Montessori Muddle – Page 178 – Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View

Shiloh (and the battle of)

We hiked in Shiloh on a beautiful spring day just about a week before the anniversary of that formative battle of the American civil war. Trail #4 traces the battle from the first contact of union and confederate pickets near what is now Ed Shaws Store and Peach Orchard Restaurant, all the way to the park center where General Grant formed his last line of defense.

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The hike winds its way across mowed fields and through rolling, forested tracts. With the leaves not yet on the trees this was the perfect time to make this hike. Two years ago, the last time the middle school did this trip, they did it a little earlier in the year in below-freezing temperatures. Apparently it was great for character building.

We weren’t quite as lucky in the character building department, it was a nice clear day, not too hot and not too cold. On the five mile hike and our students got a lot of practice navigating by compass. However, we had to take to the paved roads about a third of the way through in order to have lunch before meeting park ranger Paul Holloway for a demonstration of an infantryman.

civil-war-infantry — Paul Holloway about to charge.

Mr. Holloway was superb, bringing into sharp relief the similarities and contrasts between soldiers in the two armies. He wore a brown coat, colors which could have been on either side, and demonstrated a rifle which was impressively loud, smokey and heavy.

Before sitting beneath a tree for our class discussion of what we saw that day we took in the visitor center and the movie, made in 1956, about the Battle of Shiloh. I though the movie was quite informative if a bit understaffed, but my students picked up on the fact that the amateur thespians kept stealing glances at the camera. Not to mention getting up and charging again after they’d been shot. They also detected a subtle bias toward the South from the narrator and in the content of the movie.

The rifle demonstration was extremely useful in setting the stage for the movie, but I though the five mile hike was also important because the students got the chance to feel the distance and then consider that what took us a couple of hours, took an entire day of hard fighting.

Seasons wheel

A beautiful intersection of art, science and abstract thinking. An assemblage of photos compressed into a circular graph by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg.

Intrinsic motivation in the real world

rewards tend to focus the brain more narrowly on the specific task that earns the rewards—thus making it harder to encourage employees to develop creative, innovative solutions. – Laura Vanderkam (2010)

How do you motivate people in the creative economy? Apparently not with bonuses. The best way to get people to be creative is to motivate them in ways that “takes the issue of money off the table, so they can focus on the work itself” according to Daniel Pink in his book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.” Laura Vanderkam’s (2010) review of the book in the City Journal provides an excellent overview.

… leaders create an environment where people want to do their best. This involves giving people lots of autonomy over their time, their tasks, their techniques, and their teams; providing them an opportunity to work toward mastery of their professional craft; and imbuing their work with a sense of purpose. Laura Vanderkam (2010)

And translated into education Pink advocates the same approach as Montessori,

encourage mastery by allowing children to spend as long as they’d like and to go as deep as they desire on the topics that interest them. – Pink (2010)

It’s good to be reminded of the importance of intrinsic motivation every now and then. There are always forces, most often subtle but sometimes not, that push toward making sure students do well in the standardized tests and cover everything in the curriculum. High schools want to see good grades in all the subjects.

But what if a student just wants to write, and they just pour their heart into it. The other subjects suffer, especially the least interesting ones, but my goodness how their writing improves. What then? …

Apprentice Essays

Apprentice texts short pieces, a sentence or a paragraph long, that introduce students to the style of good writers. Remember that wonderful turn of phrase or vivid image that just leaped out at you? Students find the cadence and the style and mimic it with a topic of their own.

Another similar approach is to type out entire texts, word for word, just to get a feel for the rhythm of good writing. It’s something to try with essays.

Pickwick Landing Hydroelectric Dam

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The hydroelectric dam at Pickwick Landing on the Tennessee River is an almost ideal place to observe electricity generation and transmission. It was a serendipitous discovery though. After our failure to arrange a tour of a dam in Arkansas on the last immersion, we did not even try with this one.

The dam is right next to Pickwick Landing State Park where we camp when visiting the Shiloh National Battlefield. We’d arrived early at the park on the day before our visit to Shiloh, and having seen the dam and its locks on Google Maps’ satellite image (click the satellite button on the map above), I thought it might be useful if we drove over.

Coming around the northern side of the dam we spotted, right next to a parking lot, an old turbine from the dam that had been set up for display. It is amazing how big these things are, but what was really neat is the fact that if you listened, you could hear the whine of the modern turbines coming from the generators deep inside the dam.

Standing over the old turbine was an enormous high-voltage wire tower, sparse metal frame and truncated arms like a benevolent grandparent leaning over a plump, but scared child. The line of towers are connected to the generation station in the dam by power substation just across the street from the old turbine. The substation’s large transformer drums were obvious even from across the road.

Crossing southward over the dam, there is a road that runs westward along the edge of the river that allows a good view of the downriver side of the locks. We were lucky enough to see a barge passing through, although with the traffic on the river the locks are probably always busy.

pickwick-locks — Barge exiting the lock.

When we got back to the park the students draw a diagrams of the dam. They don’t do nearly enough diagrams given the importance of drawing in connecting the body and the mind (something I plan on rectifying in the next cycle) so this was a good experience for them. It was also a reminder to always keep their writer’s notebooks with them because then they could have drawn their diagram while they were at the dam looking at the thing.

Greenhouse in a bottle

The BBC has an excellent video demonstration by Maggie Aderin-Pocock of how to demonstrate how additional carbon dioxide in the air results in global warming. She uses baking soda and vinegar to create the CO₂ and lamps for light (putting the bottles in the sun would work just as well). You’d also probably want to use regular thermometers in the bottles if you don’t have ones that connect to your computer.

Self-respect, self-knowledge and character

To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, … counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves. – Joan Didion (1961), via Word on the Street (2010)

Unlike Dalrymple, Joan Didion figured that self-respect is built on self-knowledge rather than the reflected assessment of others. She saw character, which is built upon self respect, as the ability to use that knowledge to be aware of and face consequences of your actions.

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others – who are, after all, deceived easily enough; – Joan Didion (1961), via Word on the Street (2010)

What Dalrymple and Didion agree upon is that a sense of entitlement is diametrically opposed to self-respect:

I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships which hampered others. Although even the humorless nineteen-year-old that I was must have recognized that the situation lacked real tragic stature, the day that I did to make Phi Beta kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proved competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand. – Joan Didion (1961), via Word on the Street (2010)

Didion’s ideas are wonderfully expressed in her essay ‘On self-respect’ that has been reproduced by Mallary Tenore on her blog Word on the Street (found via The Daily Dish). It’s a long essay, written in 1961 so some of the references may be dated (though time and the Twilight Series have given some of the references potency again, at least for the middle school crowd). I don’t think I can recommend the whole essay for my students, but reflecting some excerpts might be a useful Personal World exercise.

People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. – Joan Didion (1961), via Word on the Street (2010)