Time

“… he was purchasing time, than which nothing is more precious to a man bent on great achievements” – from Plutarch‘s Life of Sertorious

Without grades and extrinsic rewards, students build much more durable commodities: strength of character and self-motivation. But as I try to manage a classroom there are so many things that could so easily be considered rewards. The most important of these is time.

I feel the significance of time most of all when we have to reschedule P.E. for the end of the day instead of just after lunch. We only do it then when there’s a lot of work that I want to make sure the students get done. It sits there, dangling at the end of the day, if only they’re focused enough, if only they work smoothly and efficiently enough.

It’s clear from the literature, and from my own observations when I do this, that extrinsic rewards reduce creativity and devalue both the work and the reward itself. So I suppose I may just have to say, on those days with too much to be done, that we’ll have to skip P.E. and eliminate the expectation altogether. It’s something I’d prefer not to do, but it’s unrealistic to expect students to give their full though and concentration to a subject while glancing at the clock every five minutes.

Sundial_PSF — Image by Pearson Scott Foresman from Wikimedia Commons.

Mitosis dance

One way to represent the process of mitosis is through dance. One of my students suggested they do an interpretive dance for their natural world personal project. I think they were mostly kidding, but with a fair bit of encouragement they did end up doing it.

The dance is much more literal than it probably needs to be since I helped a bit with the final product. I still think it’s pretty useful though because it’s abstract enough that you have to know the mitosis process to figure out what’s going on. So much so, I had them perform it twice at the end of our synthesis discussion. The second time through I narrated it so the steps would be clear to everyone.

I think it might make for a good “spark the imagination” lesson if one was needed.

Right now the dance needs four people, two for the chromosomes and two for the centrioles, but it would be really neat if the entire class participated by representing the cell membrane.

The diagram with the steps is: mitosis.svg. The instructions are below.

Steps

The DNA (DNA 1 and DNA 2) stand facing the audience with DNA 2 hidden behind DNA 1 since the DNA have not yet duplicated.
- The centrioles (C1 and C2) just stand there with C2 pretending not to be there.
- DNA 1 mimes touching the nucleus walls while DNA 2 pretends not to be there.
- DNA 1 dances the DNA helix, which probably involves lots of hand motions and spinning around taking 23 steps to represent the number of chromosomes in humans.
Replicating: DNA 2 steps forward while C 2 moves around the two DNA to get to the other side
The DNA join hands and spin around (because it’s fun to do, apparently)
The DNA line up next to each other and lock elbows while the centrioles start extending their threads, which probably involves some type of waving hand motion.
The centrioles move in, with their threads, and grab the open elbows.
The centrioles pull the DNA apart.
The two DNA act out the reforming of their nuclear membranes.
The DNA-centriole pairs wave each other goodbye as they become separate cells. (This is where having the rest of the group as the cell membrane would be nice.)

City in the sandbox

sandbox-city-diagram — The City of Apolypse.

My small group that had trouble getting SimCity to behave itself on the laptop decided to go build their city in the sandbox instead.

They had just looked through all the civic buildings and zoning options before they took the outside option, so they started with SimCity’s basic introduction to urban planning concepts.

The group chose to locate their city on the ocean, with a river. Previously, when the class had looked up and down the U.S.’s eastern seaboard in Google Maps, we’d noticed that most of the bigger cities, like New York and Charleston were on or near estuaries. (We’d also noticed that most of the cities were protected by some sort of barrier from the direct influence of the oceans.)

[googleMap name=”New York City” description=”NYC on the river and ocean.” width=”480″ height=”400″ mapzoom=”8″ mousewheel=”false”]New York City[/googleMap]

This group gained some significant advantages over just playing the computer game because the sandbox model allowed them create features not built into the game.

In particular, they sculpted an earthen dam with a hydroelectric power plant, that was the centerpiece of their city.

By putting a dam across the estuary they could acquire both fresh water reservoir and hydroelectric power.

It’s probably not unfair to guess that the idea for the dam came primarily from our visit to the Pickwick Landing Hydroelectric Plant last year. I say so because the eight grader who came up with the idea was reminiscing about last year’s immersions for the rest of the day.

apocalypse-150g — The decline and fall of Apocalypse.

The group did a great job, although they did site their landfill upstream of their reservoir. This became a problem because after they presented to the class they turned on the river. We relearned the biblical lesson about not building on the sand. This was not entirely unexpected though; the students had named the city Apocalypse.

The combination of computer simulation and physical model really worked well. So much so that two years from now, when I do this again, I think I’ll require at least one group to do the physical model. But it really worked for them to have at least seen the computer game so I’ll have to build that into the project too.

The fundamental “Need” for Electronics

elf-phone — Renaissance Faire Elf Using Cell Phone. (Image by Zoomar). The caption for the photo is priceless, 'I just want to state for the record that a cell phone at a Renaissance Faire is anachronistic and wrong. Being an Elf, however is 100% historically accurate.'

What are the fundamental needs of life (as we know it)? Energy, water, living space and stable internal conditions. These are physical needs of all organisms from bacteria to plants to mammals. Humans share these needs too, and this was one of the things we talked about in natural world this cycle. However, in social world studies we also discussed how people have psychological needs that, as far as we can tell, are different from those of single celled organisms: celebration, community, entertainment, and, among other things, what my students call understanding, which includes religion and spirituality.

My technophilic students also interjected that we, humans, have a need for electronics.

Electronics? My first thought was that they were being facetious, and they may have well been. But as we talked about all the other needs during our synthesis discussion last Friday I began to realize just how fundamental electronics have become to life as we know it.

Electronics are tied into the way we meet those fundamental physical needs. Organizing shipping and distribution of food requires complex scheduling software and databases. The operation of the pumps that extract our groundwater and deliver it to our houses are controlled by microcontroller. With MRI’s and computerized records our health and well-being (maintaining those stable internal conditions) are increasingly influenced by electronic technology. And in our homes, the elegant knobs and dials of thermostats on furnaces and ovens are giving way to smooth if inelegant digital displays.

Even our understanding of the world we live in, of the effects of global climate change for example, is based predominantly on sophisticated computer models and confirmed by computerized satellite systems (see NCAR for example).

So have we reached the point where electronics are a fundamental need of society, and how long will it be before we as individuals become inseparable from our electronics devices? Are we all cyborgs now? And the ultimate question: Should we be teaching more electronics in middle school?

Luring vultures

The theme for this term’s Independent Research Project is Life on the Nature Trail, and my students are required to do some actual field work on the species or taxonomic group they’ve chosen to investigate. One students chose vultures because they saw one in the clearing just outside the trail and we’ve occasionally caught sight of one soaring over the campus.

He’s been trying to lure one in for a closer look.

Since I’ve vetoed the idea of leaving fresh meat out, unless he finds professional to guide him, he’s asked for permission to lie out on the grass pretending to be carrion.

I let him take the camera (see above).

Today we saw one swoop past during P.E., so we took a couple minutes trying to lure vultures (see below).

Unfortunately, it did not seem to work.

Proactive-reactive reax

Despite everything, the Personal World lesson on being proactive-versus-reactive seems to have made an impression. I keep hearing students point out reactive behavior to each other. Someone even cited the reading from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens. Changes in actual behavior are, however, a little more difficult to quantify.

Was Osama bin Laden being proactive?

Well I managed to step in it quite nicely today. Up to the knees and then I had to start bailing.

The lesson on being proactive versus being reactive had been going so well. Proactive people “make it happen”, while reactive people “get happened to”. Proactive people are “can do”, while reactive people are “can’t do”. Proactives are “change agents”, while reactives are “victims”. Etc, etc ….

The pattern you notice from the lesson is that proactive equals good, while reactive is bad.

Adolf_Hitler_in_Paris_1940 — He was probably proactive ...

So can you give some examples of proactive people and reactive people? Yes, yes, Osama bin Laden, reactive. … Well…. Um… no, maybe not, … not necessarily? He did, he was a change agent, he made it happen. And thinking about it now, I’d be willing to bet Hitler was pretty proactive too.

Churchill_V_sign_HU_55521 — ... but so was he.

So I started to bail, trying to convey the idea that being proactive was about personal empowerment, and just because the bad guys are proactive doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. I hope I got that across. What I think I should have added, and I’ll have to remember to do so tomorrow, is that if the bad guys are proactive, it’s all the more reason for the rest of us to be proactive too.