Thinking About Design Then Thinking About Culture

This year, as part of orientation, we showed a couple videos to students to get them thinking about the key questions:

Why are we here?
What do we want our culture to be like?
What do we need to do to make our culture the way we want it to be?

The one I showed, a TED talk by Tony Fadell focuses on how he sees the world as a designer: looking for those small nuisances to which we’ve become habituated by paying closer attention to detail, looking for the big picture, and trying to see things with new, childish eyes.

I think it was successful in that I’ve been hearing it come up–particularly the term habituation (although the students could often not remember the actual term)–a few times already this semester.

Beautiful Weather for a Walk

walk-3460-s — St. Albans' lake, on a clear October morning.

Two weekends ago we lucked into some of the most beautiful fall weather for our walk-a-ton. We’re trying to replace our old playground that had become somewhat decrepit. While our objective is not quite up to the Skudeneshavn Primary School‘s standards, it’s somewhat closer than what we had before.

Most of the kids who walked around the lake were from the lower school – after all, they’re the ones who expected to “play”- but I expect it will gets a lot of use by the middle and high schoolers once it’s installed.

walk-3465-s — Some walked more than others, but everyone had a good time.

Nearby Coal Plant’s Leaking Coal Ash Pond

View Ameren’s Coal Power Plant in a larger map

Jeffery Tomich had a good article last month on the leakage from the coal ash pond at a coal burning power plant near to our school. While the leakage appears to pose no real risk to us, it is a serious environmental issue at a local site that a number of students drive by on the way to school.

I’ve annotated the following excerpt from the article based on the questions my students asked when we talked about the it.

Since Since 1992, a coal ash pond next to the Ameren power plant here has been … hemorrhaging up to 35 gallons a minute [into the local groundwater].
…
At many [other] sites, trace metals in coal ash including lead, mercury, arsenic and selenium have been found in groundwater at levels that exceed drinking water standards.
…
In 2007, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report identified 63 sites in 26 states where the water was contaminated by heavy metals from coal ash dumps. That was more than a year before an estimated 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash sludge escaped an impoundment in Kingston, Tenn. The sludge spread across 300 acres, and 3 million cubic yards spilled into a river.
…
The waste is created from burning coal to create electricity. At Labadie’s ash ponds, it’s composed of fly ash, a fine, talc-like powder that’s captured by filters in the plant’s stacks to reduce pollutants released into the air, and bottom ash, a coarser material that falls to the bottom of coal boilers.
…
a report prepared by Robert Criss, a Washington University professor, identified several dozen private wells along the bluffs near Labadie Bottoms that could be at risk of contamination. Contaminants could infiltrate from shallow alluvial soils to the deeper Ozark aquifer [(see also USGS, 2009)] tapped by residents for drinking water, according to the report.
…
Ameren believes the leaks don’t pose an environmental threat. But because of ongoing concerns, and because the EPA has asked the utility to monitor them, Ameren will make repairs to the ash pond by the end of the year

— Tomich (2011): Leaks from Ameren toxic waste pond in Labadie stir fears in St. Louis Today.

More information from the local environmental group, Labadie Environmental Organization:

The ash overflow in Tennessee: see Dewan, 2008.

The Ingredients of “Character”

Some key performance-character strengths:

zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity.

— Tough (2011): What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? in The New York Times’ Education Issue

Paul Tough’s thought provoking article is a great overview of some of the recent research on character, and discusses a few attempts to instill character building into school.

Levin [co-founder of the KIPP network of charter schools ] noticed that … the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class.

— Tough (2011): What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?

Much of the work on character is based on the universal character characteristics identified in the book Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (Peterson and Seligman, 2004) and the research of Angela Duckworth (her research page is a good place to find copies of her publications).

Duckworth’s Grit Scale, seems to be a remarkably good predictor of GPA, and perhaps more interestingly, corresponded inversely to the number of hours of television students watched: “gritter” students did better in school and watched less TV.

Among adolescents, the Grit–S [short Grit Scale] longitudinally predicted GPA and, inversely, hours watching television. Among cadets at the United States Military Academy, West Point, the Grit–S predicted retention.

— Duckworth and Quinn (2009): Development and Validation of the Short Grit Scale (Grit–S)

The grit survey would probably be a useful addition to the Personal World curriculum.

One interesting application discussed in the article is at the KIPP middle schools in NYC. There they issue a Character Report Card and integrate discussion of character into all the classes: a language class might talk about how much self control the protagonist in a novel has and how that works out for them.

I’d be extremely reluctant to have to grade my students on twenty four character traits. While it might be a useful rubric to have and discuss and build on students’ positive self-conceptions, I fear that it might also significantly reinforce the negative conceptions as well.

Imbuing a language of character as a subtext of the curriculum seems like a great idea however.

Performance vs. Moral Character

One important critique of much of this work is that it focuses on “performance” character, the character traits that predict high achievement, rather than “moral” character which focuses on the ability to work well with others.

These two perspectives on the same character traits need careful attention. From a performance perspective, social intelligence, can be seen as a way of getting ahead – something that is somewhat manipulative, but from a moral perspective, social intelligence is intrinsically beneficial to the person and the society around them.

And perhaps this is the biggest problem with performance-character. It is extrinsically motivated: do this and you will get this reward. The intrinsic nature of moral-character seems much more in line with a progressive approach to teaching. Certainly, much care should be taken in how we think about and include character building in education.

The Character Education Partnership has a number of lesson plans and best practices for all grade levels, that focus more on moral character.

Giving Students the Opportunity to Fail

Finally, Tough talks about the fact that students need the time and space to explore, try difficult things, and to fail, in order to really build character.

The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure, and in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.

— Dominic Randolph (2011) in Tough (2011): What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? in The New York Times’ Education Issue

This is tied into the central theme of the movie Race To Nowhere and the book The Price of Privilege, that argue that, for many affluent students, the stress of excessively high academic expectations are having some seriously negative effects.

People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. – Joan Didion (1961), via Word on the Street (2010)

(hat tip to Ms. D. for the link to the article)

Appropriate Technology: Innovation with Light

Not a lot of light penetrates the galvanized steel roofs that are ubiquitous in slums around the world. Alfredo Moser came up with one ridiculously cheap solution (via the World Social Forum, 2011).

While this the kind of cheap, elegant solution I would go for in a heartbeat, I’m pretty sure my wife would veto. For the more stylistically conscious – and for people with a bit more money in their pockets – there are $2.00 LED lights advocated by The Appropriate Technology Collaborative (ATC). A lot of people in dire poverty live in the slums, but that’s not the case for everyone.

The ATC’s seems to focus on projects designed by university students and implemented in the third world. If they work, the designs are published with a Creative Commons license so that other Non Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) that work in poorer countries can use and distribute them. Their blog has a lot of good information. And, there’s also the Global Bucket project that I’m still keeping an eye on.

Epic Rain-Garden

flowerbed-angels — They're making dirt-angels, actually.

Talk about a long day! (“What an understatement,” she says.)

flowerbed-before — The 'before' picture.

We moved about 45 tons of sand, gravel and compost today, filling in the moat we dug last week. We were lucky enough to have the help of a backhoe for the digging, but all the filling in today was done by hand, with shovels and wheelbarrows.

flowerbed-night-backhoe — Digging the moat.

Despite rumors about it being a first line of defense against the Cordovan barbarian hordes, the moat was actually intended to become a rain garden, which was designed by the Rhodes College Hydrogeology class to intercept some of the runoff slope that funnels water directly down toward the school during the intense rainfall that we get with our spring and fall mid-latitude cyclones.

So we had to get rid of the heavy, dense, silty-loam soil that is really slow to let water seep through, and makes it hard to grow anything on the Memphis side of the Mississippi River. The fine grained silt was blown over from the Mississippi River floodplain about 20,000 years ago when the ice-age glaciers were melting and all their ground up rock flour was being washed down the Mississippi. This type of wind-blown sediment is called loess. I like the sound of the word because if you stretch out the “oe” properly it does something to the back of your throat that feels distinctly German; however, if you ask someone from the deep south to pronounce it, you’ll hear the name of Clark Kent’s girlfriend.

flowerbed-sh-oil — Middleschooler pushing a wheelbarrow full of silty-loam.

The backhoe dug two trenches, each about 2 m wide, 6 m long, and about 60 cm deep, and piled the soil up next to the holes. Moving this stuff is not trivial. My middle-school students gave it a try on Friday afternoon and though they made a small dent, there is an awful lot more to do (my students also helped figure out how long it would take to finish pumping out Friday morning’s collected rainwater from the trenches).

flowerbed-pea-gravel-delivery — Five cubic yards of pea gravel.

Then, on Saturday, with large piles of the old soil still sitting there, we replaced the impermeable loam with a fifty-fifty mix of sand and compost, underlain by five centimeters of pea-sized gravel on top of five centimeters of crushed limestone. This material was delivered by dump truck on Friday afternoon, while school was still in session. It was loud, exciting, and according to one member of the pre-school aged audience, “the best day ever!”

flowerbed-best-day-ever-oil — Enjoying the 'best day ever.'

I have to agree. It was kind-of exciting. Although for me, the bright, brown pile of pea gravel evoked fond memories of pyramids of powdered curry, saffron and tummeric sitting on the spice-seller’s stall in a market in Morocco .

flowerbed-pea-gravel-therapy-1 — Rhodes students slacking off (after lugging soil and gravel all day).

For others the pea gravel was a more tactile experience: snuggling into it, after a hard day’s work, appeared to be quite therapeutic.

flowerbed-pea-gravel-therapy-2-oil — Girl Scouts taking a well earned break.

flowerbed-pea-gravel-therapy-3 — Middle school students slacking off (after ...?).

flowerbed-hauling-dirt — Hauling silty clay.

flowerbed-wading — Dr. Jen raking in the first of the gravel in the not yet drained pit.

flowerbed-team-ziebarth — Team Z. on the top of the mound.

flowerbed-gravel-tossing — Gravel tossing.

flowerbed-job-well-done — The last of the pile. Job well done.

To be continued…