Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever. – Robbins (2010), This is a news website article about a scientific paper
If you’ve ever thought that science articles in major newspapers all seem to follow a similar pattern you should read this article by Martin Robbins, the Guardian’s “Lay Scientist”. It’s hilarious.
Despite everything, the Personal World lesson on being proactive-versus-reactive seems to have made an impression. I keep hearing students point out reactive behavior to each other. Someone even cited the reading from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens. Changes in actual behavior are, however, a little more difficult to quantify.
I’m quite happy for students to use their handheld devices if they’re being productive. They’ve used them to take text-based notes (I’m still not sure how they are able to type so fast), make flashcards (I need to find or make an app for notecards and bibliography cards for the IRP), and now they’ve discovered one for making graphic organizers called Idea Sketch (thanks go to J. for showing me, and M. for finding it).
I’ve been using graphic organizers (GOs) a lot at the beginning of the year and students are getting the idea that we will inevitably put one together to summarize the weekly themes. So today, during our Needs of People discussion/lesson, when I did a quick spot check to see what the the iPod users were doing with their devices, they showed me that they were already putting together GOs. Because I really want them to develop the skill themselves, I’ve not been giving them GOs ahead of time, and we’ve been practicing putting them together. I was quite happy to see them being proactive. Maybe the lesson helped after all.
Idea Sketch is simple, seems to work pretty well, and is a free download at least at them moment.
So now I want to use video games in the classroom. My head of school is politely opposed. I argued it would be useful for integrating our work on the themes of geography and needs of people. She allowed me to pick up a copy of SimCity if I could come up with some sort of evidence that it actually works. Quantitative evidence. You’ll be hearing more about that in a later post.
However, while I was shopping I also picked up a cheap copy of Civilization IV because while it also goes into city building, it does so from a more regional perspective. I’d played older versions of the Civilization games before (a long time ago in a galaxy far away) so I was somewhat favorably familiar with how it works.
Unfortunately, the fourth version is too sophisticated. There are so many variables to deal with that it would be difficult to use on the relatively short time-scale that I want students to spend on this. Whereas before, founding a city on a river gave very obvious benefits (a bonus in the productivity of the land around the river), there are so many different types of land surfaces and changes that can be done to them that the advantages of the river, while still there are much less obvious.
On the plus side, if students find the game enjoyable, succeeding will take a lot of historical research and understanding the geography of cities. It would also take a lot of time, not necessarily wasted time, but a lot of time nonetheless.
[googleMap name=”Memphis, TN” description=”35 N, 90 W” width=”480″ height=”400″ mapzoom=”1″ mousewheel=”false” directions_to=”false”]35, -90[/googleMap]
Google Maps are a great tool for introducing the five themes of geography because it allows you, as you zoom-in from a distance, to observe things in different ways. The different views, terrain, satellite, map, offer a nice introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) layers; GIS is one of the most powerful technological developments of the information revolution and we’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the next year or so as the political parties try to gerrymander congressional districts into more favorable boundaries.
If you start zoomed out all the way, like in the map above, you get to see your location from a global perspective. Note that if you sign up to the google maps site itself, instead of embedding the map like I have it here, you can select an option so that the cursor shows the latitude and longitude. The largest scale view is best for talking about hemispheres and latitude and longitude. Even better would be to use Google Earth which will show the world as a sphere.
Zooming in a couple times will begin to highlight features of topography and land surface cover, two important physical components of space. Both the terrain and satellite views show this, but sometimes one works better than another so this is a good time to switch back and forth between the two and mention that this is GIS. Looking at North America, the satellite view shows the Rocky Mountain region quite nicely, while the terrain view shows the climatic gradient from the snowy northern Canada to the green Gulf Coast.
Switching to map view and zooming in a little more, the highway network and to some degree the river networks become more apparent. Google Maps is designed for general use so there’s no easy way to emphasize the importance of the river networks and ocean ports without pointing it out yourself.
As you get down to the scale of the city itself, a little of the human geography of place becomes visible if you know what you’re looking for. In the case of Memphis, as well as a lot of other cities, the loop highways don’t just direct highway traffic around the city but separates the city itself from its suburbs. There are often significant class, racial and other demographic differences between the populations living within the loop and those outside.
At a scale that covers both the city and its surroundings, the satellite view nicely shows the effects of development on the urban, undeveloped and agricultural environments. In the Memphis region (see the image directly above), the Mississippi River separates the flat, lowland, agricultural floodplains of Arkansas in the west, from the urban and suburban development atop the river bluff to the east; the difference is strikingly obvious. You may also notice the tree lined channels of the east-west flowing tributaries to the Mississippi. They’re relatively narrow but the dark green of the trees are a striking contrast to the light colored concrete and asphalt of the rest of the city.
[googleMap name=”River port” description=”River port” width=”490″ height=”400″ mapzoom=”15″ mousewheel=”false” directions_to=”false”]35.0895, -90.106[/googleMap]
You can use the closer view (especially if you switch the map above to satellite view) to point out the importance of water transportation in most cities by focusing on the port. The railyards are also good to look at because all the material they transport they tend to be hidden away despite their sheer volume.
Finally, the street view lets you take a look as some of the ways people adapt to the environment. To truly understand adaptations you really need to contrast different places, which is why the small groups are asked to do this type of analysis for different cities around the world, but if you’re giving a lesson and know what to look for the street view can be a nice introduction. In Memphis, apart from the very southern style of many buildings, we have the shotgun houses that are long and narrow, with front and back doors lined up to permit air flow in the hot humid summers.
So to sum it all up, I’ve put together this graphic organizer for the five themes of geography for Memphis. It’s not complete of course, but it should have all the examples mentioned in this post. I’ve asked all of my groups to include a similar graphic organizer in their presentation to help pull everything together. We’ll see how it goes.
His thought turned to the Ring, but there was no comfort there, only dread and danger. No sooner had he come in sight of Mount Doom, burning far away, than he was aware of a change in his burden. As it drew near the great furnaces where, in the deeps of time, it had been forged, the Ring’s power grew, and it became more fell, untameable save by some mighty will. As Sam stood there, even though the ring was on on him but hanging by its chain about his neck, he felt himself enlarged, as if he were robed in a huge distorted shadow of himself, … – The Return of the King (Tolkien, 1955).
One of the ways students collect seed ideas for writing is by recording significant quotes from things they read in their Writer’s Notebooks; things that resonate with them; things they might want to respond to. I use this blog in a similar way. My notebooks tend to be filled with equations, sketches and diagrams, while anything I can type ends up here….
I’ve been rereading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings for the xth time (where x is a number too large to recall). As the Ring crosses the mountains into Mordor its power grows and it becomes hard to control. If the ring represents technology and its bearer, at this point Sam, represents the common person, then we see the choices facing the individual in the modern society; either to take the ring and bear the consequences of using complex, powerful technology that you do not understand, or to forgo it and accept the loss of power that entails. Sam faces what we face every day, though usually we’re unconscious of the decision.
This is also, pretty much, the central theme of Jurassic Park (I can see that this post is turning into an intertextual essay, but we’ll see). Crichton expresses the point more explicitly when he has the mathematican, Malcome, diatribe about the lack of humbleness of the creators of Jurassic Park; they build on existing technology without spending the time and effort learning how to use it. Crichton’s character believes that in putting the time and effort in mastering something, we learn to respect it, and give more though to the morals and ethics of how and if to use it. Easy to use, genetic technology is the equivalent of the Ring. It is powerful, too easy to use, and can lead to disastrous consequences.
We’ve been covering the characteristics, patterns and needs of life this last week, and, in discussing what qualifies as alive and what does not, the question of robots and computer viruses came up. Well if software does become sentient, will we have to recognize it as being alive? There’s no end to the number of science fiction books and movies that address all number of aspects of this issue. The self-aware SkyNet in the Terminator is one paranoid end-member example, but I’ve always liked James Luceno’s catholic computers in Big Empty.
However, advances in intelligent computing have not achieved sentience quite yet, and it might be a while. Yet, it would be interesting to consider a world where everyone has a computer on the brink of sentience. Oh what power would we each have then. And if these intelligent computers’ (potential) characters are colored by their interaction with human individuals, the good, the bad and the ugly, what would happen when a billion pieces of software cross the sentience threshold all at once (with the latest and greatest software update ever)?
Mrs. Z. donated two small books of poetry, The Best Poems Ever and Poetry Speaks (much thanks). The second comes with an audio cd, where many of the poems are read by the authors. Since some of the authors are adolescents themselves, their reading can be a little halting, but there is a nice authenticity.
The The Best Poems Ever has a lot of the classics. I read William Blake’s The Tiger as an example. The students though my reading was pretty lifeless so I recited it for them with a lot of emphasis and hand motions. They were pretty impressed that I’d memorized the poem so quickly, at least until I told them I’d memorized it years before (probably in middle school actually). I probably should have kept this secret. Sometimes you need the mystique.
We’ve come up with a schedule so someone different will read every morning at the end of community meeting. They’re required to choose their poem ahead of time and have practiced reading it before they present. We also take a little time for comments, the objective is to try to identify the issues and the subtexts. This is how I discovered, with much reasoned explanation, that Edna St. Vincent Millay metaphorically described the asteroid impact theory for the extinction of the dinosaurs over 30 years before scientists came up with the idea.
Travel
by Edna St. Vincent MillayThe railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn’t a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.All night there isn’t a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.My heart is warm with friends I make,
And better friends I’ll not be knowing;
Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,
No matter where it’s going.
I discovered today, during our morning poetry reading, that Edna St. Vincent Millay‘s poem Travel is a metaphor for the asteroid collision that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. The train is asteroid bearing down on the Earth, the smoke from the train is the dust and ash kicked up by the impact, while the whistling of the train is the moan of the dying dinosaurs.
Remarkably perceptive of St. Vincent Millay since the asteroid impact theory was posited by the Alverezs’ group decades after her death in 195.