Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Therefore, he added,
we must prepare carefully,
out of the spotlight.— U.S. diplomatic cable Haiku via Haïkuleaks
We’ll be studying poetry soon, and Wikileaks is in the news. I therefore post the mind-expanding website, Haïkuleaks, which condenses diplomatic cables into seventeen syllables and three lines each.
The site uses Haiku Finder to scan through the cables for inadvertent Haikus.
‘People need to see
the results of decisions,’
the Sultan stated.
The group OK Go set up an excellent Rube Goldberg machine for their music video, This Too Shall Pass. Thanks to Sage B. for pointing this one out to me. She’ll probably get to see it again next year when we get into physics and electricity and they need a little inspiration for their own machines.
Last year I used Honda’s The Cog advertisement, which is much simpler (and shorter) than OK Go’s.
So we’re studying graphs (data representation) for math this cycle. Slate Labs has a neat scattergram showing Brett Farve’s vacillating comments about his likelyhood of retierment for the last three years.
Linguist, Rick Aschmann, has wonderfully detailed maps of the various dialects of English used in North America. It includes lots of audio samples of speech, and is excellently annotated.
Given that dialects are great integrators of cultural history, including the history of immigration to the different regions, this may well be an excellent resource for this cycle’s work on U.S. immigration.
The r-dropping areas in the Lowland South … could be described as “Classical Southern”. This is the accent that Scarlett O’Hara is attempting to imitate in this clip from Gone with the Wind. This area represents the heart of the old plantation system, as can be seen on the map mentioned above. However, this feature seems to only occur in older settled areas, and does not occur in western areas on the Mississippi River or farther west that were settled after about 1825.
— from American English Dialects by Aschmann, (2010).
Two X chromosomes (XX) makes women female. Men have an X and a Y, the latter of which is responsible for all the things that make them male. What we teach is that one of the X’s in the women’s XX’s dominates the other so that women’s physical characteristics (phenotype) is only determined by the dominant X. Recent research shows that’s not necessarily the case.
“Our study shows that the inactive X in women is not as silent as we thought,” said Laura Carrel, Ph.D., assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, Penn State College of Medicine, Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. “The effects of these genes from the inactive X chromosome could explain some of the differences between men and women that aren’t attributable to sex hormones.” – From Penn State University, edited by Science Daily.
It’s a fascinating finding, but I don’t think I’ll go into it with the students except, in the very unlikely event, that a direct question comes up. At this point, simpler is better.
Last Wednesday’s lunar eclipse was nicely captured in the stop-motion video below. What a wonderful way to celebrate getting past the longest night of the year. And, because the question does come up, we’re seeing the shadow of the Earth cross over the moon.
Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse from William Castleman on Vimeo.
One of Google’s new search options lets you assess sites based on reading levels.
The purpose of this blog keeps evolving in my mind. It is a place for me to keep all the notes and pedagogic reflections that I should be recording, but have not, and would not, be keeping otherwise. It’s also a bit like my writer’s notebook in that I use it to experiment my writing style.
I also hope the site can be useful to other Montessori (or any really) teachers because I have a real, fervent belief that everyone gains when we share as much information as possible.
This blog, being in a public space, should also be friendly to parents who might look in once in a while; this way they can get a fair, if perhaps too revealing, glimpse of my educational philosophy, see where I’m going, and get a bit of an explanation of why I do the things I do.
Finally, I occasionally show certain blog posts to my middle school students. It’s an easy place to link videos like the one about the Northwest Passage. Almost inevitably after I do that though, I’ll find some student perusing through the rest of the blog, usually with the exclamation, “Hey that’s not what actually happened!”
So I try to write posts that are accessible to all these different groups. I try not to shy too much away from using longer words, layered meanings, references, and subtexts, because, after all, if students don’t already get them, this is as good a place as any for them to learn.
Barry Schwartz has an interesting post at the Search Engine Roundtable about the new Google option, as does Adrian Chen at Gawker. Both articles post the graphs for a number of different sites. I’ve not yet seen an actual definition of the what the different levels on the graphs mean, but the Muddle sits almost entirely in the intermediate section of the graph, much like the New York Times’ site. This does not seem like bad company to keep, though I do think I’d like to try for more variety. We’ll see.
Rob Dunn at the Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting article on the not-so-useful aspects of human anatomy that resulted from evolutionary history.
It starts with evidence that the mitochondria in our cells were once separate organisms and goes on to explain things like how the change from quadrupedal to bipedal, upright walking resulted in our S-shaped spine (and frequent backaches) and our unsupported intestines. It’s quite the interesting read.
