Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
“It is only by measuring we can cross the river of myths.” — Hans Rosling
Hans Rosling explains, in wonderfully graphical form, how as child mortality has improved so has quality of life, which has in turn lead to fewer births and population stabilization.
More details on the general reduction in poverty in The Guardian.
We talked about the Voluntary Human Extinction Project (VHMET) in Environmental Science, when we were covering issues related to overpopulation and the need for genetic diversity. While I’ve never been quite sure just how serious VHMET is, I just came across this 2007 article by Robert Krulwich on NPR about a tribe of pygmies in the mountains bordering China and Burma that chose extinction because of all the genetic problems that were being caused by inbreeding.
It would be nice if the only rule in the classroom had to be something like, “Respect each other,” or alternatively, “Be excellent to each other,” but sometimes you have to go into the details to figure out what exactly that means.
During the last interim I had my middle school class come up with a list of rules about how to act while doing group work. There’s often someone who wants to slack off, and there are other times when people want to work but the other members of the group think they could do the work better without them. So we came up with these rules that try to balance the responsibility of the individual to actively participate, and the rest of the group to let them participate.
The List:
Together with the house cup, the middle school groups are working well together for the moment.
We covered the Millennium Development Goals in Environmental Science this past quarter. However, the big outstanding question was how close have we come to meeting any of the goals. Health Intelligence hosts an excellent, interactive map for tracking progress on the Millennium Development Goals.
The website Influence Explorer has a lot of easily accessible data about the contributions of companies and prominent people to lawmakers. As a resource for civics research it’s really nice, but the time series data also makes it a useful resource for math; algebra and pre-calculus, in particular.
We talked today about the smog in Beijing.
[A]t the time of the image, the air quality index (AQI) in Beijing was 341. An AQI above 300 is considered hazardous to all humans, not just those with heart or lung ailments. AQI below 50 is considered good. On January 12, the peak of the current air crisis, AQI was 775 the U.S Embassy Beijing Air Quality Monitor—off the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scale—and PM2.5 was 886 micrograms per cubic meter.
–Carlowicz (2013): via NASA Earth Observatory
The pollution in Beijing seems to be a result of automobiles and construction, and not factories as you might think. One of my Chinese students (A.S.) pointed out that the Chinese government had moved a whole lot of factories out of Beijing about 10 years ago in preparation for the Olympics. Curiously, the factories were relocated to poorer areas as the cities have become wealthier; something we’ve seen at a global scale as well.
The relocation of factories out of Beijing is part of a mass migration of Chinese industry in recent years from wealthier cities, which have become environmentally conscious, to less-developed ones.
–Cha (2008): Relocation of Beijing factories only moved the problem in the Washington Post via the Seattle Times.
A student (N.C.) sent me this neat video based on the If the World Were a Village website. I plan to show it to my environmental science class because we’ve been talking about human population recently.
Dr. Austin has the middle school students build physical models of the continents as an exercise in geography. They use some type of cellulose clay to shape the topography then paint on or apply other icons to represent other types of spatial data; one group, for example, used sparkles to represent population.
The final models are nice for trying stop-motion fly-throughs.