Montessori Muddle – Page 181 – Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View

Mercenaries on the playing field

These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling,
And took their wages, and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth’s foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

– A.E. Housman

Three themes converged on the playing field today; poetry, competitive sports and video war games. We’d used Alfred Houseman’s “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries” for a lesson on OULIPO yesterday because it’s short and one of my small groups had presented a week ago so we were all familiar with the poem. We’d been trying post-games discussions after frizbee (and soccer) to learn sportsmanship. We’d been having issues with video games and the definition of the word “duty“. I’ve long suspected (and would love to find a study that looks into this) that video game players are more likely to give up when the odds are against them because they are so used to just restarting the game (or respawning).

Today at the end of our post game discussion, I recited Epitaph to highlight the strength of character shown by some of the players who put up a great comeback despite part of their team stopping playing. It was a serendipitous convergence of three themes we’ve been dealing with this entire cycle (if not the whole year). It was a moment when I really appreciated being able to be so engaged with all parts of the curriculum.

Federal Reserve’s economic data

The St. Louis Federal Reserve has a Summer School program for teachers. Two of the sessions deal with current events (banking crisis and jobs) but the third covers the data and primary source documents that bank makes available online (for free). These include the FRED and GeoFred websites.

Screen shot 2010-03-20 at 2.16.48 AM — Unemployment data for the Eastern US from GeoFRED.

GeoFred produces graphs like the one above showing economic statistics across the country. It can do it on a state by state basis, by county (as above), or by even more refined areas.

FRED plots graphs and even provides the data for economic statistics over time. The graph above shows GDP since they started collecting data in the 1940’s. It also has the times of recessions shaded in. The data in the graph can also be downloaded if you want to do your own analysis.

These seem to be handy little tools for teaching and for research projects, and are pretty easy to use.

The teachers’ training sessions are free though you have to get your own housing. They do provide breakfast and lunch. If you want graduate credit for them however, each three day session will cost around $306 and garner one credit.

Sportsmanship

“Winning is the easy part, losing is really tough. But, you learn more from one loss than you do from a million wins. You learn a lot about sportsmanship. I mean, it’s really tough to shake the hand of someone who just beat you, and it’s even harder to do it with a smile. If you can learn to do this and push through that pain, you will remember what that moment is like the next time you win and have a better sense of how those competitors around you feel. This experience will teach you a lot on and off the field!” – Amy Van Dyken

Sports bring out the best and the worst in us. In victory and defeat. When the competitive fires burn fiercest they strip away facade and open windows into the soul. We’ve been playing Ultimate Frisbee on and off all year for PE and like it because it offers, in a microcosm, a remarkable view into the character of my students. Subtle behaviors in the classroom get magnified on the playing field; the willingness to quit when the score is against you versus the quiet perseverance no matter what happens. Yet, if the way we act when we play sports reflects the our character, then perhaps we can shape our character by changing the way we act when we play. That’s what “they” mean when they say that playing sports builds character.

“How a man plays the game shows something of his character; how he loses shows it all.”
-Tribune (Camden County, GA)

I’ve also come to realize that team sports can work as a substitute for co-operative games if I insist on a half-time team talk and a post game discussion by the whole group. The half-time talks are turning into pep talks and the post-game talks are proving very useful. I choose someone at random to give the talk.

There are times when you’re tired and times when you don’t believe in yourself. That’s when you have to stick it out and draw on the confidence that you have deep down beneath all the doubts and worries.” -Jim Abbot

I have not had many post-match group talks, but I am rectifying that. After each game, the group need to address some reflective questions:

What worked?
What was challenging?
How did you feel?
What did you learn?

Once again, we practice reflective thinking, although this time it’s for the group as well as the individual. We’re building abstract thinking skills as well a character, and hopefully, they both reinforce each other.

“The answers to these questions will determine your success or failure. 1) Can people trust me to do what’s right? 2) Am I committed to doing my best? 3) Do I care about other people and show it? If the answers to these questions are yes, there is no way you can fail.” –Lou Holtz

The SDA

Screen shot 2010-03-11 at 12.39.59 PM — Answers to the question 'Some people say that it is better for a country if different racial and ethnic groups maintain their distinct customs and traditions. Others say that it is better if these groups adapt and blend into the larger society. Which of these views comes closer to your own?' sorted by year in which the respondent was born.

UC Berkley’s Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA) website has a lot of potential as a research tool for the more advanced middle-schooler. I greatly encourage students to do original research in their semester-long Independent Research Projects. They pose questions, collect and/or analyze data and slog through the challenges of dealing with open ended questions. Middle school is the appropriate time for this as they are working on their formal thinking skills. With the increasing availability of websites like the SDA, everyone can gain access to research grade datasets.

The SDA is powerful because it has a lot of data from survey questions dealing with a large number of survey issues, from race relations, to perceptions of the economy, to use of the web. But with that power is a certain degree of complexity. It took me a while this morning to decipher the web interface and I’m no where near plumbing all the nuances of the statistical analysis, but it’s not too hard to do some basic plots.

On the left side of the window is a list of all the survey questions available. There are a lot but they each have the full question so it’s pretty easy to figure out what they mean. When you select one, such as the opposition to a family member bringing home a black/negro friend for dinner, it gives you the little code, “RACDIN” in this case that you enter as the Row on the right side of the window (see the above figure). Now I want to know how people’s answers to that question changed based on how old they are, so for the Column option I put in “AGE”. Of course what I actually put in is “AGE(c:10,1)” which tells the program to lump all the age data into 10 year sets, starting at age 1.

SDA-Age-dinner — Answer to the question, 'How strongly would you object if a member of your family wanted to bring a (negro/black) friend home to dinner?' sorted by age of the respondent.

Students will certainly need help getting started, and I could add video instructions if anyone wants it.

Now comes the most interesting part, interpreting the graphs. I like the plot at the top of this post for this reason. It shows that the younger people are the more likely they are to think it’s better if racial and ethnic groups maintain their customs and traditions. Does this mean that younger people have more racist attitudes, trying to maintain separation, or does it mean that they are more accepting of different cultures?

Poetry in the morning (update)

Some clichty folks
don’t know the facts,
posin’ and preenin’
and puttin’ on acts,
stretchin’ their backs.

– from Weekend Glory by Maya Angelou

We’ve started poem presentations in the mornings. They are supposed to be a part of our daily community meeting, at the beginning as part of their sharing, but the meeting is such an established ritual that we frequently forget the poems until the end. What’s been nice is that the students have been reminding me about it rather than the other way around. This seems to indicate some interest.

Baku(azerbaijan)_old_city2_monument_of_vahid_poet — Monument of Vahid Poet? (from Wikimedia Commons).

Despite my having presented a couple poems, their having seen a video of Anis Mojgani’s excellent poetry performance, and their having read how to read a poem out loud, I had to do a lot of coaching for the first couple students; slow it down (it’s something I always have to work on myself); put some emotion into the performance; match the tone and expression to the meaning of the words.

Poets_Mausoleum_Tabriz — Poets' Tomb, Tabriz, Iran (image from Wikimedia Commons)

I’m not the most experienced drama coach. Fortunately I did pick up one or two things from the excellent director we found for our play last winter (the importance of projection for example). It also helped that one of the first students to present has had quite a bit of experience in the theater, so, once I conveyed the idea that it was a performance, she knew what to do. Finally, because I’d called for volunteers to be the first presenters, the first few students who presented were not types to be easily embarrassed at being coached and commented on by myself and the rest of the class.

Monument_to_Poet_János_Arany,_1893 — Monument to János Arany (from Wikimedia Commons)

So far it’s worked very well. We’re doing one poem, from memory, a day, with no real theme for the week, rotating through the class. I’ll poll my students to figure out how they want to continue after we get through most of the class. Specific poets, poems on specific subjects, specific types of poems, there are a number of themes I’d like to try/negotiate. If I can get this started as an ongoing tradition there’ll be time to try it all.

Build your own generator

If you don’t have a generator building kit, but do have a few magnets, some wire and a long nail, you can build your own generator using the instructions on William Beaty’s website, ‘Ultra-simple Electric Generator‘. The video gives excellent, detailed instructions, but there are also written instructions with a supplies list.

UPDATE: A small group of my students tried this and, despite the complaints, I thought it was a useful exercise. I’m looking forward to their presentation tomorrow.