Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Jonas Bendiksen has an amazing website of photos, sounds and stories from life in slums in South America, Africa and Asia. It’s quite a poignant. You get wide-angled photos from far away and then the photographer steps closer to his subjects until you’re in a panorama of someone’s small apartment, hearing their story.
This cycle we’re working on social action.
Bendiksen’s work ties in well with Mollison’s Where Children Sleep.
I’ve been helping my wife model the fluid flow through her apparatus, and she has some really neat results from some experiments where two chemicals react and block off the regular, symmetrical flow.
The streamlines look a bit like butterfly wings to me, so I modified the image a little. The original flow paths through the circular apparatus are below. I’m not sure which image I like better.
P.S. The other thing I learned from this little exercise is how to write Scalable Vector Graphics (svg) files (W3C has an excellent reference). With svg’s, like other vector graphics formats, no matter how big you blow them up you never loose resolution like you would do with a regular, rasterized image. Unfortunately, I still have to figure out how to include the svg files on this blog, so these png images will have to do for now.
It’s dawn, but the sun has not yet come up. Even when it does it won’t be able to break through the solid, low sheet of stratus clouds. Make that nimbostratus clouds, ’cause it’s raining. The light, forever-drizzle as the spring warm fronts push slowly, persistently, against the winter.
It’s cold, but the birds are out, and so am I. Impervious to the weather, two bright males compete for the attention of a female. She stands apart, as patient as the rain. The males chase each each other from tree to tree. Their intentions are overt, their challenges obvious; yet there is so much less tension than when primates interact.
I appreciate their lack of subtlety.
I like rainy days. They bring back memories: of hard, tropical rain beating a pulsing, bass, asyncopation on a galvanized steel roof; of goalkeeping on a flooding field, where you could not even see the half-line, much less the other goal; of hiking the calmed streets of New York, dry and warm with the hood up on a bright orange raincoat.
The rain isolates and quiets the world. Though I enjoy our immersion trips, and really believe they are one of the best mediums for learning, I savor those few minutes of solitude each morning. Before the cacophony to come.
Poetry can be disjointed, illogical and irrational. Sam Tanenhaus argues that that is why poetry helps us make sense of catastrophes and disasters.
One of the enduring paradoxes of great apocalyptic writing is that it consoles even as it alarms.
This has been, in fact, one of the enduring “social” functions of literature — specifically, of poetry. Narrative prose is less well suited to the task. This isn’t surprising: narrative implies continuity and order — events that flow forth in comprehensible sequence, driven by motive forces of cause and effect. …
But catastrophe defies logic. It faces us with disruption and discontinuity, with the breakdown of order. The same can often be said of poetry itself. It operates outside the realm of “logic.” Rather, it obeys the logic of dreams, of the unconscious. This is especially the case with lyric poetry, with its suggestion of vision and prophecy.
— Tanenhaus (2011): The Poetry of Catastrophe, on the New York Times’ Arts Beat Blog.
Andrew Sullivan, on the Daily Dish, highlights W. B. Yeat’s “The Second Coming,” as being quite apt to the topic. It was written just after World War I (Poem of the Week).
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?— Yeats (1919): The Second Coming, (via Poets.org).
This cute, little, true story of how a bunch of kids (they look like adolescents) living on rafts in a lake built their own soccer field (on rafts), and eventually created the Panyee Football Club, is actually an advertisement for the Thai Military Bank (TMB), but it’s quite inspirational nonetheless. The setting and videography are also superb.
To supplement our work on the fundamental needs of humans, we can add James Mollison’s poignant pictures in his book, Where Children Sleep. It ties in well with the Diverse China pictures.
You can find more of his images in LIFE.
Even without the text descriptions, the pictures are wonderfully composed and evocative. I think I’m going to have to add this one to our library.
An interesting project would be to have my students take their own pictures of their rooms. Just in the book, some of the contrasts are quite startling.
Engine room,
It could never die, never,
Because it is nine months my mother make me check out she heartbeat.—David Rudder (1988): from Engine Room
Despite those nine months, scientists have identified a condition called beat deafness, where people just can’t find the beat.
The article claims it’s rare. My wife tells me it must be genetic.
A wonderful and facinating interpretation of what pi sounds like if you translate the first 33 digits into sounds.