun, the solar wind. This makes life on land a lot easier since the solar wind’s particles are quite damaging to DNA. However, prior to the magnetic field forming all this damage to DNA may have also accelerated mutation and thus evolution.

Insects up close

insect-water — Photo by Luc Viatour from the Réserve naturelle Marie-Mouchon.

A change of perspective can give the most amazing insights. I find macro photographs, particularly of insects, to offer a stunningly refreshing view of these nuisances. Luc Viatour, whose image is posted above, has some wonderful, copyright permissive, pictures.

Alternatively, Miroslaw Swietek has some amazing images of insects covered in droplets of dew (taken at around 3:00 am).

John Kimbler also has some spectacular photos as well as a nice article on how to do macro photography. The Wikipedia page on macro photography is also quite useful in that it goes into how to adapt your camera to take these photographs.

Photography, with it extensive use of refraction and reflection is a great avenue to talk about waves and their properties. Macro photography can be quite effective at striking the imagination and getting into taxonomy and entomology.

Fostering creativity

We know creativity is important, but how do we teach it? Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman have a fascinating article in Newsweek that is a superb advertisement for Montessori education. It posits, with extensive citation to back it up, that the increasing use of standardized curricula and testing is leading to decreased creativity in the U.S..

Of course you don’t teach creativity. Indeed, the arts, which are typically thought of as the first avenue for developing creativity, have no monopoly on the ability.

The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly. – Bronson and Merryman, 2010.

Creativity can be developed with practice. When we’re being creative the brain starts by shifting through a whole bunch of different, vaguely relevant ideas at the same time. At some point some these ideas click together as the brain quickly recognizes some pattern and it focuses, focuses, focuses, encapsulating the pattern into some new insights and evaluating its possible effectiveness. It’s this mental shifting of gears from vague to precise, and the ability to focus attention on the specific problem that we improve on with practice. How:

… alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves. – Bronson and Merryman, 2010.

They outline the steps to a project that practices creative thinking to solve solve a problem:

Start with fact-finding – what do we need to know to solve the problem.
Next scope out the possible problems.
Generate ideas.
Identify the best ideas.

Here the steps alternate from divergent thinking to convergent, general idea collection to focused thinking. They generate facts and ideas, then evaluate them rigorously. Creativity requires both types of thinking because either one is ineffective on its own.

In Montessori

The foundation for fostering this type of creativity in the classroom lies in developing a safe community. Clear rules reduce anxiety but leave room for exploration and curiosity. In the language of Montessori, this translates to developing a prepared environment and allowing freedom within boundaries.

Bronson and Merryman say this about the teacher:

When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. – Bronson and Merryman, 2010.

And they note this about the students:

They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world. – Bronson and Merryman, 2010.

I really like how the authors integrate the cognitive and neuroscience research into the article, to the great benefit of the more detail oriented among us. I always find remarkable how all this new science just continues to demonstrate Maria Montessori’s perceptiveness. The Montessori method is fundamentally designed to foster creativity.

This is a clear argument for the Montessori Method. I’ll certainly use this for my parent presentations and recruiting. As a teacher, however, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of the importance of creating space for creativity. I like the way Bronson and Merryman put it:

In the space between anxiety and boredom was where creativity flourished. – Bronson and Merryman, 2010.

The Layers by Stanley Kunitz

Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
– from The Layers by Stanley Kunitz

Greek painted statues

BrinkmannStatue — Image from Gurney Journey

Despite the elegance of the plain white marble statues from ancient Greece, they were originally painted. The Boston Globe and the Smithsonian Magazine have great articles on how the reconstruction of the coloring is done and on Vinzenz Brinkmann, the archeologist who did much of this work.

Montessori Science Fiction

One of my favorite books that ties in with the study of the life sciences is Janet Kagan’s Mirable. It’s a series of stories about colonists trying establish themselves on a new world. Because of an accident on the trip over from Earth, the plants and animals they try bring with them (or propagate from their recorded DNA sequences) tend to randomly, and all too frequently, produce offspring that are hybrids of all sorts of phylogenetically unrelated organisms. The hybrids then produce other hybrids until, eventually, they produce another “Earth-authentic” species. This was supposed to be a feature to add redundancy to their gene banks. The impetus for the stories comes from the fact that some of the hybrids are unexpected and quite interesting, like the kangaroo-rex.

k-rex2 — M. A. Buss' model of the kangaroo-rex. Note the sharp pointy teeth and claws.

Kagan writes a good story, entertaining, light hearted and easily accessible to early adolescents, but I particularly like her model of education on the new world. Since they need as much genetic diversity as possible, even people who don’t want to raise children need to have them. So kids are sent to live at a boarding school that’s really a hotel, which they run. Sounds a lot like Montessori’s Erdkinder.

The kids get training and regular visits from experts in a variety of fields. They get to help of the protagonist with her projects by tracking animals in the field and running genetic sequences through their equivalent of GenBank.

The best science fiction provides interesting models of society. Mirable, I believe, is a model of a society designed around the ideas of Peace Education. The Montessori spirit runs throughout the stories not just in the education system, but in the way characters interact one another, even in times of conflict.

I’m an unabashed advocate for using science fiction in the classroom because it delves into such wide ranging parts of the curriculum, Natural World, Social World, Language and, in this case, Peace Education. Of course the stories have to be chosen well. Mirable is one of perhaps only two books (the other is The Chrysalids by John Wyndham) that I use when we study the life sciences.