Spices in a Moroccan market. Image by Donar Reiskoffer, found on Wikipedia Commons.
Montessori elementary programs approach history from the perspective of the basic needs of human beings. They look at how humans have satisfied the needs for food, shelter, spirituality and so on over time.
A new book by Tom Standage called, “An Edible History of Humanity” looks at human history through food, from how agriculture lead to the beginning of civilization, to the role of spices in the European discovery of the Americas, to how food production shaped the rise and fall of Napoleon, to the effects of the Green Revolution on the world today.
it concentrates specifically on the intersections between food history and world history, to ask a simple question: which foods have done most to shape the modern world, and how?
Spiked Online has a nice review of the book that touches on many of the key points. This book certainly open up a wider discussion of world history. A simplified version would likely be a great addition to the middle school curriculum.
The vivid colors, heart-rending smells and sheer mass of the pyramids of spices in Moroccan markets are a vivid reminder of the importance of the Arab spice trade. The spice mixes I remember in particular, they can consist of over twenty different spices coming from all around the world.
Why do we use our hands? Milton Glaser (above) uses his to think, and he cites Frank Wilson who argues that the hand and the brain are so connected as to be a single almost indistinguishable system. In fact, Wilson extrapolates this connection to education where, he makes the arguement, “less rigid more individualized approach to education will yield a student with a unified body and mind” (according to The New Yorker, 1998).
Drawing is thinking for some people at least. Perhaps that’s one of the things that defines kinesthetic learners? It certainly is something to bear in mind when designing and implementing the curriculum. Teachers tend to use teaching methods that fit their learning styles, so it is important to bear in mind we will have a variety of students. It’s certainly something about which I have to keep reminding.
It is also important to remember that all students benefit from experiences with different modes of learning. Students, especially adolescents whose brains are rapidly developing new neural pathways and pruning others, need to experience variety, because once we are set in our ways, it becomes a lot harder to learn new tricks.
This is where preparing the environment becomes so important. We want student to have choices, but we want them to try new things, and sometimes these two objectives conflict. The video above does make a persuasive argument to me about why we should draw and practice drawing. Perhaps it will do the same for our kids.
Tom Leher has a number of really entertaining science related songs. Here he does the elements and someone (unknown unfortunately) has made a video to go with it, where the elements all pop up on the periodic table as he sings. Since there is no apparent pattern to order in which he sings the elements, this is more a “strike the imagination” type thing rather than anything else.
The title of Mark Bauerlein‘s book is somewhat provocative. It’s called, “The Dumbest Generation, How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.” As I am very much an advocate for incorporating technology in the classroom, it’s not too unexpected that I disagree with large parts of his thesis.
Yes there is probably an important link between the brain and the hand that facilitates creative work. But it does not necessarily follow that, “Writing by hand, students will give more thought to the craft of composition. They will pause over a verb, review a transition, check sentence lengths …” (Bauerlein, 2010). As we work on habits of revision there seems to be no real reason why they should spend more time on improving a sentence they’ve hand written than one they’ve typed. True, if students are conditioned to write in short rapid bursts of texting it will translate into their other writing, but it is the role of the teacher to help them delineate these different genres of writing. I also have not seen the evidence that writing by hand is any less abstract than writing by typing on a keyboard. We are already expressing ideas using an abstract medium, words, why is one form of expression better than the other?
Where I do agree with Bauerlein is on the need to take breaks, even substantial ones, from technology and the online world. Where I see the greatest need for this is in aiding student’s comprehension of the natural world. You live too long in the virtual world and you begin to translate that experience into the real world. Yet the virtual world remains a model of the real one. It is simplified and enhanced to make it a more enjoyable experience, so the lessons you learn there do not truly apply to the real world. In addition, physical experience in the virtual world, at least for now, cannot create the kinesthetic, mind-body understanding of the laws of physics and biology that you learn from real-world games and just walking along the nature trail. This is why I am a firm believer in our week-long immersions every six weeks.
So I continue to allow my students to introduce new technology to the classroom, as long as they can show me that it is effective in helping them learn. The latest thing is the proliferation of iPod Touches. I like the iPods because of apps like iSeismo that lets you monitor vibrations in 3D. However, on our recent visit to the Le Bonheur Hospital a number of my students took their notes on their iPods. I personally don’t believe that these are more effective than pencil and paper because you can’t combine text and images very effectively on an iPod, but they did take copious notes (which they were quite proud to show me). I’m planning on giving them a quick quiz to see what they learned from the trip so we’ll see just how effective their note taking was.
We’re all swimming in a sea of new technologies, and we can’t really tell what will benefit and what will hinder without trying them out. So, I at least conclude that the key goal of middle school education should be to create in students a core competence and confidence that will help students navigate steadily in this world of much information and rapidly changing fads. A fundamental understanding of the mechanisms that underlie people’s behavior is key. Know yourself and understand how societies behave. The first is not trivial and the second requires drawing general conclusions from a lot of historical data, which is quite challenging for most adolescents, but that’s why we teach the way we do.
Note: There is an interesting discussion of the use of technology in the traditional classroom going on now on Will Richardson blog post “The Big Questions: Now What?“
Different parts of the brain mature at different rates. By early adolescence the parts of the brain responsible for social interaction are pretty well developed, but the parts responsible for critical thinking and impulse control (the frontal cortex) are not.
We visited the Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital today. And after a tour, a couple of people from the neurological division gave us a nice little presentation about the human brain. They used Rita Carter’s DVD, “The Human Brain“, which has a great animation of electrical signals pulsing from neuron to neuron through the neural network. I’m considering getting it for the class because the animations and the interactive slicing of the human brain are pretty neat. You can, however, find some, free applications for looking at the whole human body from the Visible Human Project.
Anyway, the fact that impulse control and critical thinking abilities are late to develop did not require fancy brain imaging to discover. Jean Paiget’s research on cognitive developmental stages found evidence that abstract thinking did not develop until the early teens. In fact, he found that abstract thinking (or formal operations as he called it) did not necessarily develop at all. As the frontal cortex matures, the ability to do abstract thinking also develops, but that does not necessarily mean that everyone learns how to do it. (At this point I make an unbiased pitch for the Montessori approach opposed to traditional schooling).
It’s very nice, or perhaps a better word is “elegant”, when very different types of research, using fundamentally different methods come to the same conclusions. In this case, neuroscience (brain imaging), which is ultimately based on physics and biology corroborates the psychological research into cognitive development, which is primarily based on observation and survey.
In terms of general use, girls utilized computers to connect with others, and boys used computers to compete with others. – Christie (2005)
There are clear gender differences in the way adolescents use computers and play computer/console games. Boys tend toward the violent, competitive games. This is not just my own experience as the above quote from a large study of middle schoolers in South Carolina shows.
Furthermore, and more worrisome, the violence in the games may spill over into real life. In 2004, Gentile et al. found that:
Adolescents who expose themselves to greater amounts of video game violence were more hostile, reported getting into arguments with teachers more frequently, were more likely to be involved in physical fights, and performed more poorly in school. –
They reference a 2001 study by Anderson and Bushman that integrated a lot of the previous work and showed that:
… across 54 independent tests of the relation between video game violence and aggression, involving 4262 participants, there appear to be five consistent results of playing games with violent content. Playing violent games increases aggressive behaviors, increases aggressive cognitions, increases aggressive emotions, increases physiological arousal, and decreases prosocial behaviors. These effects are robust; they have been found in children and adults, in males and females, and in experimental and non- experimental studies
In graphical form it looks like this: How video games lead to aggression. (From Anderson and Bushman, 2001)
I can’t say I’ve observed this myself, but it is certainly cause for concern. In fact, a later study by the same authors and Nicholas Carnagey (Carnagey et al., 2007) found that people who played violent video games were actually physically desensitized to violence (though the method used in this study is not nearly as convincing as the previous work).
Finally, the degree you can personalize characters in video games is improving rapidly. Some very recent research from Fischer et al. (2010) found that:
playing a violent video game with a personalized game character … increased aggressive responses.
I have to say that I find the evidence from this albeit quick survey of the science to be both disturbing and damning. Of course these scientific studies are statistical averages, and each individual is different and is affected by a larger environment than is just in the violent video games. Indeed, I have played these games myself, I know intensive gamers, and have students who regularly play these games and can’t say that I’ve observed much correlation with the games and aggressive behavior. But then again it is sometimes hard to see the forest from beneath the trees.
I guess I’m going to have to be more strict about violent video games. We don’t allow them in the classroom (in general), but I think I’m going to have to stress the issue a bit more when I talk to students and their parents. Of particular concern is when violent games overlap with video game addiction. As with everything in life, moderation is important, and in a time when students are going through large changes and discovering themselves it is essential to help them with self-regulation.
Because my students use a lot of online sources I always emphasize the importance of watching out for copyright infringement and making sure they cite their references. This is easy enough to say but for a lot of internet content there is a lot of conflicting information about how to write citations.
Blogs in particular are difficult to cite, so I thought it would be useful to add the citation to the bottom of each of my blog posts as an example (it also allowed me to figure out how to write a WordPress Plugin). After looking at a number of referencing styles I finally settled on the Yale University Writing Center’s APA format.
You should be able to see what it looks like below. I’ve made parts of the reference links, which help connect directly to the post and the website, but do not greatly affect the official style.
The primary role of an instructor is to transform a novice into an expert within a given subject area. – Cooper (1990)
The above quote comes from a paper on instructional design by Graham Cooper. I don’t quite agree with it entirely since it does not seem to allow for a well rounded view of a student as an individual, or the Socratic ideal, but it does seem applicable to the more strictly academic areas in the middle school curriculum.
In order to figure out what distinguishes experts from novices, cognitive scientists have spent a lot of time observing the two groups. Their key finding has been that as you become an expert on a topic, you construct mental pictures (or schemes) of the shapes of problems, so when you encounter a new problem you can just fit the new problem to the mental pictures you have and see which best fits. It’s a bit like learning rules of thumb that apply to different situations. When a problem comes up, the expert can quickly whip out the right rule of thumb from their mental back pocket while the novice, though equally smart, needs to figure out all the steps with some degree of trial and error.
This is a nice perspective when it comes to teaching something like solving equations, but I think one important distinction of the Montessori philosophy is the belief that adolescents should also be learning flexibility, and be capable of dealing with novel problems. Because adolescence is when students are just becoming able to think abstractly (at least according to Paiget), and abstract thinking needs to be practiced, it is necessary that students encounter novel, challenging problems on a regular basis.
Pangea breakup in reverse (adapted from image in Wikimedia Commons).
A lot of creative and problem solving thinking comes from hashing out new problems. In a globalized world, where technology is capable of dealing with routine tasks, be they constructing a car or solving a series of equations, creative problem solving is becoming a more and more valuable skill. Especially now that “The World is Flat“.
