Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
The Royal Society’s Picture Library is now available online. It contains images from some of the seminal scientific works of the last four centuries. It’s an excellent resource for teachers and students, who, with registration, can get free high-resolution images for presentations and unpublished theses.
I’m particularly attracted to the biological drawings at the moment because I’m trying to get students to practice their scientific drawing and diagramming.
During your adolescence, which lasts from your early teens into your 20’s, the brain changes rapidly, you develop new abilities and capacities, and the habits of mind and skills you develop will last long into adulthood.
Abilities: The last part of the brain to develop is the Frontal Lobe. It’s responsible for reasoning and judgement — aka Executive Function. So, it’s somewhat understandable that teens often have poor impulse control — their Frontal Lobe (the prefrontal cortex in particular) is still developing.
However that’s not an excuse. It is essential for adolescents to be held to account, because it’s only by practicing responsibility that they get to learn how to use their Executive thinking skills.
Because that’s how we learn — by practicing.
When we’re learning something new, brain cells, called neurons, reach out and connect to form networks. As we practice and focus on specific things — certain patterns of movement or certain ways of thought — some of the unused connections get pruned away, while others become stronger. The axons that connect the most-used pathways get coated in myelin, which acts as an insulator to make sure signals can pass quickly and efficiently.
By reorganizing the connections between brain cells, the brain learns and becomes better at what you’re practicing. Thus we gradually transition from novices to experts.
However, there is a cost.
Making strong pathways makes for quicker thinking about the things we’ve practiced, but makes our brains somewhat less flexible at learning new things. We develop habits of mind that stay with us for a long time.
Some of those habits we might not actually want to keep; and there’s also the possibility that we might not develop some habits of mind that we really would like to have.
The development of the frontal lobe during adolescence opens a window of opportunity for learning good judgement/executive function, but it does not mean we actually will learn it. We need to actually practice it.
So, if you would like to know yourself, want to be able to control yourself, and, especially, want to shape the future person you will become, then you’re going to have to figure out: which habits of mind you want to be practicing and which ones you don’t.
PBS’s Inside the Teenage Brain is now online.
Peter Orszag advocates for increasing the length of the school day by about 2 hours.
As a teacher, I know I would appreciate a little extra time in all my subjects. Based as my experience as the sole teacher in a middle school classroom, I think about how much more we could have done with the extra time to round out the curriculum. But I think it only makes sense to add those two hours if they’re used properly. More of the same — like sitting at desks — is unlikely to help a lot.
Orszag points out that there’s some evidence (see Dobbie and Fryer, 2011 (pdf) and Fryer, 2011 (pdf)) that longer school days have improved student performances. But it’s crucial to note that the longer days are part of extensive changes in the curriculum that I don’t think can be separated from the other changes: “frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and high expectations” (Dobbie and Fryer, 2011); “a more rigorous approach to building human capital, more student-level differentiation, frequent use of data to inform instruction, and a culture of high expectations” (Fryer, 2011).
When I think of longer school days, I tend to think of a more apprenticeship model. Giving students time to work on personalized projects, interacting with experts as they need.
Dr. Klaus Schmitt has some utterly amazing photographs that simulate what bees and butterflies can see. They can see ultra-violet wavelengths of light, which we can’t.
Schmitt maps the ultra-violet in the image to blue to make it visible to our eyes.
His site (Photography of the Invisible World (updated)) has a lot more pictures and information about the process.
The eye’s lens is pretty good at blocking ultra-violet light, so when Claude Monet (whose works we visited earlier this year) had the lens of his eye removed he could see a little into the ultra-violet wavelengths of light.
Monet’s story is in a free iPad book put out by the Exploratorium of San Francisco called Color Uncovered (which I have to get). Carl Zimmer has a review that includes more details about Monet and how the eye works.
P.S.: All of Monet’s works can be found on WikiPaintings, a great resource for electronic copies of old paintings (that are out of copyright).
The Guardian has an excellent video that explains how the images from the Hubble Space Telescope are created.
Each image from most research telescopes only capture certain, specific colors (wavelengths of light). One camera might only capture red light, another blue, and another green. These are captured in black and white, with black indicating no light and white the full intensity of light at that wavelength. Since red, blue and green are the primary colors, they can be mixed to compose the spectacular images of stars, galaxies, and the universe that NASA puts out every day.
The process looks something like this:
NASA’s image of the day is always worth a look.
Space.com has an excellent guide about the best way to observe meteor showers; dress warm; after midnight; be patient). The Lyrid meteor shower is on this week.
To take good photos of a shower you’ll need to do long exposures or get lucky. Details on the photo above here.