Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
EV from Somewhat in the Air has a great post on antithesis.
An antithesis … can be built by contrasting any of the different parts of a statement. But there is always a balance in the actual physical construction.
— EV (2011) in Antithesis – 15 minutes of writing
For example:
“Extremism in the defense of liberty is not vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” –Barry Goldwater (1964)
It makes for a nice little (15 minutes perhaps?) self-contained exercise.
Learn.Genetics have some very nice animations and exercises that deal with DNA, genes and protein synthesis. At the moment, I’m finding the following particularly useful:
Therefore, he added,
we must prepare carefully,
out of the spotlight.— U.S. diplomatic cable Haiku via Haïkuleaks
We’ll be studying poetry soon, and Wikileaks is in the news. I therefore post the mind-expanding website, Haïkuleaks, which condenses diplomatic cables into seventeen syllables and three lines each.
The site uses Haiku Finder to scan through the cables for inadvertent Haikus.
‘People need to see
the results of decisions,’
the Sultan stated.
Haiku Finder is a quick and extremely dirty way of finding haiku’s in any texts.
You may not want to let your students find out about this site, or, alternatively, having them plug in their existing texts might make for an interesting way of introducing haikus.
I’m not particularly poetic (tell me something I don’t know), I have to go back through a month of posts to get my first Muddle haiku:
One of those things is
that rabbits eat their own poop.
Well not exactly.— from On Rabbit Digestion
Just in time for us to start reading The Chrysalids, David Schindler has a frightening gallery from the abandoned surroundings of Chernobyl, twenty-five years after the accident with the nuclear reactor.
The YouTube video below shows the same images as the gallery.
There’s a curious and clear gender difference when it comes to my student’s use of their blogs. All the girls have them and most are posting things right now, but the boys don’t.
This is in large part due to the way I rolled out the student blogs. I started with a couple students (girls) who were most interested, and since then I’ve been setting up blogs for students as they’ve been requested. The process has been slow because I’ve been trying the multi-user version of WordPress (WPMU), which is not nearly as easy to set up as a stand-alone WordPress installation (like the one used for the Muddle). I think, however, that I have the setup process worked out now, so I could accelerate the rollout if necessary.
Since the two students I started with were girls, it’s perhaps not too surprising that it’s the other girls who were most interested in getting their own. That’s the way the social connections are arranged in our class.
Though there’s no real evidence for it, I do wonder, however, if there is a gender component to it too. Since girls tend to develop more quickly than boys at this age (see Sax, 2007 for a general description, and NIH, 2010 for a recent overview of adolescent brain development), so perhaps they’re more self-reflective. Girls also tend to emphasize interpersonal relationships more (e.g. Johnson, 2004), and are generally more communicative.
… females (1) develop more intimate friendships, (2) stress the importance of maintaining intimacy, and (3) expect more intimacy in their friendships than do males. — in Gender, grade, and relationship differences in emotional closeness within adolescent friendships by Johnson, (2004)
At any rate, I’m curious to see how this develops. I think I’m going to remind the whole class about the blogs though.
(Excel Spreadsheet used to create the brain volume scattergram: here.)
The attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords will come up tomorrow, (I have one student who is extremely interested in politics who is sure to recognize the importance of this), so I’ve been trying to figure out how to approach the issue. The New York Times’ Learning Network Blog has an excellent resource on, “Ways to Teach About the Arizona Shootings” that starts with allowing students to have a personal response, provides lots of great links relating to political violence and inflammatory rhetoric, and ends with a review of the history of assassinations in the U.S..
For my class, however, the two places I see the most relevant connections, that are developmentally appropriate, are in our ongoing discussion of rhetoric and argument, and in the language lessons focusing on connecting issues in texts.
In the wake of the shooting, as everyone’s been trying to make sense of the attacker, his reading list has been a key focal point for trying to understand his motives.
There are lots of ways to link Mein Kampf, Animal Farm, and Brave New World; the latter two are secondary school staples for one thing. However, considering the issues in these texts, here’s one interesting observation by adriejan from Light Sound Dimension, “While these are all masterpieces, they have in common that they deal with the topic of reality perception being controlled by higher powers.” Does this hint at someone struggling with their identity and feeling powerless in the face of a complex world? Perhaps. This is what Jacob Mooney at Vox Populism calls “forensic bibliography”.
Whether we recognize it or not, we most often connect with the themes of books, even more than the quality of the writing I think (how else to explain the success of the early Harry Potter books, or Twilight). So our preferred reading lists tell us a lot about ourselves.
I’m glad I’ve started on rhetoric and argument this cycle, because that’s another key intersection with the curriculum given where my early adolescents are morally and philosophically. There two points about extreme rhetoric that need to be made here (at least). The specific point deals with the direct consequences of the language you use. Extreme language like the statement, “I’m going to kill you for that!” limits your options, even if meant as hyperbole. If it’s taken seriously, backing down from the threat diminishes your reputation, tempting you to try to back up your unintended extremism. And when it’s not taken seriously, you’re requiring the content of your statement to be ignored, which sets a precedent for everything else you say.
The more general point about using inflammatory rhetoric, that it’s bad for the political and social culture, is probably the harder one to get across, because in insisting on temperate language you’re ultimately arguing against free-speech. Free-speech is fundamental principle that idealists latch onto easily. Adolescents have a predilection for idealism. Principles also offer good, solid, defendable positions when dealing with complex issues. Put free-speech against the idea that inflammatory language helps create a culture of violence, especially when it’s difficult to find any clear link between the language and the action, and I have no idea where the discussion will end up. Yet I have some confidence that my students will see the point, even if they don’t concede it. They have dealt with this type of ambiguity before, especially when they’re arguing about the limits of my power in the classroom (“Let’s vote not to have any math this cycle”).
We’ll see how it goes.
The New York Times has made data from the U.S. census available in an interactive map. This is an excellent tool to play with, since it has geographic information about income, race, education and more. The data is at the census tract level, so it is quite detailed.
I can see using this app being very useful for local research projects. Simply comparing the location of the different racial populations in a city like Memphis to the spatial distribution of income or education would probably tell a lot that we already intuitively know.