Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
The American Natural History Museum has a YouTube channel with some interesting science-related videos. The one above, “shows the known universe as mapped through astronomical observations.”
Every satellite, moon, planet, star and galaxy is represented to scale and in its correct, measured location according to the best scientific research to-date.
When thinking about literature and stories, the Heroic Journey is often a useful lens for observation. The unassuming hero receives “the call”, gains allies, meets challenges and wins in the end (although the cost may be high). This basic template is strewn throughout literature; my personal, favorite is Bilbo Baggins’ journey in Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”.
Another great example of the Heroic Journey is Luke Skywalker’s in the first movie of the original Star Wars trilogy. And it is the deviation from the template that makes the Star Wars prequels, starting with The Phantom Menace, so hard to watch. At least, that is what one critic, who produced a brilliant, 70 minute video critically comparing the two movies, believes. He elegantly makes his arguments using video clips from the two movies.
WARNING: THERE IS SOME OBSCENE LANGUAGE AND INAPPROPRIATE REFERENCES, enough so that, as it is, this video is probably most likely inappropriate to show to students. With that in mind, the link is here. An edited version would be ideal. Without the obscenity, the arguments in the video are a useful discussion of the movies, of story arcs, and of deconstructing art. It is quite entertaining too.
For those leery of the language, the author points out:
Almost every time I discuss protons, neutrons and the nucleus of an atom, or at least so my students complain, I end up talking about nuclear fission and fusion and nuclear weapons. If the discussion goes on long enough I tend to bring up the cold war and how the fear of mutually assured destruction (MAD) reduced the chance of a hot war. I don’t often get into how the explosions from a nuclear exchange could put so much dust into the upper atmosphere that it blocks the sunlight and create a nuclear winter that would affect life all around the world. A nuclear winter that would have an effect similar to the winter created by the asteroid impact that lead to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
The danger of nuclear weapons have not, unfortunately, gone away. There is a facinating article in Scientific American on how even a “small” nuclear war could have global consequences. They have a great quote from Mikhail S. Gorbachev about how,
“Models made by Russian and American scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to people of honor and morality, to act.”
The major finding of the research in the article is that even a small nuclear war, such as between India and Pakistan, could lead to a significant global nuclear winter.
I like to take every chance I get to tie natural and social world concepts together. It’s one of the things I enjoy most about teaching in an interdisciplinary Montessori classroom. There is a beautiful and scary story here about how the science of the infinitesimally small has had a fundamental effect on the major geopolitical conflict of the latter half of the 20th century, and continues to affect us today.
There is an interesting article in the New York Times on cognitive neuroscience is showing that pre-schoolers are capable of learning mathematical concepts. How novel. The third paragraph:
For much of the last century, educators and many scientists believed that children could not learn math at all before the age of five, that their brains simply were not ready.
This timescale coincides with Angeline Lillard’s observations in Montessori: The Science behind the Genius (Lillard, 2005) about how constructivist approaches to teaching, like Montessori’s, were devalued and derogated because the more factory-like approaches were seen as more efficient during a time when the marvels of the industrial revolution were continuously impressing. This general theory, of course, may or may not be related to the theory of teaching specific concepts like math. It is disappointing that the references to such a broad statement are not provided in the article.
I ran into the twitter page for the Montessori Middle School of Louisville today. It is regularly updated (as of May 2010) and the tweets give a fascinating glimpse of what a rural Montessori school near Knoxville, Tennessee, is up to. They have everything from programming computer games with Flash to working the gardens and composting.
The school’s website is at: http://www.discoveret.org/mms/ and they also have a blog at http://montessorimiddle.blogspot.com/
Instead of listening to music in the morning, instead of reading about the composer and the piece, maybe, we could read poetry instead.
The Library of Congress has a nice website with 180 poems for American High Schools, as well as instructions by Billy Collins on how to read a poem out loud.
Referred to me by a reliable source (thanks Moriah) as the answer to the question “What is a poetry slam?”, this is Anis Mojgani performing “Shake the Dust”. A great example of poetry as it should be spoken, this video is an excellent example for students learning how to read a poem out loud.
To follow up on the previous post on the evolutionary benefits of kindness, this essay by Marc Hauser describes some of the science that indicates that morality is innate. Not religious affiliation, gender, nationality nor political views affect how people respond to moral dilemmas.
“We tend to see actions as worse than omissions of actions.” People tend to believe that deliberately hurting a healthy person to save one or more others is morally repugnant if the others would only be hurt by your inaction.