Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
This is the first of an excellent series covering the history of English from The Open University. They make for a great spark-the-imagination lesson for etymology.
There’s lots more interesting videos at The Open University’s YouTube channel.
(via The Dish)
I encourage my students to write what they know.
Bullets flying past my face,
After the enemy like a chase.
Grenades landing right beside me,
I’ve now deployed my RC-XD.
Staying camouflaged on my hands and knees,
LOOKOUT, SNIPERS IN THE TREES!A silenced weapon keeps me stealthy,
Kill the enemy, with my Valkyrie.
Dolphin dive onto the ground,
My magazine is almost out of rounds.
I get shot with a pistol,
In the back of the head.
My teammate tries to revive me,
But it’s too late, I’m already dead.— Harrison Hill
I have a great antipathy when my word processor tells me what to do, or, even worse, “corrects” my writing without my permission. So I avoid MS Word like the plague. OpenOffice is little better. Now I’ll admit that my writing is usually in great need of a good editor, but not looking over my shoulder, inserting little, irritating suggestions while I’m caught up in the turbulent rapids of self-expression. Getting into the flow of productive writing is difficult enough; I don’t need the extra distraction.
Instead I much prefer the plain text editors; Smultron has been a favorite of mine since I’ve been using Macs, and I spend a lot of time writing on the class Wiki (MediaWiki) and on this blog (WordPress), which both have very simple text-entry boxes.
WordPress and MediaWiki also process the text and make it presentable. Like most websites these days, this blog has a theme that tells it where to put the text, how to format it, what background to have, where to insert images, what to have in the header and footer, …. The theme I use was created by Karen Blundell and adapted to put in a couple of my own details, like the little citation thing, and the ability to name the reviewer and editors at the bottom of the post. I did spend a lot of time getting these things to work, but I did learn quite a bit about the inner workings of WordPress and CSS in doing them, and once they were done, I could forget about them entirely and just focus on the writing.
Similarly, with LaTeX, although it’s much more of a pain to figure out how to use. On the Muddle I use LaTeX to add mathematical equations, but it really is a fully-fledged typesetting program, designed for professionals.
My class recently created a little display of fossils collected from Coon Creek for a school fundraiser, and we put together a booklet for it. I had the students write their essays and put them up on our Wiki. Then I copied and pasted their text into a LaTeX document, added a couple chapters from some of my blog posts, and it did the rest to create a very nice looking book, complete with title page, table of contents and bibliography.
Setting up the LaTeX file was not trivial, since I’ve not used it in a number of years, and this was the first time I tried to format a book. But it creates beautifully looking documents, without all the mysterious formatting features that inevitably show up if you tried something this complex with Word.
There are, I’m sure, other software for publishing documents like this. However, LaTeX is free and so is the old version of Smultron. Smultron’s new version costs $4.99, but is probably worth it.
Middle school is where you learn the conventions of language: comma placement; who versus whom; and things like that. But language, and even its conventions, are ever evolving. Stephen Fry makes the case that we should be a little less pedantic.
The more you learn about something, the more detail reveals itself. It’s a bit like walking down a single path of a fractal pattern. Wherever you go, no matter how much you know, new branches open up before you. Within every little thing is an infinity of discovery.
It’s one of the reasons why I don’t accept, “It’s boring,” as an excuse for not wanting to do something. Boredom is when you don’t use your imagination. You can never get bored because of all of the interesting things in world.
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,— from William Blake (1863): Auguries of Innocence, via Art of Europe.
I still have not tried my fractal writing exercises, but I think I’ll try to work one into the next cycle. Perhaps start with describing a tree, then a leaf (or a section of bark), then cells under the microscope.
Or perhaps a better subject, since we’ll be looking at organ systems, would be a fish.
Way back in Cycle 3, our class had our immersion to Nashville. We stayed in villas in Montgomery Bell State Park. Dr. mentioned in his post, “Limestone Trails at Montgomery Bell State Park”, that we went on a hike. It said that we followed a stream and then followed a ridge trail back to the villas, but it never said what happened in-between that. I’m gonna tell what really happened on that hiking day at Montgomery Bell State Park.
Our class did follow a stream; we did get soaked with nasty water; we were trying to learn something about the boring rocks that I don’t remember; and were trying to see who would fall in the stream the most.
After a long time of following the creek (mainly walking in it), we got near a children’s play-area. Dr. told us that we needed to get back, but that we weren’t tracing our steps back. We had to climb over more huge, boring rocks to get to the ridge trail. Dr. then told us to just follow the path. Seven of us went up ahead while the rest of the class stayed way behind.
Meanwhile, one student was assigned to be the last one of the group. He got ahead of Dr., by a couple of paces, but kept looking back to make sure Dr. was following us. One time he looked back, he realized that our teacher was gone! He told two other students what had happened, and they, freaking out, ran up trying to catch up to the rest of the group. They found us and filled us in.
We all thought we were going to die out there: we were gonna be eaten alive by mountain lions; we were gonna starve; we were gonna die of thirst because we were all too stupid to go back to the stream for water! We were all going to die no matter what, unless we found Dr. We didn’t know what to do.
Some of the so-called, “adventurous”, students ran back to find Dr., while one student continued to follow the trail. The rest of us just stayed put.
The group who ran back found Dr., dilly-dallying, while the group who stayed put tried to find the one student who’d ran up ahead of the main group. Soon enough, we were happy to see Dr. again (well some of us were), because we were tired of looking for where we had to go. The first thing I heard from him was, “You guys shouldn’t have wandered off.”
It wasn’t our fault that we didn’t know where Dr. was. He was busy taking pictures so the rest of us went up ahead. Because of this, we could have died. We didn’t know where to go. He should be in front, so we know where to go and so we don’t die. It was all of his fault not ours.
He didn’t believe that.
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.
One of my students, Ms. Piper Ziebarth, had the audacity to agree with me, enthusiastically, when I mentioned that my writing could do with a little editing. She also had the temerity to call one of my more artistically designed paragraphs, “boring.”
So I offered her the chance to intern at the Muddle as an editor and reviewer.
This week, most of my students are off seeing a little of what it’s like to have a real job. Apart from getting them out of my hair for a week, the internships are intended to allow them to build some self-esteem by contributing to society (internships must be unpaid), practice speaking and acting in formal situations, and exercise the most interesting and challenging aspect of learning by applying their knowledge in new areas.
I offered Piper the chance to work with me because she’s a gifted writer, from whom I would do well to learn. Unlike my own, her writing is clear and concise, with strong emotional subtexts that draw the reader in. She’s also internalized the lesson that the revision process is essential, so her work benefits from a strong, critical eye.
Piper’s also one of my more prolific student bloggers.
I’ve not worked at a newspaper or magazine, so I’m only vaguely familiar with their traditional editing process. I have seen both sides of the scientific peer-review process, but there, the focus is more on making sure the end result is scientifically accurate. There, the use of scientific jargon is essential for clarity when communicating among scientists working in a specialized field. While I greatly enjoy the freedom of blogging, I often find myself being pulled into that careful style of scientific writing.
Hopefully, Ms. Ziebarth can help pull me out of it.
Over the next week, my challenge will be to not mention schoolwork, and all the other things we have going on in the classroom, and let Ms. Ziebarth focus on editing and revising.
Ultimately, what shows up on the blog is my responsibility, and I can be quite stubborn. But, hopefully, I’m old enough to learn how to use a good editor and reviewer well.