Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Although we’re not precisely sure why, the choir was quite the popular choice this year. The students are enthusiastic, and our music teacher, Mr. E., does an awesome job. It’s really nice to run into them practicing in the commons.
In this case they were in the Keeping Room — long, vaulted ceiling, remarkable acoustics. They practiced at one end; people accumulated at the other.
I let my students bring in one page of handwritten notes, a “cheat sheet” if you will, into their last Physics exam. I’d expected to see some very tiny writing, but some of the notes needed scientific-grade magnification equipment to be read. Seen from a distance, the dense writing did have a certain aesthetic appeal.
Of course the primary reason for letting students bring in the cheat sheets into the exam was to get them to practice taking notes. At one extreme, the students who already take good notes benefit from having to condense them. At the other extreme, the students who don’t take notes at all get a strong incentive to practice. The very act of preparing cheat sheets is a good way to study for exams.
And it worked. As they hand in their papers I usually ask them how the test went, and, this time, I also asked a few student if they found their page of notes useful. One student in particular responded, Well I didn’t need to use it after making it.
It was also very interesting to see the different styles of note taking: the strategic use of color; densely packed text; equations; diagrams; columnar organization. What all this means, I’m not sure. I’m particularly interested in how their note taking style relates to students’ preferred learning style.
Indeed, it would be interesting to see if the note taking style co-relates in any way with students’ performance on the test. One could hypothesize that, since we know that students learn better when they encounter material from multiple perspectives, then students whose notes have the greatest mix of styles — diagrams, equations, text etc. — should have learned more (and perhaps perform better on the test).
It’s a pretty simple and crude hypothesis, since there are likely many other factors that affect test performance, but it would still be interesting to look at.
The first few mornings at Heifer were cold. About five or six degrees Celcius (in the 40’s Fahrenheit) at sunrise. The large barn we slept in had been “converted” from housing horses to housing people. Apparently, horses prefer wide-open, drafty places.
But a warm sleeping bag goes a long way. And being forced to wake up just before the break of dawn does have certain advantages. I’m rarely up and about in time to capture the morning light. With the early morning fog drifting across the slopes and rising off the lake, those first few mornings were wonderful for photography.
Sunrise is usually the coldest time of day. After all, the Sun’s been down all night, and is only just about to start warming things up again. Cold air can’t hold as much moisture (water vapor) as warm air, so as the air cools down overnight the relative humidity gets higher and higher until it can’t hold any more – that’s called saturation humidity; 100% relative humidity. Then, when the air is saturated with water vapor, if it cools down just a little more, water droplets will start to form. The cooler it gets the more water is squeezed out of the air. Water vapor in the air is invisible, but the water droplets are what we see as fog. Clouds are big collections of water droplets too; clumps of fog in the sky.
We worked in the fields this afternoon: picking beans and planting garlic. Clear skies with a cool, early October breeze; warm, but not hot.
It was enjoyable work. The fields were small and there were a lot of us. Lots of conversation.
We picked somewhere close to 64 lbs of green beans, which, according to our guide, sells for somewhere around six dollars per pound (organic beans). Three hundred and eighty four dollars. Took us about an hour.
Earlier in the morning, we’d had a discussion about Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Heifer ranch is a CSA. People from the surrounding towns buy shares in the annual crop, and the ranch brings them a basket of produce every week for the season. CSA’s are great: fresh local produce, for about the same price as in the store. You tend to get a broad enough variety that it helps expand your cooking repertoire. And you avoid all the externailties from long distance transportation and factory farming.
They (our guides) had compared CSAs to the “typical” industrial agricultural system. Students read out notecards as they went through the all the jobs of the people who get your tomatoes to you. One student, who represented the energy going into the system, had to do a lot of jumping-jacks and pushups – situps too. There are eleven different jobs in the industrial system, with the people actually picking the crops – migrant workers – getting one cent for every dollar you pay at the store. They are three jobs within the CSA, and the farmer gets 80% of the sale price.
The presentation was a little problematic, unfortunately. Heifer is a CSA after all. Trouble started with our facilitator’s terminal question, “So which one do you think is better?” The first response was, “Well with the economy these days, won’t you loose a lot of jobs with the CSA?”
Fair point. But it might be argued that the industrial system might take one big farm and 11 jobs to bring 1200 tomatoes to market, it might take 4 CSAs, and about the same number of jobs (12), to do the same. Although the each person in the CSA system gets a little less, the money is more equitably distributed.
The second question, cut to the crux of the problem, “But what are the notecards leaving out?” Cynical? Perhaps. However, I’d like to think of it as healthy skepticism.
So now our guide was stuck. How could she, an obvious advocate for CSAs, convince the skeptical? Not easy, perhaps not even possible. By being too strong of an advocate for her side, she’d have a hard time convincing even the impartial.
It’s not easy making an argument that you’re passionate about. Not at all.
I made sure I had a small discussion with the more skeptical students, to make sure they realized that even if you distrust the credibility of someone, you can often learn something useful. In fact, that’s why you should always look for multiple sources of information. Also, while CSAs are great for some things, local farms in Arkansas or Missouri aren’t going to be producing a lot of tomatoes in January.
That’s why I’m glad we picked the beans later in the day. And it was important that we did the accounting.
It took sixteen of us one hour to pick $384 worth of beans. That works out to 24 bucks per person per hour. Since the migrant workers only make 1% of the final cost, we would have made about 24¢.
24¢ for an enjoyable hour of gardening on a pleasant day. But what do you do when you’re hot and miserable in the middle of the summer, and hour after hour after hour of the same work is what you need to feed your family. And you’re missing school to do it.
I’m not sure that students will intuit the difference between what we did and what migrant farm workers do; neither the time we put in, nor the effort we expended were anywhere near equivalent.
I think making that distinction is important. Recognizing what migrant workers do, many who are the same age as my students, might make the point of what organizations like Heifer and Human Rights Watch are trying to do better than just talking about it, or simulating it, in the classroom.
I think it might make a big difference to hear the voices of these workers.
So I’ll show the HRW video advocating for the CARE Act to reduce child labor among teen migrant workers, and see if it has an impact.
“I’d like you to do chlorine too.”
“But I shouldn’t have to do chlorine. Chlorine was extra homework last time. I got Argon. I’ll do Argon. I don’t have to do extra homework today, so I shouldn’t have to do chlorine too.”
“It’s true, you didn’t earn extra work today.”
“So I don’t have to do chlorine.”
“If you do chlorine we’ll have the full set of elements.”
“But do I have to do it?”
“I’d like you to do it.”
“But do I have to?”
“No.”
“OK I’ll do it.”
We’re off to the Heifer International farm near Little Rock for a week. I have not been there before, but I suspect I’ll be disconnected, loosing contact with the part of my brain that has all the details.
I could program during some of my downtime, but all the reference documentation is online. I could do some reading about pedagogy – I’ve been meaning to get to the book about homework – but I suspect it would be extremely frustrating to not be able to look up the references and follow thoughts with some online research. And I can’t really blog.
I’m not even sure I’ll have phone service.
So instead I’ve brought a book of poetry. It’s the same one I used to take on long trips before I was so fully committed to the internet. I’ve read it through a number of times, but there’s always something new to discover.
And it should provide the time I need to finish memorizing a few favorites. At one point I could recall the first three parts of the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, but I think I’m back down to one now.
At any rate, there might be some slow blogging for the next week. I’ve scheduled a few posts but not enough to cover the time I’m gone, so this might be the first significant break for a couple years. We’ll see how it goes.
A number of my middle-school students seemed to believe that recycling is the be-all and end-all of environmentalism.
We were trying to determine what type of material would make for the best drink bottles.
I have a deep reluctance to reflexively consider anything, “good for the environment,” considering that the environmental impact of any particular product is a complex thing to assess. My students, on the other hand, seem to think that recycling is good and all the rest of it can go hang.
I’d want to add up all the environmental costs: the raw materials; the energy input; the sources of the energy input; and the emissions to the air and water, especially all the other external costs of pollutants that people tend not to want to pay for. To my students, these things have been invisible.
Perhaps it’s the success of the environmental movement that’s pushed things to the background. We’re not struggling through smog everyday – although we’ve had some bad days this summer – and even big issues, like the BP oil spill, are a bit remote and seem so far away.
So, I tried showing the Story of Stuff today. It’s definitely a piece with a “point-of-view”, but I was hoping it would be provocative.
And it was.
It certainly got a lot of the students agitated, ready to challenge its assertions about just how bad pollution problems really are today, which created a nice opening for me to point out the need for skepticism in the face of any information received. Of course, at that point they were probably a little skeptical about me too, but reasoned skepticism is at the heart of the scientific perspective I’d like them to learn as “apprentice” scientists.
I’d like them to read Orwell too, but that’s another battle.
One student was stimulated enough that, I hope, they’ll actually do a little research into the facts presented in the video and present their findings to the class.
I’ll also have to do a little follow-up on how to argue. In particular I’ll need to post a picture of Paul Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement and point out that it’s better to try to refute the actual argument rather than attack the messenger.
We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.
