Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Photographer Christoph Otto has a few utterly amazing photographs of the kids of Rio Negro in Columbia, who have to take a zipline to get across the valley to school.
This video gives more details.
It might also be useful if students need some incentive to try the zipline at the challenge course.
Here’s a wonderfully serious piece in the magazine Foreign Policy on what the wizarding world should do to recover and reconcile now that Voldemort has finally been vanquished.
… if history teaches us anything (consider the bitter legacy still lingering from the 17th-century Goblin Wars or the recent experience of American Muggles in Iraq and Afghanistan), it is that the defeat of Voldemort by Harry Potter may have been the easy part. Indeed, one might even say it was child’s play. The hard work of postwar stabilization still lies ahead.
— Malinowski et al, 2011: Post-Conflict Potter in Foreign Policy.
It’s a bit long, but it’s worth reading at least through the first section on, “Transitional Justice and Reconciliation”.
This section points out that, sure, Voldemort’s henchmen need to be prosecuted before the law (and not just detained without charge), but it will be a lot more difficult to deal with the thousands who supported Voldemort in greater or lesser ways. After all, some of these only did what they did under threat. The article recommends a Truth and Reconciliation Commission like in South Africa.
Among their other recommendations are:
You’ll notice that a number of these recommendations focus on expanding the rights of the individual and build in more checks and balances into government and the media. These, and the overall emphasis on building mechanisms to prevent future conflict, align well with the ideas of peace education. It might also be an interesting focus for a class discussion/Socratic dialogue.
I’d be curious to hear from any Harry Potter fans who might come across this post and have the time to read the article (even though school’s restarted and the homework’s being piled on).
I was sorting through my slide collection, while preparing for our recent move, and came across my binder of slides from New York on 9/11. These are actual, physical slides, organized neatly in plastic binder pages, not digital images.
If I remember correctly, I was just visiting the city that day, staying with my grandparents in Brooklyn. The visit was for work, I’d a post-doc lined up at Columbia and I’d lived in the city before, so I’d not thought to bring my camera with me.
So I walked into Manhattan, against the crowds turned out by the silent subways. Edging against the flux of humanity walking across the bridges away from the tragedy.
And I bought a camera, on the afternoon of September 11th, in a small shop somewhere around 32nd Street. The proprietor was sitting behind the glass cases, following what was going on outside on a small television set. Fortunately, the electricity and credit card system were still working. He was happy to sell me a good, used, fully manual Pentax K1000 (just like the one I’d left at home), and enough slide film to get me through the day.
I’ve always had faith in the strength and resiliency of New York. It’s where I’d spent my first four years, as an impressionable teenager, after immigrating to the U.S., but I would not have been able to harbor any doubts about those first, likely naive, impressions after that day. And this was without seeing or even knowing about the heroics at the World Trade Center. All I could see was the calm and matter-of-factness of the people on the street. Though the arteries had clogged, the blood of the city, its people, still flowed.
Nor was I the only one headed towards the dense clouds of smoke, made eerily attractive by the clear sunlight and pellucid skies of that clear September day. I don’t think I would have made it over the bridge if there were not a few other people, hugging against the railing, edging their way across. That infinitesimal trickle turned into a small but steady stream on the streets of Manhattan itself, which was then dammed up by the police line at Canal Street. Being unable to see anything from there, I turned left and joined the crowd this time as took me back across the Manhattan Bridge back into Brooklyn.
I figured the opposite waterfront would be the best place of any for me to get any glimpse of what was going on. So, once across, I looped under the eastern side of the bridge and walked along the roads that edge the shore until I ended up in Brooklyn Bridge Park.
The picture at the top of the post is from the Brooklyn Bridge Park. I managed to get two major icons into the frame that are important personal symbols: a piece of the Brooklyn Bridge is on the right edge and, if you squint, you can see the Statue of Liberty (my favorite landmark) on the left. They’re a good reminder of the history and purpose of this great city. I also like that the picture captures the silhouette of the city dove, a graceful symbol of peace, standing against the roiling clouds of smoke, dust and turmoil.
Bamboo can grow as fast as 1 meter per day. Alexander Vittouris, a student at Monash University, used this fact to shape the stem into the frame for this human-powered vehicle that he calls the Ajiro. The idea is to create a more sustainable means of production.
Derived from the field of arborsculpture [my link], which specialises in the specific modification and grafting of plants to create shaped structures, the conceptual design, the Ajiro, involves using these principals to create a ‘clean footprint’ urban and recreational vehicle – a grown vehicle. Using bamboo, with its rapid growth rate (as much as one meter in a 24hr period), coupled with its structural integrity make it an ideal candidate for the formation of unique urban personal mobility.
— Vittouris (2011): Ajiro – Naturally grown urban personal mobility
State of Green has a good description of the process.
Following up on Fully Printed‘s vision of a future with 3d printing, I came across Shapeways, a website that lets you upload 3d designs and “prints” them in your choice of objects. One user, Cunicode chose to make different cup design every day. I’m quite taken by their Low Resolution cup.
In the finished cup, you can clearly see the quadrilateral and triangular facets that make up the 3d design’s mesh. I like that.
So now I’m just waiting until something interesting occurs to me. Shapeways would be a great place for creating some unique manipulatives.
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.
Andrew Zak Williams asks 30 believers and 30 non-believers why. Their answers do a great job summarizing the major arguments and philosophies of both camps.
Theists assert a number of reasons for their belief: their need for there to be some purpose in the world rather than see the universe as the result of the unguided vagaries of random chance; profound, spiritual experiences in their past; their perception that the beauty of life and the universe must have had some (intelligent) design; and sometimes, an acknowledgment of the need for an element of blind faith.
Atheists, on the other hand, argue the lack of evidence; the often prejudicial, unjust nature of the religions many of them grew up with; and the fact that to recognize one type of religion as correct, often requires its adherents to believe that the others are wrong, leading to the conjecture that none of them are right and they’re all wrong.
Stephen Hawking tries to thread and interesting needle:
I am not claiming there is no God. The scientific account is complete, but it does not predict human behaviour, because there are too many equations to solve.One therefore uses a different model, which can include free will and God.
— Stephen Hawking (2011) in Faith no more (Williams, 2011) in the NewStatesman.
Many adolescents will be encountering these types of questions on their own or through all the bat mitzvah, confirmations and other religious coming-of-age ceremonies adolescents face. Either one of these two articles would be an interesting, if delicate, subject for a Socratic dialogue, especially while studying the history of religions.
[via The Dish]
Iceland’s new draft of a constitution has been submitted to parliament. The drafters relied heavily on citizen comments using internet sites like Twitter and Facebook. Anyone who’s scrolled through the comments sections of just about any site open to the general public would probably worry that the ratio of good information to bad would be pretty small (a low signal-to-noise ratio). But,
“What I learned is that people can be trusted. We put all our things online and attempted to read, listen and understand and I think that made the biggest difference in our job and made our work so so so much better,” [Salvor Nordal, the head of the elected committee of citizens] said.
–Valdimarsdottir (2011): Icelanders hand in draft of world’s first ‘web’ constitution on phsorg.com
The final draft is here (the link uses Google Translate, so it’s not a perfect translation). It will be interesting to see what the parliament does with it now.
From the constitution:
12th Art. Rights of children
All children should be guaranteed the protection and care of their welfare demands.
What the child’s best interests shall always prevail when taking decisions on matters relating thereto.
Child should be guaranteed the right to express their views in all matters relating thereto shall take due account of the views of the child according to age and maturity.
–Article 12 of draft Icelandic Constitution via Google Translate.