Tag: video

The positive side of teasing

Teasing, under some circumstances, might actually help people bond. At least according to Dacher Keltner of the Greater Good Science Center.

Teasing can be a way to diffuse embarrassing situations, but its effect depends very much on the context and the culture. The outstanding question is how we differentiate positive teasing among friends from verbal attempts to bully. Part of the answer to this question lies in the effect: does the teasing contribute to group cohesion, or does it isolate and exclude?

The future of education?

The innate will to learn is the basic premise of the Montessori philosophy. So we emphasize giving students the freedom to explore the Montessori works, and allow them the time an space to teach each other, rather than intervening all the time. I know I find it hard to shut up sometimes and let them make the obvious mistakes, but they learn so much better that way.

Sugata Mitra wondered what would happen if you gave a computer to bunch of developing-world kids and let them use it as they would. As with Montessori, it turns out that the kids learn a lot, especially because they end up teaching each other.

Mitra’s TED talk is quite interesting in that it’s amazing just how much students will learn from a computer, even if unmediated by a teacher, if you just let them at it. Based on this work, he wants to add more computers and more unmediated spaces, all around the world. I think it’s a good idea.

In middle school we don’t have all the Montessori works students use in pre-Kindergarten through Upper Elementary. Students and their studies are getting more abstract. Instead, there are lots of individual and group projects. I like to view it as a set of apprenticeships: learn to be a scientist, learn to be an author, learn to be a geographer, and so on. One of the key questions I juggle is how “real” should their projects be. Should I give them a basic assignment and have them figure out the questions on their own, or should I point them toward specific resources, like chapters in the textbook. The answer is somewhere in between, but there is a constant tension. I also just try to mix it up a bit.

At any rate, Mitra’s work is interesting and I think its long-term results will probably affect the way we teach Montessori middle schools.

Rube Goldberg music video

The group OK Go set up an excellent Rube Goldberg machine for their music video, This Too Shall Pass. Thanks to Sage B. for pointing this one out to me. She’ll probably get to see it again next year when we get into physics and electricity and they need a little inspiration for their own machines.

Last year I used Honda’s The Cog advertisement, which is much simpler (and shorter) than OK Go’s.

Schools kill creativity

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’re not going to be creative. But when do we give kids the chance to be wrong. Ken Robinson’s argument in this TED talk, is that schools are designed to produce workers good at automatic tasks and bad at creative, heuristic ones. This may have worked well during the industrial revolution, but is painfully deficient in the modern world. It’s the same argument made by Daniel Pink in Drive.

Robinson is a most entertaining speaker, so the presentation is a joy to watch. It’s a great reminder that we need to foster some risk-taking, and students need to know that sometimes the ultimate consequence of failure is learning.

Connecting themes among texts

XVIII

Oh, when I was in love with you
Then I was clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
How well did I behave.

And now the fancy passes by
And nothing will remain,
And miles around they’ll say that I
Am quite myself again.

– A.E. Housman -from A Shropshire Lad.

Over the last two days, I’ve been trying to focus a little on how different texts can be connected by their shared themes. Poetry is one of the options for students’ presentations during the community meeting every morning, and, to speed things up a little, I’ve been insisting that students have their presentations ready and approved by the facilitator, be it a poem or leading a discussion of one of George Washington’s Rules of Civility, before the meeting starts. Otherwise, I get to choose the poem they present.

So yesterday I chose Shelly’s Ozymandias, and this morning I picked Housman’s Oh, when I was in love with you.

When we do a poem or a rule of civility, the presenter leads a short discussion of the work. For poems this means identifying interesting aspects of the language, but mostly I’ve had them focusing on extracting themes. They’re getting better and better at that with practice, so today I explicitly asked, “What themes do today’s and yesterday’s poems share?”

It took us a while to unpack the two pieces, they had to hear them again, and finally I ended up giving them my opinion.

We need to work on these intertextual comparisons a bit more, but, hopefully, they’ll improve with practice.

I’m considering having them read the lyrics of James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful (the “clean” version) tomorrow, because it fits nicely with the other two poems and a contemporary work might offer them an additional connection to the work. We’ll see.

– Ozymandias – Percy Bysshe Shelly (via poets.org)

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”