books to read – Montessori Muddle

Adolescents Versus Their Brains

The part of the brain responsible for logic and reasoning is slow to develop compared to the rest during our adolescence. As a result, adolescents are driven way too much by their emotions and instincts. This means that a lot of the time someone else, teachers and parents usually, have to provide that rationality for them, and help them develop those thinking skills for themselves.

That, at least, was my take-home message after reading David Walsh’s excellent book Why Do They Act That Way. He does an excellent job explaining how the brain develops during adolescence, how it affects the way teenagers behave, and some of the best approaches to dealing with it.

There are a lot of excellent details about how brain development interacts with hormones to create many of the behaviors we find typical of teenagers. Since puberty proceeds differently for girls and boys, Walsh also highlights the differences in the timing of development, and the contrasting results of the different hormones released.

Yet, he also recognizes that adolescent behavior is not solely the result of biology. The effects of neurological and hormonal changes are amplified in industrial societies where kids spend less time with parents, and more time with peers, than in non-WIERD cultures (see The Myth of Adolescent Angst) which leads into his approach to dealing with teens.

To address this unfortunate combination of nature and culture, Walsh advocates a structured approach to parenting, where rules are clear, reasonable, and enforced. This, however, needs to be balanced with the need to keep lines of communication open, which is not an easy trick. Teenagers will want to push you away, but it’s necessary to keep connected to them anyway.

He also emphasizes the need for mentoring good behavior and rational thinking, because, as we’ve seen before, while the developing pre-frontal cortex provides the capacity for formal thinking, it needs practice and training to work well. And, after all, two of the key things we ultimately look for in adults are self-control and the ability to think rationally.

This book is an extremely useful read for parents and teachers (though the first chapter is a bit slow for the impatient). It does a great job of explaining how biology affects behavior, and how to deal with them. I particularly like fact that Walsh has found that teens find it useful to know all this biology stuff too, and it affects how they behave.

Drive: How to exploit intrinsic motivation.

So my holiday present from the Head of School was Daniel Pink’s 2009 book, Drive. I’m much happier reading scientific papers and books based directly on them, like Lillards’ Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius, than mass-market, self-help publications, but I’m supposed to get through it so we can have a discussion during our inservice. However, since I’d read a favorable review of the book last April I’m willing to give this one a chance, despite the desperate lack of information on the back and the sad pandering to business-minded readers in the blurb on the inside cover.

My antipathy toward self-help books, is based largely, I think, on the possibly erroneous belief that these books tend to be anecdotal, unsupported by science, or even to start with a scientific basis (however poorly understood) and stretch it into wonderful realms of possibility where it was never meant to go.

I also find it hard to credit books that tend to be awfully culture-specific. The worst ones come from certain myopic cultural niches that I find it hard to identify with. Even the stuff that based on rigorous science (as rigorous as far as the social sciences can be at least) tend to be based on the sub-population within the scientists’ easiest reach: WEIRD people from Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democracies.

Anyway, I’m in the middle of chapter one, and the book is actually quite good. Drive is well written for a general audience, so it lacks the concision that would make me happier; I’m already familiar with quite a bit about what he writes, and I’m a little crunched for time this break. The science so far is still based mostly on WEIRD people (though the first studies were done with other primates), but at least it’s an easy read.

Earth Ecology and Terraforming Mars

I’ve been thinking about science fiction, like Mirable and The Chrysalids that tie into the Natural World (science) curriculum. While I’ve not read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars triology, Red Mars, Blue Mars and Green Mars, they’ve won a number of awards and I’ve heard good things about them.

I’m looking for books that address global ecology, so stories about terraforming Mars would seem to fit. The Mars triology books are also supposed to be fairly rigorous and consistent about the science, something I look for in good science fiction. There are also some good articles discussing the science that can be used for supporting information, like this one by Margarita Miranova (2008) about the actual feasibility of terraforming Mars.

100624141934 — Feature identified by students from Evergreen Middle School. Image from NASA.

Given Mars’ proximity and the fact that space agencies have orbiting satellites and ground rovers makes the idea of colonizing Mars an intriguing one for the more adventurous adolescents. In fact, the recent news that 7th graders discovered a new feature on Mars’ surface might also inspire some interest. The 7th graders’ project was part of the Mars Student Imaging Program (MSIP), which might also be of interest. MSIP actually allows students to use the camera on board the Mars Odyssey satellite, by identifying locations for detailed images.

Montessori Science Fiction

One of my favorite books that ties in with the study of the life sciences is Janet Kagan’s Mirable. It’s a series of stories about colonists trying establish themselves on a new world. Because of an accident on the trip over from Earth, the plants and animals they try bring with them (or propagate from their recorded DNA sequences) tend to randomly, and all too frequently, produce offspring that are hybrids of all sorts of phylogenetically unrelated organisms. The hybrids then produce other hybrids until, eventually, they produce another “Earth-authentic” species. This was supposed to be a feature to add redundancy to their gene banks. The impetus for the stories comes from the fact that some of the hybrids are unexpected and quite interesting, like the kangaroo-rex.

k-rex2 — M. A. Buss' model of the kangaroo-rex. Note the sharp pointy teeth and claws.

Kagan writes a good story, entertaining, light hearted and easily accessible to early adolescents, but I particularly like her model of education on the new world. Since they need as much genetic diversity as possible, even people who don’t want to raise children need to have them. So kids are sent to live at a boarding school that’s really a hotel, which they run. Sounds a lot like Montessori’s Erdkinder.

The kids get training and regular visits from experts in a variety of fields. They get to help of the protagonist with her projects by tracking animals in the field and running genetic sequences through their equivalent of GenBank.

The best science fiction provides interesting models of society. Mirable, I believe, is a model of a society designed around the ideas of Peace Education. The Montessori spirit runs throughout the stories not just in the education system, but in the way characters interact one another, even in times of conflict.

I’m an unabashed advocate for using science fiction in the classroom because it delves into such wide ranging parts of the curriculum, Natural World, Social World, Language and, in this case, Peace Education. Of course the stories have to be chosen well. Mirable is one of perhaps only two books (the other is The Chrysalids by John Wyndham) that I use when we study the life sciences.

Enjoying the silence

That was one of the most poignant moments for me—conversations I had with a class of kids in a school in a tough neighborhood who simply had no positive associations at all with the idea of silence.
– George Prochnik (Gorney, 2010)

In constructing the Montessori classroom we aim for an open, uncluttered environment. George Prochnik has an interesting little interview in the Atlantic about the value of silence in our noisy world. He points out that there has been a movement away from the sound deadening carpets, tablecloths and wall hanging in the interior design of restaurants, in an effort to generate more energy. Of course that makes things louder. Thinking about the interior design of the classroom, I can see how there might be a trade-off between creating an uncluttered environment and designing for a quiet classroom.

Of course, in a classroom of adolescents, some prefer to work in quiet, while others favor the energy and noise in the background. I try to create nooks and crannies where students can get out of the noise but are still visible to the rest of the room. I also allow students to use headsets during individual work time.

Thinking about it now, the nooks were designed to fit small groups of three, but the students only really migrated toward them as individuals. So it may be that their primary value has been to provide small cones of silence and I should make more of them but smaller ones.

Poverty on the Brain

This book I should read, “Teaching with Poverty in Mind“, sounds like it’s based on Ruby K. Payne’s framework for understanding poverty. I’ve already written a little about the controversy surrounding her work. Payne’s practical activities seemed useful at the very least, so it should be interesting to find out how Eric Jensen extends the theories to the classroom.

Mindset: Set to grow

Carol Dweck’s book on the importance of your mindset. Fixed mindset – not good; Growth mindset – effort creates ability –> reward effort, perseverance, and character. When you praise you praise growth qualities like effort, and not fixed qualities like intelligence. It sounds like it ties in with all of the research on praise and rewards. It’s a book I should read.