Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
In my new “Books to Read” series, Susan Scott’s book Fierce Leadership. This was recommended by Mary Yenik who’s been teaching classroom management at HMC. Scott is the author of Fierce Conversations, which is about enabling people to have challenging conversations (parent-teacher conferences can be contentious sometimes) effectively. According to my notes, the new book is about “not wimping out.”
The training at the Houston Montessori Center for secondary teachers is long and quite intense. Two teachers from a new Montessori school in Lakeland Florida are keeping a blog about their experience to keep the parents and supporters of the school at home updated on what’s going on. It’s a wonderful read.
Ms. Clarke and Ms. De La Cruz are an excellent team. They’re starting up a new program and it’s nice to see the training program from that perspective. I am quite excited to see how their middle school turns out. In their blog, they convey quite nicely the quality of the training program and the impressive quality of the teachers in training.
The Vision of Humanity website publishes a wonderful, interactive map ranking countries based on peace. If you place the cursor over the country it gives you their rank. The U.S. is 85th out of 149. They have maps for 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010.
The peace index is based on quite the number of factors, some subjective, including, “Perceived criminality in society”, “Respect for human rights”, “Weapons exports” and “Number of conflicts fought”. All these factors were weighed and tabulated based on the input of an international team. It’s assembled by the Institute for Economics and Peace who have a number of downloadable peace education teaching materials designed for 14-16 year olds on their website.
They have an excellent video (see below) explaining what the peace index is all about and the effect that peaceful societies have on economic growth.
The maps and video would be excellent additions to our discussions of war and peace. I especially like that they try to directly link peace with economic growth, which offers something almost tangible whose importance and implications students can fairly easily understand. I really like these resources.
They’re books I plan to read (at some point) because they were recommended by someone I trust for some reason. They may be great, they may be controversial, I can’t offer any guarantees, but they’re all fairly influential in their way. I’m posting them here so I don’t forget that I plan to read them, and I’m more than happy to hear comments on the books before I read them. Spoilers are welcome.
After the caves at Meramec Caverns we took a rafting trip down the Meramec with the same company that runs the Caverns. They drove us to a put-in point a couple kilometers upstream in an old yellow schoolbus and left us with two rafts and the full kit and we floated down the stream back to the cavern’s parking lot.
The stream was quiet and it was an easy float, especially with the nice weather. We saw turtles sunning on the logs, a bald eagle flew across of the bows of the leading boat, and we chatted with a few of the other boaters on the river.
Not a bad way to spend an afternoon.
A wonderful demonstration of sound waves, frequency especially, expressed in propane fire. It’s called a Ruben’s Tube.
A great place for a cup of tea or breakfast in the morning, the Soulard Coffee Garden and Cafe is close and comfortable with an extremely friendly staff and clientele. Makes one want to spend more time in St. Louis. It’s a bit small so you might not want to bring the entire class.
Teaching website design can be done in two ways. The easy way is to use one the the many, very good, software packages. Adobe Dreamweaver is a fairly popular commercial package, while Mozilla’s SeaMonkey (from the creators of Firefox) is a free, open-source alternative.
The longer way to teach web design, which I prefer, is to start with HTML and CSS and build a fundamental understanding of how webpages work.
Chakita J., who teaches technology at the Hazelwood School District in St. Louis and shares my approach to the subject recommends , “The Complete Reference HTML” by Thomas Powell.