Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
We all love the Schoolhouse Rock video, “How a bill becomes a law” but with the recent passage of the health care bill we are reminded that the theory can get a little more nuanced in practice. NPR’s On The Media has an updated version.
The original is below:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall;
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King’s horses
And all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again!
I often tell my students that the meaning of a piece of literature, or really any piece of art, depends both on the intended meaning of the author and the experience-colored interpretation of the observer; any piece can have as many meanings as there are observers.
We also sometimes talk about the multiple meanings the author may be trying to convey; when they use metaphor in a single sentence or thread subtle, acerbic, poignant satire through a piece.
I can’t remember ever getting to the point of talking about unintentional meanings that seep into the work from the author’s unconscious, but these, sometimes I suspect, tell us the most about the nature of our shared humanity than intended meaning can.
The government’s Energy Star program to label products that are more energy efficient was in the news recently (and there are a lot of different products that have the label). The New York Times ran a story on how auditors, when asked by congress, submitted 20 fake and often ridiculous products to be approved for the stickers many environmentally aware people look for when they buy appliances like refrigerators (an AP report is also available).
GAO obtained Energy Star certifications for 15 bogus products, including a gas-powered alarm clock. – (GAO, 2010)
The Energy Star investigation was done by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which is often tasked with checking up on the other branches of the government. The GAO website is a great information source because they post very readable summaries of their reports, and a highlights page that answers the question, “Why GAO Did This Study” and “What GAO Found”.
This study highlights the lesson that while we want to be environmentally aware, we must always remain skeptical of claims pushed by manufacturers, even if they are supported by government certification. It also highlights an excellent application of the concept of checks and balances. One branch of government (congress) checks up on others (EPA and DOE who run the Energy Star program are part of the executive branch) and the others are forced to improve.
Adolescents like to tick you off. Push all of your buttons to see what happens. And you want to ask, “Who are you really?” and, “Do your really not care?” We probably did the same when we were that age, but do you also remember how idealistic we were? The video below, from Penguin Publishing (found via The Dish) captures a bit of that duality of the adolescent mind. The use of white space and of just simply words also ties it quite nicely into our ongoing discussion of poetry in a “spark the imagination” kind of way.
A discussion of statistical significance is probably a bit above middle school level, but I’m posting a note here because it is a reminder about the importance of statistics. In fact, students will hear about confidence intervals when they hear about the margin of error of polls in the news and the “significant” benefits of new drugs. Indeed, if you think about it, the development of formal thinking skills during adolescence should make it easier for students to see the world from a more probabilistic perspective, noticing the shades of grey that surround issues, rather that the more black and white, deterministic, point of view young idealists tend to have. At any rate, statistics are important in life but, according to a Science Magazine article, many scientists are not using them correctly.
One key error is in understanding the term “statistically significant”. When Ronald A. Fisher came up with the concept he arbitrarily chose 95% as the cutoff to test if an experiment worked. The arbitrariness is one part of the problem, 95% still means there is one chance in twenty that the experiment failed and with all the scientists conducting experiments, that’s a lot of unrecognized failed experiments.
But the big problem is the fact that people conflate statistical significance and actual significance. Just because there is a statistically significant correlation between eating apples and acne, does not mean that it’s actually important. It could be that this result predicts that one person in ten million will get acne from eating apples, but is that enough reason to stop eating apples?
It is a fascinating article that deals with a number of other erroneous uses of statistics, but I’ve just spent more time on this post than I’d planned (it was supposed to be a short note). So I’d be willing to bet that there is a statistically significant correlation between my interest in an issue and the length of the post (and no correlation with the amount of time I intended to spend on the post).
A few of my students have been complaining that we don’t do enough different things from week to week for them to write a different newsletter article every Friday. PE, after all, is still PE, especially if we’re playing the same game this week as we did during the last.
So I’ve been thinking of ways to disabuse them of the notion that anything can be boring or uninteresting in this wonderful, remarkable world. A world of fractal symmetry, where a variegated leaf, a deciduous tree and a continental river system all look the same from slightly different points of view. A counterintuitive world where the smallest change, a handshake at the end of a game, or a butterfly flapping its wings can fundamentally change the nature of the simplest and the most complex systems.
“Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.”
— Terry Pratchett (Interesting Times)
There are two things I want to try, and I may do them in tandem. The first is to give special writing assignments where students have to describe a set of increasingly simple objects, with increasingly longer minimum word limits. I have not had to impose minimum word limits for writing assignments because peer sharing and peer review have established good standards on their own. Describing a tree, a coin, a 2×4, a racquetball in a few hundred words would be an exercise in observation and figurative language.
To do good writing and observation it often helps to have good mentor texts. We’re doing poetry this cycle and students are presenting their poems to the class during our morning community meetings. It had been my intention to make this an ongoing thing, so I think I’ll continue it, but for the next phase of presentations, have them chose descriptive poems like Wordsworth’s “Yew Trees“*.
The world is too interesting a place to let boredom get between you and it.
I asked the question, “What is peace?” on a test and the answers were beautiful to see. Peace is more than the absence of war, my students have internalized that concept, but what else? One student said that they really had no idea about what to put for that question and just put whatever came to mind. Many of them say it’s also the absence of fear. I did not ask if they thought that we lived in a peaceful country (at least according to their own definition) but I think I will probably ask that question when we go over the test.
The other frequent answer revolved around the idea that peace also means freedom, particularly freedom of expression. That certainly was a common theme when they researched human rights activists.
Sleep rhythms change during adolescence. Students often find it harder to get to sleep at night and harder to get up in the morning. Their best time for learning is in the afternoon. So why not just adjust the school day? Margaret Ryan has an interesting article on the BBC website about an English secondary school that did just that, starting lessons one hour later at 10:00am. Their preliminary results seem favorable, but the research has not yet been published.
Prof Till Roenneberg, who is an expert on studying sleep, said it was “nonsense” to start the school day early.
He said: “It is about the way our biological clock settles into light and dark cycles. This clearly becomes later and later in adolescence.”
Prof Roenneberg said if teenagers are woken up too early they miss out on the most essential part of their sleep.
“Sleep is essential to consolidate what you learn,” he said.
