Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Jonas Bendiksen has an amazing website of photos, sounds and stories from life in slums in South America, Africa and Asia. It’s quite a poignant. You get wide-angled photos from far away and then the photographer steps closer to his subjects until you’re in a panorama of someone’s small apartment, hearing their story.
This cycle we’re working on social action.
Bendiksen’s work ties in well with Mollison’s Where Children Sleep.
Poetry can be disjointed, illogical and irrational. Sam Tanenhaus argues that that is why poetry helps us make sense of catastrophes and disasters.
One of the enduring paradoxes of great apocalyptic writing is that it consoles even as it alarms.
This has been, in fact, one of the enduring “social” functions of literature — specifically, of poetry. Narrative prose is less well suited to the task. This isn’t surprising: narrative implies continuity and order — events that flow forth in comprehensible sequence, driven by motive forces of cause and effect. …
But catastrophe defies logic. It faces us with disruption and discontinuity, with the breakdown of order. The same can often be said of poetry itself. It operates outside the realm of “logic.” Rather, it obeys the logic of dreams, of the unconscious. This is especially the case with lyric poetry, with its suggestion of vision and prophecy.
— Tanenhaus (2011): The Poetry of Catastrophe, on the New York Times’ Arts Beat Blog.
Andrew Sullivan, on the Daily Dish, highlights W. B. Yeat’s “The Second Coming,” as being quite apt to the topic. It was written just after World War I (Poem of the Week).
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?— Yeats (1919): The Second Coming, (via Poets.org).
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.
NPR reports on the discovery of a 11,500 year old house in Alaska that probably belonged to some of the first people to migrate to the Americas over the Bearing Land Bridge during the last Ice Age. Just 500 years later the Land Bridge was submerged by rising sea levels.
It’s a good article to go to for our discussion of human migration patterns. It also has the added poignancy of the fact that, at the end, the home was turned into a burial crypt for a young member of the family.
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.
Mortar shells landing on concrete create a pattern almost like a floral arrangement. In Sarajevo, after the Bosnian War, the mortar scars in the sidewalks were filled in with red resin. The results are called Sarajevo Roses.
Flickr has a nice map that links to Rose pictures in downtown Sarajevo.
I found out about these from reading a recent set of View From Your Window Contest entries on Andrew Sullivan’s blog.
The UN World Food Program (WFP) has the site FreeRice.com where for each vocabulary question you answer correctly it donates 10 grains of rice to the WFP. The site is quite ingenious, it uses the money generated by the banner adds at the bottom of the page to buy the rice. It was created by John Breen and donated to the WFP.
The site is going beyond vocabulary into other subjects such as geography (identify country capitals and countries), identifying chemical symbols, art, language and math (pre-algebra).
They also have a nice video of the rice being distributed to refugees from Myanmar sheltering in Bangladesh.
A Tired Ball Speaks from THE AMEN PROJECT on Vimeo.
I remember playing the game with a rolled up spheroid of aluminum foil. For kids living in poverty in the developing world something as simple as a soccer ball is an expensive luxury. Jessica Hilltout has a coffee table book out called “Amen: Grassroots Football“, with photographs of the “balls” she’s seen used in Africa. The video above has just a small selection.
The pictures speak to, and help explain, the popularity of soccer around the world. Unfortunately, I’m not quite sure how to order the book, but the website does allow you to look inside.
