Although I’m pretty sure I’d explained this before, I had a student ask me today what makes the bread rise. He’d been combining the ingredients to make bread for the student run business with a rather thoughtful look on his face. So I told him that yeast is a fungus that “eats” the sugar in the honey and “releases” carbon dioxide bubbles, which get trapped in the dough causing the bread to rise.
I could see the look of disgust racing across his face at the mention of fungi, so I asked, “Would you like to look at it?” He did, and he was not the only one. So after lunch I broke out the microscope, which we have not used much this year since we’re doing the physical sciences this year. A slide, a cover slip, a drop of the residue from the glass jar we used to mix the liquids for the bread, a quick (so very quick) demonstration of how to use the microscope and whallah.
Under 10 times magnification you could see hundreds of cells moving across the field of view. The students were impressed by how many there were. Under 40 times magnification you begin to see cell structures.
Image from Wikimedia Commons, but yeast under the 40x microscope objective looks pretty similar.
We’ll look at yeast again next year when we’re focusing on the life sciences, but when I think of the Montessori axioms that the role of the teacher is to prepare the environment and to follow the child, I think of situations like this. At this time, in this place, after kneading dough for half a year, the student asked the question, and everything was ready for him to answer the that question and whet his appetite for more.
On the last morning of our immersion trip we had a choice between going to Hot Springs, Arkansas, with its geothermal springs and another museum, or hiking at Lake Catherine where we had spent the night. Since we’d been to two museums on the previous day, we pretty unanimously chose the hike. And it was great.
Conchoidal fracture in quartz (image by Eurico Zimbres FGEL/UERJ via Wikimedia commons)
We took the Falls Branch Trail, which follows a couple of young, boulder-choked creeks that have are carving steep-sided valleys through nice clean limestone bedrock. The students were constantly bringing me rocks to identify, and they were almost invariable limestone, with a few pieces of quartz thrown in. The limestone was so clean that it was near translucent (fairly close to marble) and the cobbles in the stream bed were easy to mistake for smoky quartz, particularly if they were rounded enough that you could not look for quartz’s characteristic, curved, conchoidal fracture. Quartz also tends to be a lot harder than limestone, but the ultimate test, which the students really wanted to see, is to put acid on the rock. Limestone fizzes. I did not have any limestone on this trip (note to self: get some HCl for next time), but this little experiment is a nice follow up for our discussions of ionic bonding in chemistry. We have some limestone samples back at school so I plan on doing this as a follow-up.
Quartz vein (white) cutting through a limestone boulder.
Because Lake Catherine is very close to Hot Springs, it would not be surprising to find some quartz. The hot water that’s coming out of the springs flows up through cracks (faults) that extend deep beneath the surface. The deeper basement rocks are silicates, the granitic rocks that make up the continental crust, so the hot water dissolves some of that silicate material, and when the water cools down, ever so slightly, as it approaches the surface, some of those silicates will precipitate out to coat the walls of the faults with quartz. Sometimes they even fill up the faults entirely, leaving quartz veins.
The stream bed, being of young geological age, was a series of small waterfalls culminating in the five meter high drop that gives the trail its name. The water was clear and cold but with that beautiful aquamarine tint of dissolved limestone. There’s a whole lot more I could say about plunge pools and migrating nickpoints, but I’d probably go on too long. Besides we did not take the time to talk about those since there was so much else to see.
Interference pattern in ripples.
When we reached estuary of Falls Creek and Lake Catherine, the lake’s water was so calm that the kids started trying to skip stones. This of course provided a beautiful opportunity to look at water waves and interference patterns. As the ripples from each skip of the stone expanded, they melded. The constructive interference was easier to see in the field because it made for bigger ripples. But the photos show the destructive interference very nicely.
This was an excellent hike. We were a little pressed for time since we needed to get back to school before the end of the school day, but next time, I think, I’ll have us pack our food in and have lunch on the trail overlooking the waterfall and the lake. The ability to use these types of outdoor experience to integrate the academic work is one of the main reasons I enjoy the Montessori approach to middle school. All through the trip back though I kept thinking about how I could organize things so that we would never need to see the inside of the classroom again.
“In a world where there is a common lament that there are no more heroes, too often cynicism and despair are perceived as evidence of the death of moral courage. That perception is wrong. People of great valor and heart, committed to noble purpose, with long records of personal sacrifice, walk among us in every country of the world.”
– Kerry Kennedy
Kerry Kennedy and photographer Eddie Adams are powerful advocates for human rights with their coffee table book “Speak Truth to Power” and Kennedy’s website, PBS documentary and center that emerged out of it. The book and website has a series of stories and interviews from human rights activists from around the world. Some of the subjects and issues are searing, as you can imagine, so use with care.
This was recommended by Sarah __ B.
A colleague gave me a copy of the play “Speak Truth to Power”, a dvd based on a book by Kerry Kennedy about the work and struggle of human rights activists. She got it for her students’ MMUN project. The movie and book are part of a curriculum used in Romania, as they are representing that country.
The movie would make a powerful addition to Cycle 3 (no pun intended) or 5, Year B for MS, or discussion point for HS.
For myself, this book ties in powerfully with our ongoing discussions of the Little Rock Nine and how brave individuals can change the world.
I’ve been thinking recently about the similarities I’ve observed between Montessori Middle and High Schools and liberal arts education at the university level. Especially when compared to a traditional secondary education the two are remarkably similar. Two that stand out are the variety of choice for the students to tailor their own learning, and lots of responsibility given to the student to use their time and resources effectively. The Montessori experience should be really beneficial in college, but that just leaves the little matter of High School.
Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, has written quite a bit about the failure of the traditional high school in the “rich world”.
[I]n secondary schools there is a demand for uniformity and regulation of behavior that results in less autonomy and the dumbing down of academic expectations – Botstein (2008).
Botstein argues for universities taking over high schools because they have credibility as educational institutions and because the structure of secondary education in the U.S., with rapid turnover of school boards and superintendents, is a failed model. One fundamental problem that Botstein and others such as Angeline Lillard identify is that the traditional educational is based on a factory style model. Students are fed through the assembly line and those who do not, or can not, conform to the necessary automation get rejected by the system. This model co-evolved with the industrial revolution when the power of the factories and efficiency were novel marvels to behold.
To a degree the education factory worked well in the past, providing the workers for the industries at the time, and certainly, for a while, helped rapidly raise educational levels and productivity. Yet as more and more rote jobs are now being automated, the educational premium is now on creativity. Where technology takes the place of the assembly line worker it also makes it easier and cheaper for the individual inventor or creator.
Personally, when assessing high schools my students go on to, the main thing I look for is the degree of independence they offer their students. Hemmed in by the needs of standardized testing and curriculum standards, it is too rare that students get the opportunities to follow their passions. My own teaching philosophy has also evolved. I’ve come to the conclusion that by the time my students graduate my Middle School they should be the type of independent learners who would succeed in the college environment (and hopefully in the world). That type of independence also means that they also have to tools to deal with anything that comes up in high school, even if they have to work around the system.
Spices in a Moroccan market. Image by Donar Reiskoffer, found on Wikipedia Commons.
Montessori elementary programs approach history from the perspective of the basic needs of human beings. They look at how humans have satisfied the needs for food, shelter, spirituality and so on over time.
A new book by Tom Standage called, “An Edible History of Humanity” looks at human history through food, from how agriculture lead to the beginning of civilization, to the role of spices in the European discovery of the Americas, to how food production shaped the rise and fall of Napoleon, to the effects of the Green Revolution on the world today.
it concentrates specifically on the intersections between food history and world history, to ask a simple question: which foods have done most to shape the modern world, and how?
Spiked Online has a nice review of the book that touches on many of the key points. This book certainly open up a wider discussion of world history. A simplified version would likely be a great addition to the middle school curriculum.
The vivid colors, heart-rending smells and sheer mass of the pyramids of spices in Moroccan markets are a vivid reminder of the importance of the Arab spice trade. The spice mixes I remember in particular, they can consist of over twenty different spices coming from all around the world.
Why do we use our hands? Milton Glaser (above) uses his to think, and he cites Frank Wilson who argues that the hand and the brain are so connected as to be a single almost indistinguishable system. In fact, Wilson extrapolates this connection to education where, he makes the arguement, “less rigid more individualized approach to education will yield a student with a unified body and mind” (according to The New Yorker, 1998).
Drawing is thinking for some people at least. Perhaps that’s one of the things that defines kinesthetic learners? It certainly is something to bear in mind when designing and implementing the curriculum. Teachers tend to use teaching methods that fit their learning styles, so it is important to bear in mind we will have a variety of students. It’s certainly something about which I have to keep reminding.
It is also important to remember that all students benefit from experiences with different modes of learning. Students, especially adolescents whose brains are rapidly developing new neural pathways and pruning others, need to experience variety, because once we are set in our ways, it becomes a lot harder to learn new tricks.
This is where preparing the environment becomes so important. We want student to have choices, but we want them to try new things, and sometimes these two objectives conflict. The video above does make a persuasive argument to me about why we should draw and practice drawing. Perhaps it will do the same for our kids.
The title of Mark Bauerlein‘s book is somewhat provocative. It’s called, “The Dumbest Generation, How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.” As I am very much an advocate for incorporating technology in the classroom, it’s not too unexpected that I disagree with large parts of his thesis.
Yes there is probably an important link between the brain and the hand that facilitates creative work. But it does not necessarily follow that, “Writing by hand, students will give more thought to the craft of composition. They will pause over a verb, review a transition, check sentence lengths …” (Bauerlein, 2010). As we work on habits of revision there seems to be no real reason why they should spend more time on improving a sentence they’ve hand written than one they’ve typed. True, if students are conditioned to write in short rapid bursts of texting it will translate into their other writing, but it is the role of the teacher to help them delineate these different genres of writing. I also have not seen the evidence that writing by hand is any less abstract than writing by typing on a keyboard. We are already expressing ideas using an abstract medium, words, why is one form of expression better than the other?
Where I do agree with Bauerlein is on the need to take breaks, even substantial ones, from technology and the online world. Where I see the greatest need for this is in aiding student’s comprehension of the natural world. You live too long in the virtual world and you begin to translate that experience into the real world. Yet the virtual world remains a model of the real one. It is simplified and enhanced to make it a more enjoyable experience, so the lessons you learn there do not truly apply to the real world. In addition, physical experience in the virtual world, at least for now, cannot create the kinesthetic, mind-body understanding of the laws of physics and biology that you learn from real-world games and just walking along the nature trail. This is why I am a firm believer in our week-long immersions every six weeks.
So I continue to allow my students to introduce new technology to the classroom, as long as they can show me that it is effective in helping them learn. The latest thing is the proliferation of iPod Touches. I like the iPods because of apps like iSeismo that lets you monitor vibrations in 3D. However, on our recent visit to the Le Bonheur Hospital a number of my students took their notes on their iPods. I personally don’t believe that these are more effective than pencil and paper because you can’t combine text and images very effectively on an iPod, but they did take copious notes (which they were quite proud to show me). I’m planning on giving them a quick quiz to see what they learned from the trip so we’ll see just how effective their note taking was.
We’re all swimming in a sea of new technologies, and we can’t really tell what will benefit and what will hinder without trying them out. So, I at least conclude that the key goal of middle school education should be to create in students a core competence and confidence that will help students navigate steadily in this world of much information and rapidly changing fads. A fundamental understanding of the mechanisms that underlie people’s behavior is key. Know yourself and understand how societies behave. The first is not trivial and the second requires drawing general conclusions from a lot of historical data, which is quite challenging for most adolescents, but that’s why we teach the way we do.
Note: There is an interesting discussion of the use of technology in the traditional classroom going on now on Will Richardson blog post “The Big Questions: Now What?“
The primary role of an instructor is to transform a novice into an expert within a given subject area. – Cooper (1990)
The above quote comes from a paper on instructional design by Graham Cooper. I don’t quite agree with it entirely since it does not seem to allow for a well rounded view of a student as an individual, or the Socratic ideal, but it does seem applicable to the more strictly academic areas in the middle school curriculum.
In order to figure out what distinguishes experts from novices, cognitive scientists have spent a lot of time observing the two groups. Their key finding has been that as you become an expert on a topic, you construct mental pictures (or schemes) of the shapes of problems, so when you encounter a new problem you can just fit the new problem to the mental pictures you have and see which best fits. It’s a bit like learning rules of thumb that apply to different situations. When a problem comes up, the expert can quickly whip out the right rule of thumb from their mental back pocket while the novice, though equally smart, needs to figure out all the steps with some degree of trial and error.
This is a nice perspective when it comes to teaching something like solving equations, but I think one important distinction of the Montessori philosophy is the belief that adolescents should also be learning flexibility, and be capable of dealing with novel problems. Because adolescence is when students are just becoming able to think abstractly (at least according to Paiget), and abstract thinking needs to be practiced, it is necessary that students encounter novel, challenging problems on a regular basis.
Pangea breakup in reverse (adapted from image in Wikimedia Commons).
A lot of creative and problem solving thinking comes from hashing out new problems. In a globalized world, where technology is capable of dealing with routine tasks, be they constructing a car or solving a series of equations, creative problem solving is becoming a more and more valuable skill. Especially now that “The World is Flat“.
