Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Aerogramme Writers’ Studio has compiled Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling as well as Neil Gaiman’s Eight Rules of Writing.
Both sets of rules focus on the search for perfection, which, like the horizon, you have to learn to deal with the fact that you’ll never reach to your ideal satisfaction.
Fighting against a well armed military, the rebels in Syria have had to do a lot of improvisation. A basic knowledge of physics and chemistry has proven somewhat useful.
The Atlantic has a collection of photos of DIY (do it yourself) weapons, that includes catapults and sling-shots.
Sebastiano Tomada Piccolomini has a fascinating photo-essay in the New Republic showing the one item that members of one group of rebels considered as their most crucial weapon. These range from a radio, to a packet of cigarettes, to improvised grenades.
Finally, one of my students discovered that a cell phone and power-source from a computer can be made to look an awful lot like and improvised explosive device.
We are living in the future, but sometimes I wonder if it’s where we want to be.
Darker colored objects absorb more light than lighter colored objects. Darker objects reflect less light; they have a lower albedo. So a deep brown leaf embedded in the ice will absorb more heat than the clear ice around it, warming up the leaf and melting the ice in contact with it. The result, is melting ice with shape and pattern of the leaf. It’s rather neat.
The creek is a wonderful subject for photography as well as geology and ecology.
It would be nice if the only rule in the classroom had to be something like, “Respect each other,” or alternatively, “Be excellent to each other,” but sometimes you have to go into the details to figure out what exactly that means.
During the last interim I had my middle school class come up with a list of rules about how to act while doing group work. There’s often someone who wants to slack off, and there are other times when people want to work but the other members of the group think they could do the work better without them. So we came up with these rules that try to balance the responsibility of the individual to actively participate, and the rest of the group to let them participate.
The List:
Together with the house cup, the middle school groups are working well together for the moment.
Cloudy ice on the creek after our February snowstorm.
For ten years after discovering penicillin, Fleming and his contemporaries could not get the penicillium mold to grow fast enough for mass production. Finally, in 1942, scientists isolated a strain of the mold from a piece of moldy cantaloupe in a garbage can.
In addition to clearing out the leaves, the fast flow in the creek created some interesting fluvial features. Example number one is this curious gravel bar that was not there a week ago. The gravel is quite coarse — 2-4 cm in diameter — but it’s extremely loose, which is typically of recently deposited sediment.
It seems likely that the sediment comes from beneath the fallen tree that cuts across the creek just upstream of the gravel bar. The tree restricts the stream flow, forcing the water to speed up, and when the water found it’s way through by cutting under the tree, it had enough energy to excavate a hole under the tree and deposit the resulting sediment just a meter or so away.
It’s a neat piece of fluvial geomorphology.