Lensyl Urbano – Page 193 – Montessori Muddle

Nuclear Winter and MAD

Almost every time I discuss protons, neutrons and the nucleus of an atom, or at least so my students complain, I end up talking about nuclear fission and fusion and nuclear weapons. If the discussion goes on long enough I tend to bring up the cold war and how the fear of mutually assured destruction (MAD) reduced the chance of a hot war. I don’t often get into how the explosions from a nuclear exchange could put so much dust into the upper atmosphere that it blocks the sunlight and create a nuclear winter that would affect life all around the world. A nuclear winter that would have an effect similar to the winter created by the asteroid impact that lead to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The danger of nuclear weapons have not, unfortunately, gone away. There is a facinating article in Scientific American on how even a “small” nuclear war could have global consequences. They have a great quote from Mikhail S. Gorbachev about how,

“Models made by Russian and American scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to people of honor and morality, to act.”

The major finding of the research in the article is that even a small nuclear war, such as between India and Pakistan, could lead to a significant global nuclear winter.

I like to take every chance I get to tie natural and social world concepts together. It’s one of the things I enjoy most about teaching in an interdisciplinary Montessori classroom. There is a beautiful and scary story here about how the science of the infinitesimally small has had a fundamental effect on the major geopolitical conflict of the latter half of the 20th century, and continues to affect us today.

Cognitive science and math for pre-schoolers

There is an interesting article in the New York Times on cognitive neuroscience is showing that pre-schoolers are capable of learning mathematical concepts. How novel. The third paragraph:

For much of the last century, educators and many scientists believed that children could not learn math at all before the age of five, that their brains simply were not ready.

This timescale coincides with Angeline Lillard’s observations in Montessori: The Science behind the Genius (Lillard, 2005) about how constructivist approaches to teaching, like Montessori’s, were devalued and derogated because the more factory-like approaches were seen as more efficient during a time when the marvels of the industrial revolution were continuously impressing. This general theory, of course, may or may not be related to the theory of teaching specific concepts like math. It is disappointing that the references to such a broad statement are not provided in the article.

Twittering a Montessori Middle School

I ran into the twitter page for the Montessori Middle School of Louisville today. It is regularly updated (as of May 2010) and the tweets give a fascinating glimpse of what a rural Montessori school near Knoxville, Tennessee, is up to. They have everything from programming computer games with Flash to working the gardens and composting.

The school’s website is at: http://www.discoveret.org/mms/ and they also have a blog at http://montessorimiddle.blogspot.com/

Poetry in the morning

Instead of listening to music in the morning, instead of reading about the composer and the piece, maybe, we could read poetry instead.

The Library of Congress has a nice website with 180 poems for American High Schools, as well as instructions by Billy Collins on how to read a poem out loud.

Poetry Slam

Referred to me by a reliable source (thanks Moriah) as the answer to the question “What is a poetry slam?”, this is Anis Mojgani performing “Shake the Dust”. A great example of poetry as it should be spoken, this video is an excellent example for students learning how to read a poem out loud.

Human? nature

To follow up on the previous post on the evolutionary benefits of kindness, this essay by Marc Hauser describes some of the science that indicates that morality is innate. Not religious affiliation, gender, nationality nor political views affect how people respond to moral dilemmas.

“We tend to see actions as worse than omissions of actions.” People tend to believe that deliberately hurting a healthy person to save one or more others is morally repugnant if the others would only be hurt by your inaction.

Self-portrait in poetry

Rilke

I recently discovered Ranier Maria Rilke’s “Self-Portrait 1906” in Edward Hirsch’s collection Poet’s Choice (which I picked up on sale at Barnes and Noble last week). The author’s integrity in this poem is quite striking. Hirsch has a very loose translation (from the German) by Robert Lowell that is very different from the more literal translation here, but both versions capture the essential meaning and honesty of the poem.

Certainly there, in the eyelids’ shape,
Of some ancient, long-ennobled race.
Childhood’s anxious blue still in the eyes,
And here and there, humility, not a fool’s
Yet a servant’s though, and feminine.
The mouth’s, a mouth, large and exact,
Unconvinced, but speaking out for
Justice. The brow’s without guile,
Gladly gazing down to quiet shadows.

This, its context’s barely suspected:
Neither in adversity nor success
To gather to precise penetration:
Yet serious reality’s being planned,
As if with scattered Things, from afar.

This version of the poem is from A.S. Kline’s “Ranier Maria Rilke: Twenty More Poems” which is free for non-commercial reproduction.

I also like this poem for middle school because serves both the Language and the Personal World curriculum. Personal World is designed to give students the time to examine themselves and their place in the society, the world and even the cosmos, and honest self assessment is always something worth working on.