Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
NPR had facinating story recently about unlikely groups working together. It’s about a town in Nevada that banded together to save a toad from going extinct. The groups working together include environmentalists and the Saving Toads thru Off-Road Racing, Mining and Ranching in Oasis Valley (aka STORM-OV).
And laughter without philosophy woven into it is but a sneeze at humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom, and if a piece of humor is to last, it must do two things. It must teach and it must preach – not professedly. If it does those two things professedly, all is lost. But if it does them effectively, that piece of humor will last forever – which is 30 years.
– Mark Twain
The term is not loaded with connotations of wisdom and wit, but “adolescent humor” is inescapable in the middle school. The question is, “What to do about it?”
With the recent furor over Mark Twain’s autobiography, which was embargoed for 100 years, I’m taking my cues from him (see above), especially since I like this philosophical approach to life in general.
I suspect it has much to do with the development of abstract thinking. During adolescence we develop a much greater ability to see and to create subtexts. With humor, the philosophy is behind the scenes, which makes it deep and resonant, but harder to see.
Background context is also important with humor, especially parody and satire: however, just because students can’t reference Plato or Socrates (the philosopher not the footballer), does not mean they don’t have their own cultural markers they can critique. Getting past “adolescent humor” means adding layers.
I am, of course, no expert on humor. This cycle I’m working with the mentor author group and my project is focusing on humorous dialogue. I have no high hopes, but I’m giving it the old college try.
None of this made it any easier last week, when I had to explain editorial cartoons. Our class is trying something new for a newsletter, a newspaper style. I vetoed Garfield-like strips as too simple, and insisted that their cartoons had to make a statement first and aim for humor second. The first student who volunteered for the job gave up after a couple hours of pulling his hair out. I think I’ll try showing them some editorial cartoons if I can find a good website. We’ll see how it goes.
Most of the exploration we studied this cycle were European expeditions. One group wanted to do something a little different, so I suggested they look in to Chinese explorations of other parts of the world. There was much Chinese commerce across the Indian Ocean, and in a non-Christian twist on the “God” theme for exploration, the Chinese brought Buddhism back from India in the third century AD (we’re studying exploration under the themes of God, Gold and Glory).
Another interesting aspect of research into Chinese exploration is the rather controversial work by Gavin Menzies that suggests that great Chinese fleets explored the Americas and circumnavigated the globe in the 1420’s, a long time before Columbus and Magellan.
There is a lot of evidence that there was no such Chinese expedition, but it’s a fascinating hypothesis and, in a way, very similar to the All About Explorers project: although Menzies’ work is not an intentionally educational hoax. Indeed, it is much more subtle and much more detailed. My favorite line of critique asserts that Menzies’ books, “.. may well prove to be the Piltdown Man of literature.” I don’t know if I’ll have the time to try to unpack that one for my students.
The poignancy and romance of exploration are distilled in Stan Rogers’ ballard “Northwest Passage“.
Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage,
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea;
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.
–Stan Rogers (1981) from Northwest Passage.
The Bounding Main website has the lyrics, including footnotes about Franklin and the others mentioned in the song, as well as major geographic features like the Davis Strait and the Beaufort Sea.
History and art collide. The music sticks in the brain then seeps down to catch the throat. I think this is a great way to get into (spark the imagination about) Artic exploration.
The next step is, of course, Shackleton and The Endurance.
One of the major motivations space exploration is the search for extra-terrestrial life. The SETI project is the most visible initiative and there are a lot of neat educational resources on their outreach page. And you can participate. seti@home allows you to download a screensaver that actually helps them process data.
The NPR program, To the Best of Our Knowledge, has a nice program asking the question, “What is Life?” The last part of the program (at about 45:00 minutes in) is an interview with Paul Davies who is head of the SETI post-detection task group. It starts with question of silicon based life, the theory of which is based on the locations of carbon and silicon in the same column in the periodic table. It also talks about what life might look like once technology really takes off and life starts “evolving by design”.
But SETI searches for signs of intelligent life using radiotelescopes. There are other projects that look for any sign of live. One of the major reasons the Mars rovers and satellites spend a lot of time looking for signs of water on the planet is that life, as we know it, requires water.
It’s also why space agencies are so interest in Europa, the moon of Jupiter that’s covered with ice. Europa also has signs of volcanic activity under the ice, which makes it doubly interesting.
All About Explorers is a wonderful site if you’re interested in talking about the credibility of sources. It looks real, is well organized, well written and could easily pass for credible to the uninitiated. The article on John Cabot starts with:
One might wonder what John Cabot and Christopher Columbus have in common. Both were born in Liverpool, England. Cabot was born in 1405, but his birth certificate was lost at sea and no one knows for sure.
Now, there are more telltale clues that everything is not on the up-and-up, particularly where they mention Cabot’s cartographic exploits on his ”alleged” return to England from growing up in Italy:
In 1484, John Cabot moved back to England with his wife and eleven sons. This was a great career move for John. He developed his own website and became quite famous for his charts and maps depicting a new route to the Far East.
I find sites like these delightful. To think that someone spent the time, energy and intelligence to create this particular little snare, says something wonderful about way the human mind works.
Nicely, the “About This Site” section notes:
All About Explorers was developed by a group of teachers as a means of teaching students about the Internet. … Because we wanted to make a point about finding useless information even in a site which looked at first to be fairly well put together, all of the Explorer biographies here are fictional. While many of the facts are true or based on truth, many inaccuracies, lies, and even downright absurdity are mixed in indiscriminately. As such, it is important that you do not use this site as a source of reference for your own research!
The site also has a set of lessons, handouts and other stuff on its “For Teachers” page.
This wonderful animation shows the exploration of the North American Coastline from 1500 to 1876, updating the map as the different explorers push further along the coastline. Most of the action occurs to the north, as expedition after expedition sough the Northwest Passage.
What’s nice, is that the names of the explorers, like Cabot and Franklin, should be familiar to students after this cycle’s research.
One of my language groups is working on mentor authors, but the other is trying the choose your own adventure story.
I started with a short, four paragraph, seed story, written in the first person with a bit of generic foreshadowing and the requisite melodrama. The setting was modern. I did consider writing the seed story with the students as a group, but I’ve not had good luck doing writing assignments by committee. Indeed, the students did have the chance to discuss the character of the protagonist but found it really hard to get past physical descriptions (which they still could not agree on) and get the personality.
We read through the seed story and then, at the end of the page, created links for the different choices the protagonist could make. Each student came up with their own choice of what to do next.
They were assigned, for the next day, to write three paragraphs advancing the story and ending with another decision point. I had to reiterate that the choice had to be something the protagonist does, not just what’s going to happen next in the plot: “You rush out of the house without even changing clothes,” would be acceptable.
The students really got into it. They really piled into the writing. According to one student, “I think this is the best thing I’ve even written.”
We read the story drafts the next day. There was a little confusion about how to end with a decision point.
Everyone had become so invested in their own stories they did not want to, as I had planned, have someone else take over at the new decision tree. In response, I’ve offered to let them continue their stories as one of the decision options, but they each also have to add to one of their peers’ story.
I’m quite excited about how this is turning out. The students are enthused and motivated and actually writing. I can also see a million ways to vary the assignment so I’ll write this one up as a success thus far.