Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Last Wednesday’s lunar eclipse was nicely captured in the stop-motion video below. What a wonderful way to celebrate getting past the longest night of the year. And, because the question does come up, we’re seeing the shadow of the Earth cross over the moon.
Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse from William Castleman on Vimeo.
With the exception of informed ones, opinions have little use as supporting evidence. – Critically Evaluating the Logic and Validity of Information from Cuesta College.
Cuesta College has a nice but fairly dense webpage on, “Critically Evaluating the Logic and Validity of Information“.
It starts with distinguishing between facts and opinions, goes into evaluating arguments and rounds up with asking critical questions. There’s lots of good information, but it needs to be parsed, broken apart, and condensed for middle school students.
Facts are statements that can be verified or proven to be true or false. Factual statements from reliable sources can be accepted and used in drawing conclusions, building arguments, and supporting ideas.
Opinions are statements that express feelings, attitudes, or beliefs and are neither true nor false. Opinions must be considered as one person’s point of view that you are free to accept or reject. With the exception of informed ones, opinions have little use as supporting evidence, but they are useful in shaping and evaluating your own thinking. [My emphasis]
– Critically Evaluating the Logic and Validity of Information from Cuesta College.
This can be tied in with my previous notes on Paul Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement to create a set of lessons on critical thinking and evaluation.
The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy has recently issued a report showing that teen pregnancy dropped by 6% in 2009. They have some evidence that the TV show “16 and Pregnant”, which I’ve mentioned before, is one of the reasons why.
Among those teens who have watched MTV’s 16 and Pregnant, 82% think the show helps teens better understand the challenges of teen pregnancy and parenthood and how to avoid it.
– Albert (2010)
Of course, it’s essential to note that, “Teens (46%) say parents most influence their decisions about sex.”
The report has many more details.
NASA’s Earth Observatory is not only a great place for pictures from space, it also posts regular scientific updates, including the most recent map of the change in temperature since 1980.
The most obvious observation from the map is that the poles are warming faster than the rest of the planet, especially the North Pole. This is a pattern that has been predicted since at least the 90’s, so the temperature observations tend to show that the scientists and computer modelers who do this research may just know what they’re doing.
It’s also important to note that the Antarctic is not warming nearly as fast as the Arctic. The continental glaciers that would most significantly raise sea level (think 10’s of meters) are in Antarctica.
The northern hemisphere warming will likely be difficult for a number of species to deal with. Polar bears, the charismatic megafauna (I love that term) most associated with the effects of the melting Arctic sea-ice, are still in big trouble. Recent research, however, suggests that if something can be done to reduce global warming in the coming century, there will remain places with enough ice that the species may survive.
Update: Interesting article on global warming science and politics in the NY Times. It starts off talking about David Keeling, the scientist who came up with a reliable way to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide.
One of Google’s new search options lets you assess sites based on reading levels.
The purpose of this blog keeps evolving in my mind. It is a place for me to keep all the notes and pedagogic reflections that I should be recording, but have not, and would not, be keeping otherwise. It’s also a bit like my writer’s notebook in that I use it to experiment my writing style.
I also hope the site can be useful to other Montessori (or any really) teachers because I have a real, fervent belief that everyone gains when we share as much information as possible.
This blog, being in a public space, should also be friendly to parents who might look in once in a while; this way they can get a fair, if perhaps too revealing, glimpse of my educational philosophy, see where I’m going, and get a bit of an explanation of why I do the things I do.
Finally, I occasionally show certain blog posts to my middle school students. It’s an easy place to link videos like the one about the Northwest Passage. Almost inevitably after I do that though, I’ll find some student perusing through the rest of the blog, usually with the exclamation, “Hey that’s not what actually happened!”
So I try to write posts that are accessible to all these different groups. I try not to shy too much away from using longer words, layered meanings, references, and subtexts, because, after all, if students don’t already get them, this is as good a place as any for them to learn.
Barry Schwartz has an interesting post at the Search Engine Roundtable about the new Google option, as does Adrian Chen at Gawker. Both articles post the graphs for a number of different sites. I’ve not yet seen an actual definition of the what the different levels on the graphs mean, but the Muddle sits almost entirely in the intermediate section of the graph, much like the New York Times’ site. This does not seem like bad company to keep, though I do think I’d like to try for more variety. We’ll see.
Rob Dunn at the Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting article on the not-so-useful aspects of human anatomy that resulted from evolutionary history.
It starts with evidence that the mitochondria in our cells were once separate organisms and goes on to explain things like how the change from quadrupedal to bipedal, upright walking resulted in our S-shaped spine (and frequent backaches) and our unsupported intestines. It’s quite the interesting read.
If you take all the books ever written and draw a graph showing which words were used when, you’d end up with something like Google’s Ngram. Of course I thought I’d chart “Montessori” and “muddle”.
The “Montessori” graph is interesting. It seems to show the early interest in her work, around 1912, and then an interesting increase in interest in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Like with all statistics, one should really be cautious about how you interpret this type of data, however, I suspect this graph explains a lot about the sources of modern trends in Montessori education. I’d love hear someone with more experience thinks.
Alexis Madrigal has an interesting collection of graphs, while Discover has an article with much more detail about what can be done with Google’s database.
At the end of each year, the Middle School puts on Dinner and a Show. As has become traditional, the students performed a play for the Show, and, for dinner, this year they did a Mediterranean themed meal: lasagna, baklava and some sort of cherry drink. The overwhelming feedback from the not necessarily impartial audience, of family members and faculty, seems to be that food and performance were quite a success. And, I have to say, the same applies from my point of view as well. The students did a great job putting everything together and pulling off the performance.
We usually work on Dinner and a Show for the entire second cycle. The first five weeks revolve around choosing the play, learning lines, and planning the meal. Our director, for the second year running, Ms. Jessica Parker, did a wonderful job with the adaptation, staging and working with the kids.
I was extremely lucky this year that I had two students who were really interested in the project. One, an eight grader, had been planning on taking charge since last year. The other, a seventh grader, really wanted to do the food. What was really nice was that, most of the time, they were the ones pushing me to get stuff done.
I’d ask questions like, “Have you started on the playbill yet?”
“Yes,” they’d reply, with exaggerated patience, “We’re still waiting for you to help with the images.”
The sixth week of the cycle, our immersion week, was dedicated entirely to the event; lots of practicing and food preparation. That’s when the students really shone. We had some help making the baklava (thanks Dr. Jen), but the next day, which was spent assembling two (and eventually three) types of lasagna, I only had a couple queries about what to use to boil water for the pasta (an electrical skillet works fairly well).
Everyone had a part in the play, but were also involved in setting things up. Apart from the cooks, there were separate crews for lighting and the backdrops. Once the crews got going, I spent most of my time staying out of the way. While I’d so like to jump in and help with everything, this is the way I think the middle school should work. I count this week as a really good one.
