Natural World – Page 84 – Montessori Muddle

Circadian rhythms and a nature deficit

I remain fascinated by the Brazilian study that found that kids living in homes without electricity did not have the same sleep deprivation issues as those with electricity. I thought of it again recently when I ran across the term “nature-deficit disorder” in Oak Hill Montessori school’s newsletter.

Unstructured nature time is so important because children live through their senses. When they are right there in the forest, they are getting a primary multi-sensory experience of nature as opposed to the secondary, often distorted, dual-sensory view presented by TV. – Daniels, 2009 (p. 4)

The idea of nature-deficit disorder comes from the book “Last Child in the Woods” by Richard Louv. Written in 2005 and updated in 2008 with a bunch of practical things you can do to change things, Louv’s book advocates for more time in nature because, “a growing body of research links our mental, physical, and spiritual health directly to our association with nature.” Not only does it affect our individual health, but directly experiencing nature also helps increase environmental awareness (which ties into the Montessori peace curriculum). Louv argues that children have a fundamental right to walk in the woods:

Science sheds light on the measurable consequences of introducing children to nature; studies pointing to health and cognition benefits are immediate and concrete. We also need to articulate the underlying “first principle”—one that emerges not only from what science can prove, but also from what it cannot fully reveal; one that resists codification because it is so elemental: a meaningful connection to the natural world is fundamental to our survival and spirit, as individuals and as a species. Louv (2009)

I can’t say I disagree very much with this diagnosis. My adolescents are too often opting for technology rather than being outside, especially if it’s in nature. This is one reason my students are building the nature trail. The trail has been coming along slowly though, but the seasons are changing and we’ll spend more time outside in the warmer weather. The timing is also nice because we’ve just finished covering simple machines in physics. There are logs and junk to be moved and saplings to be cleared.

Note: Louv has a long list of links to print and broadcast articles on the whole “nature-deficit disorder” concept.

Sleep makes us better people

In researching the benefits of sleep to assist a student interested in sleep deprivation, I came across the work of Matthew Walker from UC Berkley. His papers have some rather intriguing titles. One of them (Walker and van der Helm, 2009), called “Overnight Therapy? The Role of Sleep in Emotional Brain Processing” finds that lack of sleep seems to result in us retaining more negative memories and emotions, and reduces our ability to act rationally (Yoo et al., 2007):

[S]tudies indicate that prior sleep loss significantly impairs the ability for effective next-day learning of new experiences across numerous species. Furthermore, sleep loss appears to disrupt the learning of different affective categories to varying extents, potentially creating an imbalance in negative emotional memory dominance. – Walker and van der Helm, (2009)

Walker’s also synthesized the current research on sleep and finds sleep is important in other types of memory as well. During sleep we organize information in our brains, finding context for the data we absorbed while awake, which is why we remember things better after we sleep.

[S]leep serves a … role in memory processing that moves far beyond the consolidation and strengthening of individual memories and, instead, aims to intelligently assimilate and generalize these details offline. – Walker (2009)

Indeed, organizing information into mental schemes is one of the keys to learning.

Walker’s bibliography is a treasure trove of information about research on the affects of sleep on our emotional and intellectual well being. These articles will, however, probably need a lot of translation for the typical middle schooler. For that reason, using the press reports on this work would be a much better alternative for students.

Snowfall

To accurately observe nature sometimes takes time. Land-labs are intended to get students out into nature for a week at a time throughout the entire year so that they can see the change in the seasons. But sometimes you need to winnow things down, speed things up, to observe the slow changes that you just miss. Time-lapse photography is one great way to do this.

Rising bread

Yesterday, one of our experimental loaves of bread failed to rise, so re-tried it today and had a discussion about all the things we can do encourage it to rise. Since yeast is an organism, and we talked about the role of yeast in baking bread yesterday, this was a chance for the students to take what they’d learned and extrapolate into a new situation.

These types of situations pop up all the time in the student run business, especially when we try something new. It gets to the critical thinking skills adolescents need to practice. It is the reason Maria Montessori advocated for a boarding house middle school that ran a business. It is one of the reasons I insist that we start at least one new business every year in addition to our core pizza business.

Baking bread; the yeast question

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.

yeast-cells — 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.

Evolution and/of dance

My students know my weaknesses too well. I had a well crafted argument today that I should let them watch Judson Laipply‘s YouTube video, “Evolution of Dance“. The gist of the argument was that they never really understood evolution until they saw the video (we covered evolution last year); the way the dance moves evolved, with small changes from one to the other is an excellent analogy for the gradual evolution of organisms. The best example was how The Robot changed into Breakdancing. I let them watch it of course, it was a good argument and the video is pretty harmless. And if it actually helped them learn about evolution ….

Saturn’s aurora borealis

I came across this beautiful animation of the auroras on Saturn. The auroras are caused by charged particles (ions) from the sun, the solar wind of protons and electrons, are focused down onto areas near the poles of a planet by the magnetic lines of a planet’s magnetic field. The ions hit the atmosphere colliding with atmospheric gas molecules like nitrogen and oxygen causing them to become excited and spit out electrons (becoming ions themselves). Molecules are not “happy” when they’re missing electrons so they’ll capture one to become “fulfilled” (fill their outer electron shells). It’s when they recapture electrons that they give off the light that we see as the auroras.

On Earth the auroras are green or brownish-red (from the Oxygen) and blue or red (from the Nitrogen). Saturn’s atmosphere is mostly hydrogen and helium so we’re not quite sure what color its auroras are. The auroras in the animation were colored in by NASA since the camera on the Cassini spacecraft is black and white.

The video clip below gives a nice explanation of auroras.