Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Video by Tobais Friedrich out of the University of Hawaii. It’s based on a recent paper that suggests that the large fluctuations in climate over the last 120,000 years opened and closed green corridors that allowed multiple pulses of migration out of Africa.
He has some other excellent earth science scientific visualizations.
For talking about migration, here’s a short video showing one day’s worth of air traffic around the world from the Zurich School of Applied Sciences. It’s pretty amazing.
The Guardian asked six major newspapers from across Europe about their local stereotypes of the other countries: Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Germany. Then they asked six “cultural commentators” from those countries to respond. It’s quite an interesting read.
Cahokia‘s just one of almost a thousand sites around the world that UNESCO considers to form, “part of the cultural and natural heritage” of the world that has “outstanding universal value.”
It’s a remarkable selection of places, from natural geological wonders like the Grand Canyon, to biological preserves like Peru’s Manú National Park, to cultural landscapes like that of Bam, Iran.
The long, detailed descriptions of the importance of these sites makes the World Heritage List website is a remarkable resource for cultural and physical geography.
Almost a thousand years ago, 20,000 people lived at a place called Cahokia. At the center of their city, was the largest artificial mound in North America. A large part of Cahokia’s success is surely its location: near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers — just across the Mississippi from modern-day St. Louis. Yet less than 400 years later (see timeline) the city was abandoned, and no one is quite sure what happened.
Our middle and high school took a trip out to Cahokia last month. It was during the same intercession between quarters when we visited the Laumeier Sculpture Park, the Da Vinci Exhibition, and did our brief biological survey of the campus.
The elevation of the main mound, sitting on the flat Mississippi flood plain, with the St. Louis skyline in the distance, was a great place to talk about the importance of physical geography in the location of cities (your biggest cities are always going to be on rivers, or the ocean or, often, both) and to reflect on how history repeats itself — a once thriving metropolis is nothing now but displaced piles of alluvium and mystery.
View Cahokia in a larger map
Cahokia is a World Heritage Site, and it has an excellent museum. I particularly liked the detail in their life-sized reconstruction of a section of the city.
Their website is also good. Apart from the timeline, mentioned above, they have a nice interactive map for details about each of the numerous mounds, and a long page about the archeology.
The site is pretty big, so you can spend a fair amount of time exploring. Fall, when the leaves have turned color, and the air has cooled a little, is an excellent time to visit.
One of the highlights of the Heifer Ranch trip was the chance for students to spend a night in their global village. It’s really a set of villages, each simulating a life in an under-developed part of a different developing country.
The Guatemalan house is pretty nice; it keeps you out of the elements, you have actual beds, and running water. The Thai houses are actually pretty awesome. They stand on stilts next to the open fields, giving good air circulation and elegant views. They remind me a lot of some of the older houses from where I grew up. The refugee camp, on the other hand is pretty decrepit. The slums aren’t much better but at least have one house with a wooden floor, though the door was so broken it was pretty useless.
Our students were assigned villages at random, but varying numbers were placed in each village to replicate the population densities more accurately. One adult was assigned to each village. We were supposed to act as if we were incompetent (not hard I know), either as two-year-olds or senile elders.
I ended up in the high population slums.
On the positive side, I was not the only adult there. Mrs H., who had joined our group with her daughter for the week of activities at Heifer, was also assigned to the slums. On the negative side, she and the girls commandeered the one “posh” building that had an actual floor to sleep on. The boys and I had to sleep on the hard, stony ground.
It didn’t help that one of the boys was “pregnant”. One person in each group been given a water balloon in a sling and told to keep it with them, safe, until dinner, when they would “give birth”, at which point the others in the “family” could help take care of the “child”. A key objective was for the child to survive until morning.
The boys scouted all the houses in the village and scavenged a large piece of metal grating to sleep on. It was not great, but it was doable. Better, at least, than the concrete-hard, uneven ground.
There was a lot more that happened on that night. None of the groups was given enough to be comfortable on their own. There was a lot of haggling, trading and even commando raids, but, in the end, they pulled together and made something of it.
The experience was quite useful, I think. Conditions were uncomfortable enough to register with the students, though a single night is not enough to really internalize all the challenges of urban slums where over one billion people spend their lives. But it does provide some very useful context for the poignant images of Jonas Bendiksen (Living in the Slums) and James Mollison (Where Children Sleep).
The Fund for Peace has been doing a lot of thinking about what it takes for a country to be considered peaceful, and what it takes for a state to fail. For the last seven years they’ve been putting together maps of the world with an index of how stable different countries are.
While it’s pretty in-depth and makes for rather sobering reading, it’s worth taking a look at the criteria they’ve come up with to determine a country’s stability. It may be useful to include some of this information in the cycle where we focus on peace.
Their criteria for instability include:
It’s also very nice that you can download their index data as a MS Excel spreadsheet, which you can let students analyze to answer their own research questions. For example, I was wondering what was the difference between the best, the worst and the USA, so I plotted this graph.
The USA is much closer to Finland than Somalia, thank goodness, but should probably watch out for that Uneven Development (wealth inequality).
I think something like this would make a good experiential exercise for the science of geography.
To supplement our work on the fundamental needs of humans, we can add James Mollison’s poignant pictures in his book, Where Children Sleep. It ties in well with the Diverse China pictures.
You can find more of his images in LIFE.
Even without the text descriptions, the pictures are wonderfully composed and evocative. I think I’m going to have to add this one to our library.
An interesting project would be to have my students take their own pictures of their rooms. Just in the book, some of the contrasts are quite startling.
