Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
NPR had a great article today summarizing what’s been going on in Tunisia.
I played the article this morning. We had a little discussion about the conflicting groups in Tunisia and the possible causes of the revolution. It would be nice to be able to follow the emergence of a democracy in real-time.
Raymond Cohn has a great table of immigration data on the Economic History Association website.
This data ties very nicely into the work we’re doing on graphing. The Excel file with the post 1820 data, and another with pre-1790 data, make it easier to work with (note the pre-1970 data comes from the Wikipedia page on the history of immigration; it was the easiest source to find a table of data).
Since each small group of students is responsible for a different wave of immigration, the groups will create bar graphs showing the countries of origin for each wave. They should look like these:
and,
Plotting the time series as a line graph would be another great way to slice the data:
Note that the data in the table is as a percentage of total immigration, so the numbers do not compare directly from one time period to the next; however, the proportions still work to show the same patterns.
Wired has a brief but excellent article on the voyage of the Beagle.
Its goal was to survey the South American coastline. The captain invited along a young man named Charles Darwin, whose father thought the voyage would just be another excuse for him to slack off. The trip ended up taking five years.
This article would be a wonderful addition to our work on exploration of the Americas next time it comes around; however, it’ll also be a neat little footnote because we’ll be delving into evolution next cycle.
Wikipedia’s entry on the ship produced this wonderful cross-section. I particularly like the sketches of people and casks showing the use of of different cabins and spaces.
If you take all the books ever written and draw a graph showing which words were used when, you’d end up with something like Google’s Ngram. Of course I thought I’d chart “Montessori” and “muddle”.
The “Montessori” graph is interesting. It seems to show the early interest in her work, around 1912, and then an interesting increase in interest in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Like with all statistics, one should really be cautious about how you interpret this type of data, however, I suspect this graph explains a lot about the sources of modern trends in Montessori education. I’d love hear someone with more experience thinks.
Alexis Madrigal has an interesting collection of graphs, while Discover has an article with much more detail about what can be done with Google’s database.
Wikileaks’ recent leak of U.S. State Department cables offers the student with a politics/geography interest an amazing glance into the role of U.S. diplomats. There are however, a lot of cables.
The Atlantic magazine has come up with an interesting way of perusing the information. Their Cablegate Roulette webpage puts up a random cable every time you press the “Load a new story” button.
What’s also nice is that they provide a sentence or two that gives the context of the cable so you don’t have to puzzle it out on your own.
The cable excerpts are brief, well written and quite informative about the political goings-on in different parts of the world. They could make an interesting supplement to the geography curriculum. The self-motivated student with a geography interest would find these quite fascinating because you have to have a basic knowledge of the world and recent history to understand what’s going on.
An example:
An executive with Kazakhstan’s national gas company has dinner with the U.S. ambassador at the Radisson hotel in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan.
FROM: ASTANA, KAZAKHSTAN
TO: STATE DEPARTMENT
DATE: JANUARY 10, 2010
CLASSIFICATION: SECRET
SEE FULL CABLE¶7. (S) The Ambassador asked if the corruption and infighting are worse now than before. Idenov paused, thought, and then replied, “No, not really. It’s business as usual.” Idenov brushed off a question if the current maneuverings are part of a succession struggle. “Of course not. It’s too early for that. As it’s always been, it’s about big money. Capitalism — you call it market economy — means huge money. Listen, almost everyone at the top is confused. They’re confused by their Soviet mentality. They’re confused by the corrupt excesses of capitalism. ‘If Goldman Sachs executives can make $50 million a year and then run America’s economy in Washington, what’s so different about what we do?’ they ask.”
This nighttime photograph of the Nile River and its delta from the International Space Station beautifully illustrate the importance of water for life and civilization. The city of Cairo is at the neck of the delta; the brighter spot where the distributaries diverge.
Spaceflight Now has other really cool photos. Bad Astronomy has an interesting post on the logistics of this particular photo, while Heather Pringle has a very interesting post on how the desert may have aided the ancient Egyptian’s civilization.
While discussing polar exploration, I mentioned the story of Amundsen and Scott’s race for the south pole. The fascinating blog, Letters of Note, has Scott’s last letter, written bit by bit, on the ice, to his wife back home. It starts, “To: my widow.”
P.S. Letters of Note is a great resource for examples of great letter writing.
The poignancy and romance of exploration are distilled in Stan Rogers’ ballard “Northwest Passage“.
Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage,
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea;
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.
–Stan Rogers (1981) from Northwest Passage.
The Bounding Main website has the lyrics, including footnotes about Franklin and the others mentioned in the song, as well as major geographic features like the Davis Strait and the Beaufort Sea.
History and art collide. The music sticks in the brain then seeps down to catch the throat. I think this is a great way to get into (spark the imagination about) Artic exploration.
The next step is, of course, Shackleton and The Endurance.
