My students know my weaknesses too well. I had a well crafted argument today that I should let them watch Judson Laipply‘s YouTube video, “Evolution of Dance“. The gist of the argument was that they never really understood evolution until they saw the video (we covered evolution last year); the way the dance moves evolved, with small changes from one to the other is an excellent analogy for the gradual evolution of organisms. The best example was how The Robot changed into Breakdancing. I let them watch it of course, it was a good argument and the video is pretty harmless. And if it actually helped them learn about evolution ….
“Imagine” “War”
One of the small group assignments last week was to pick two anti-war songs and present their meaning and context. They had a choice of music ranging in time from Frederick Weatherly’s “Danny Boy” to Green Day’s “Holiday”, but they chose two Vietnam Era songs, “Imagine” and “War”.
These turned out to be inspired choices. Not the least because both had music videos that closely reflected the songs’ different approaches to conveying the same message. Lennon’s “Imagine” is peaceful, aspirational, but somewhat subversive, while Edwin Star’s “War” is militant with its rejection of conflict.
The lyrics also provided an excellent contrast in the poetic use of language to convey meaning. After showing the two music videos, the students took the songs apart, stanza by stanza, and you can read the stridency in the punctuation and use of capitals in the lyrics of “War”:
WAR! good God y’all huh
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing…say it say it SAY IT!
WAR!…uh huh yeah huh!
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing…listen to me
We had a great discussion. I found this to be an excellent assignment that merged the poetry we’ve been studying in Language Arts with the history and peace education of Social World.
John Lennon – Imagine
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The Clinton Library
I have one student who intends to be president. He already has the date picked out. So the Clinton Library in Little Rock was a great stop on our immersion. It took a little coaxing to get him all the way through while some of the others, who were not as enthusiastic, waited patiently. I’m fairly sure he would have been happy to spent the entire day there.
The library is located on the Arkansas River. In fact, while it’s mostly built on the bluff overlooking the river, one side of juts out over the embankment, out over the flood plain. I suspect that if the river were to flood (which is perhaps unlikely with all the locks on the river), the supports for that wing of the building would be under water.
Inside the museum are displays about Bill Clinton’s eight years as president, a small theater with a video about Clinton’s life and some other odds and ends of the Clinton presidency (the limo, the replica oval office). The highlight was the replica of the cabinet room. Everyone enjoyed sitting at the table. After the initial rush for seats, it was discovered that they were all labeled for the different members of the cabinet, which was interesting enough as the all took at least a second to consider what their role might be if they were actually in the government.
There was also an exhibit with a number of Madeleine Albright’s pins, which she used to send messages to her diplomatic counterparts while she was the UN ambassador and as Secretary of State. You might not think that would particularly interesting to adolescents, but there were some spectacularly beautiful, jeweled insects that attracted the attention of some students, and an interesting RPG pin (from Pakistan) that attracted the attention of others.
Since we’d been doing museums and tours all day, everyone was tired by the time we’d finished the museum. It would be another hour before we got back to Lake Catherine so instead of just jumping into the van I offered them the chance to run around on the steep, grassy embankment, down into the floodplain. Instead they (mostly) opted to roll down. Fun was had by all.
The museum was a decent stop, worthy of an hour or two, but, with our current study of civil rights, and the age of our students, it could not match Central High.
Citing websites
My students are very good at putting the list references on their presentations, however, websites usually turn up as simply a link to the site. I’m now working on rectifying this. Because there are a lot of different types of online resources Yale Library has a few different ways to cite them. What I like the most, however, is that they give very clear examples of how to use them in the MLA, APA and Chicago styles. My preference is for the APA but to make sure and include the URL (like the citation at the bottom of this post).
Amnesty International’s YouTube channel
While looking up Speak Truth to Power I ran across the Amnesty International (USA) YouTube Channel. There are quite a number of powerful videos posted and the main focus is the campaign for human rights. But human rights issues around the world today are not trivial, and it is a challenge to raise awareness that serious issues exist without demoralizing idealistic adolescents into thinking that they can do nothing about it.
I’m somewhat conflicted about the efficacy of the first two videos posted here. The one above is extremely powerful, but the one below has a simpler, more uplifting story.
I also don’t know how students would react to the music video below. I like the international voices, like that of Emmanuel Jal, that can speak from experience about the challenge facing billions around the world today. But I wonder how much the words and the meaning will register.
Why do we believe conspiracy theories?
The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis has one display about the conspiracy theories surrounding Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Some of them were pretty far-fetched, but I did not have a good answer to one student’s question about why do people come up with all these conspiracy theories. David Aaronovitch has a new book out about why people believe conspiracy theories, and in an interview with Thomas Rogers he has a pretty believable answer to the question, “What makes us susceptible to conspiracy theories?”:
We want to believe theories that contradict the idea that young, iconic people died senselessly. If a story takes away the accidental from their death, it gives them agency. After the JFK assassination, it was unbearable to many people that they could live in a country where a lone gunman could kill a president. In those circumstances, it’s not surprising that an overarching conspiracy theory emerges. It suggests that somebody is in control, rather than that we’re at the mercy of our neighbors and to some extent of ourselves (as was the case with Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana). It’s the urge to make sense of a particularly traumatic moment.
Saturn’s aurora borealis
I came across this beautiful animation of the auroras on Saturn. The auroras are caused by charged particles (ions) from the sun, the solar wind of protons and electrons, are focused down onto areas near the poles of a planet by the magnetic lines of a planet’s magnetic field. The ions hit the atmosphere colliding with atmospheric gas molecules like nitrogen and oxygen causing them to become excited and spit out electrons (becoming ions themselves). Molecules are not “happy” when they’re missing electrons so they’ll capture one to become “fulfilled” (fill their outer electron shells). It’s when they recapture electrons that they give off the light that we see as the auroras.
On Earth the auroras are green or brownish-red (from the Oxygen) and blue or red (from the Nitrogen). Saturn’s atmosphere is mostly hydrogen and helium so we’re not quite sure what color its auroras are. The auroras in the animation were colored in by NASA since the camera on the Cassini spacecraft is black and white.
The video clip below gives a nice explanation of auroras.
Hiking in Lake Catherine State Park, AK
On the last morning of our immersion trip we had a choice between going to Hot Springs, Arkansas, with its geothermal springs and another museum, or hiking at Lake Catherine where we had spent the night. Since we’d been to two museums on the previous day, we pretty unanimously chose the hike. And it was great.
We took the Falls Branch Trail, which follows a couple of young, boulder-choked creeks that have are carving steep-sided valleys through nice clean limestone bedrock. The students were constantly bringing me rocks to identify, and they were almost invariable limestone, with a few pieces of quartz thrown in. The limestone was so clean that it was near translucent (fairly close to marble) and the cobbles in the stream bed were easy to mistake for smoky quartz, particularly if they were rounded enough that you could not look for quartz’s characteristic, curved, conchoidal fracture. Quartz also tends to be a lot harder than limestone, but the ultimate test, which the students really wanted to see, is to put acid on the rock. Limestone fizzes. I did not have any limestone on this trip (note to self: get some HCl for next time), but this little experiment is a nice follow up for our discussions of ionic bonding in chemistry. We have some limestone samples back at school so I plan on doing this as a follow-up.
Because Lake Catherine is very close to Hot Springs, it would not be surprising to find some quartz. The hot water that’s coming out of the springs flows up through cracks (faults) that extend deep beneath the surface. The deeper basement rocks are silicates, the granitic rocks that make up the continental crust, so the hot water dissolves some of that silicate material, and when the water cools down, ever so slightly, as it approaches the surface, some of those silicates will precipitate out to coat the walls of the faults with quartz. Sometimes they even fill up the faults entirely, leaving quartz veins.
The stream bed, being of young geological age, was a series of small waterfalls culminating in the five meter high drop that gives the trail its name. The water was clear and cold but with that beautiful aquamarine tint of dissolved limestone. There’s a whole lot more I could say about plunge pools and migrating nickpoints, but I’d probably go on too long. Besides we did not take the time to talk about those since there was so much else to see.
When we reached estuary of Falls Creek and Lake Catherine, the lake’s water was so calm that the kids started trying to skip stones. This of course provided a beautiful opportunity to look at water waves and interference patterns. As the ripples from each skip of the stone expanded, they melded. The constructive interference was easier to see in the field because it made for bigger ripples. But the photos show the destructive interference very nicely.
This was an excellent hike. We were a little pressed for time since we needed to get back to school before the end of the school day, but next time, I think, I’ll have us pack our food in and have lunch on the trail overlooking the waterfall and the lake. The ability to use these types of outdoor experience to integrate the academic work is one of the main reasons I enjoy the Montessori approach to middle school. All through the trip back though I kept thinking about how I could organize things so that we would never need to see the inside of the classroom again.
