Author: Lensyl Urbano

Silence in the Middle School: The Little Rock Nine

My students watched the video about the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock and they were shocked. Truly shocked. They had already started reading the letters to and from President Eisenhower which are powerful in that they trace the story with the actual presidential records. Then one of the students brought up the video on a laptop and they all gathered around to watch. For 5 minutes afterward there was silence in the classroom.

The ugly, vicious hatred of the mob was powerful, and the one girl, Elizabeth Eckford, just a little older than the middleschoolers, just sitting there with the crowd all round, unable to speak, proud upright, but with a shell shocked look in her eyes. The video is moving, and it brings home the strength and courage of those nine kids in a world that must have seemed to be tipping toward destruction.

iSeismo app

Those who know me know how much I like the iSeismo app for the iPhone. The phone as a built-in accelerometer and the iSeismo app uses it to show the movement of the phone in three dimensions. The app show three graphs (seismographs), the first two show horizontal motions and the third vertical motion. So, if you put the phone on the table and hit the table the third line should jump up and down.

You can also export the data from the phone (or iPod Touch), and since the phones’ times should be synchronized pretty well, there should be a way to use two phones to triangulate the location of an impact, say on the floor in a room, in the same way that seismologists use seismographs to locate earthquakes. That would make a great demo if it was easy enough to do.

Update: iSeismo can also be used as a heartbeat monitor.

Desegregation of Central High School

Troops escort students to school (from Wikimedia Commons).

Recording of Eisenhower’s address to the nation on the situation in Little Rock.

In going over the timeline of human rights today, we realized that it did not have a card for the civil rights struggle of the 1950’s and 60’s. One of the key events that middle school students should be able to relate to is the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas. Imagine having to have troops escort you into school. Imagine having to endure racial taunts every day when you were only one of nine African American students in the entire school.

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas has a nice outline of the events of 1957 in the context of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. However, the National Park Service’s website is perhaps better targeted to Middle School age range. The video below is also a good primer, and my students found it to be very powerful.

The Eisenhower Presidential Library has some of the primary documents related to the events. They give a vivid account of the events from the perspective of what the president saw.

The Little Rock Nine (in New York, 1958)

The difference between poetry and prose

Words exist that can, when used by a poet, achieve a dim monochrome of the body’s love, but beyond that they fail miserably. – John Wyndham, The Crysalids

Gustave Dore's illustration of the Ancient Mariner (from Wikimedia Commons)

Going into poetry next cycle I’m having some mixed feelings. I like reading poetry, I love hearing poetry, especially when it has something to say. But I can’t write it worth a lick. I have a lot more practice writing prose, and, well, you can judge how well I can do that.

I’ve always wanted to be able to write poetry. I’ve always liked the John Wyndham quote cited above. Poetry can be expressive in a way that prose can’t. Yet prose can tell a story in ways that poetry cannot. There is, of course, a long history of story poems. The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner was a constant companion when I was bicycling solo around Lake Superior.

At any rate, Brian Beglin has a wonderful review of a novel written by a poet (Margo Berdeshevsky) (found via the Daily Dish). Belgin writes that often the combination does not quite mesh, and in working through why not he comes to the conclusion that poetic phrase do not work in prose because:

When poets write fiction, it can sometimes read like a transfer student trying to navigate the unfamiliar hallways of a new school. Sometimes this works to brilliant effect, as the poet can put a fresh shine on the fiction writer’s familiar tools. In Simon Van Booy’s The Secret Lives of People in Love, the sentences feel brisk, bright, exact, like blocks of ice chiseled into smooth, brimming faces. Conversely, Berdeshevsky’s sentences seem to ache for line breaks, for the leaps and turns vital to a poem but often detrimental to fiction: “There’s a noise she is not waiting for. Scratching like—a light knocking—and again a scratching, as of unsheathed nails on her door.” Craft-wise, these bursts of language are fascinating; yet they have the net effect of poetry: they stop time with their beauty. They can bring a story—which relies on forward momentum, on cause and effect—to a halt.

Not having read the books he references I can’t opine on if he’s right or wrong, however, it is a beautiful distinction he makes: poetic sentences stop time with their beauty, but you don’t want to stop anything when you’re telling a story.

Good teachers …

How do you know if you’re a good teacher is a question we all ask ourselves as we go through the Montessori teacher training and when we reflect on our time in the classroom. Most of us do not come from traditional educational backgrounds. Angeline Stoll Lillard (2007; p. 379), who literally wrote the book on the cognitive and pedagogic research that supports the Montessori approach, writes that in 1946 Maria Montessori “advised that Montessori teachers not take traditional education courses, because such courses would deepen their adherence to traditional methods and ideas.”

Lillard’s own belief is that although educational training programs have improved since the 1940’s (they teach more constructivist methods similar to Montessori) new teachers going into traditional schools today get pounded down by the institutional structure of these schools (the traditional classroom layout, the testing etc.) so that they are rarely able to apply those approaches and end up falling back into the traditional methods. Interestingly, according to an article by Amanda Ripley in the Atlantic, “a master’s degree in education seems to have no impact on classroom effectiveness.” (at least within the Teach for America program). The Teach for America research found that the key traits that predicted a teacher would be good are contentedness with their own life and perseverance.

Of course you have to ask yourself, how do they determine if a teacher is a good teacher? Unfortunately, they do it through standardized test scores. This, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing, because evaluating good teaching is important and difficult to put into numbers. Even crude measures of the quality of teaching can be useful if there is no other available evidence. But increasing the uses of standardized tests has a tendency to shape the entire educational system toward the test itself. In addition, there is a lot of evidence that a focus on testing is not a good way to get students to learn. It devalues the learning to the student, and focuses the attention of the teacher on the test, and, “The very structure of such tests, breaking learning into components that are tested in a disjointed manner, discourages integrated learning” (Lillard, 2005; p 344).

Yet the focus on testing intensifies. In Washington D.C., teachers are now being scored and potentially fired based on test scores. According to Ripley, teaching quality will now be numerically scored, and for “teachers whose students take standardized tests, half their score will be based on how much their students improved.” At the federal level, there is a new educational initiative where:

states must first remove any legal barriers to linking student test scores to teachers—something California and Wisconsin are already doing. To win money, states must also begin distinguishing between effective and ineffective teachers—and consider that information when deciding whether to grant tenure, give raises, or fire a teacher or principal

The two sentences above are separated by a period into two different ideas, but their confluence appears to be inexorable. While testing should be a component of evaluation, test scores are easy to use and come in the form of easy to understand numbers, so the over-reliance on them seems inevitable.

While there is a clear need to identify good teaching and teachers, I do not believe that standardized tests are the answer.

Quantum mechanics – things you should know

Diffraction of light through a grating. Image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PatronRefraccionCD.jpg

The way sub-atomic particles behave is weird. They don’t fit very well into our everyday experience of the world, but the math and the experimental observations hold up. Chad Orzel has an interesting post on the seven things everyone should know about quantum physics that’s written in language a lay person can understand. This does not make the concepts much easier to grasp intuitively, because, as I mentioned before, quantum mechanics is weird, but it does explain things so we can begin to grasp the big picture of how the universe works. It also helps explain why they’re building the Large Haldron Collider. So though you may not know the answers, you’ll at least have an idea about what it’s about when your students ask.

The principles of macro-economics

With a national unemployment rate of 10%, most students are aware of the current recession. When they ask about what the government is doing about it, the answer is that they’re following the advice of a man who died over 60 years ago, John Maynard Keynes.

Keynes wrote the textbook on how to manage economies, particularly in response to recessions. If the economy is in a recession because people are not spending money, then his solution was for the government to spend the money instead. Friedrich Hayek, however, disagreed.

Hayek’s disagreement with Keynes is a disagreement about human nature. This is after all what economics is all about, how people behave. Hayek though that recessions are necessary for economies and societies adjust to changes. Economies go into recession because as things change, such as technology, some businesses will fail because their products are no longer necessary. Eventually new companies and industries will replace these, but as that transition occurs, there will be the general hardship of a recession.

So, if the government spends money to support the economy all it’s doing is preventing necessary change, which means that in the long run, the economy will be worse off than if the government just let the change occur. Necessary adjustments will have to occur sooner or later.

The thing which is most needed to secure healthy conditions is the most speedy and complete adaptation possible of the structure of production. – F. Hayek

Even today are ongoing arguments either way. The government, specifically the heads of the Federal Reserve and the department of the treasury, Ben Bernanke and Tim Gethner, is dealing with the current recession by following Keynes’ prescription. They are adding more money to the economy. Other economists disagree.

The video illustrates the differences between Hayek’s and Keynes’ view of the economy using a music video and a rap. It is a wonderful example of how serious issues (and you can see the sincerity of the creators) can be explained in a way that catches the attention. I like how the authors give the same message in two modes: the words explain the concepts and the video illustrate them (look out for Tim and Ben).

C.O.D.: Call of “Duty”

The Call of Duty video games are pretty popular among the boys in my class (the gender stereotypes hold up very well with this one). Last week they tried to convince me that there was enough educational value in the games to allow them to bring it in for their overnight at school. They even created a PowerPoint presentation to convince me. Unfortunately, for them, it was not particularly effective. While there was a lot of information about the missions and the types of weapons there was not so much in the way of facts or concepts they learned (Subsequently, however, one student mentioned that he learned about favellas in the game. Though I don’t want to think about what they were doing in the flavellas).

I would really have liked to have had them talk about “Duty”, as in the title, and moral responsibility. I dropped a lot of hints but too no avail. They were not successful in their petition, but we did have a good discussion about the purpose of warfare (if any), and how to make a convincing presentation (consider your audience). I may let them try again next time.

As a side note, The Onion, has a great video on the next version of the game which will be even more realistic (you spend most of the time in the game sitting around and then you get shot in the back unexpectedly and the game is over.) The video may not be appropriate for middle schoolers however, because there is a scene where the soldiers are sitting around bored and talking about what soldiers often talk about.