Visuwords is a great visual dictionary. It not only gives definitions, but shows the links between antonyms, synonyms and etymology.
I plugged in a few of the words from this cycle’s vocabulary lists (parasite, circumnavigate, host, viceroy etc.) and the results were quite neat.
Also, if you double click a word/node it expands to show you the things it’s connected to. This can lead to a quite complex diagram. It would have been great to use it for the word navigator, because it gives a graphic organizer that pretty much covers what we talked about for social world this cycle.
Definition of eukaryote. Notice it links to the word prokaryote (the red line indicates that it's an antonym).
Synthesizing Cycle 1’s theme of, “What is Life”, I’ve given the students the option of choosing a personal novel where the question of life and sentience are important themes. Frankenstein and Feet of Clay were two suggestions.
For our Socratic Dialogue, I’ve found a nice article (via The Dish) from MIT’s Technology Review, which deals with the cultural differences that affect how Americans and Japanese view robots. They suggest it’s because Americans come from a monotheistic, jealous god culture where only god can create life, while the animism that permeates Japanese culture makes them more amenable to having self-actuating beings around them.
Apart from the theme, the article’s vocabulary is complex enough for lots of marking up and discussion, but it starts with the hook of warfighting mecha.
A few of my students have been complaining that we don’t do enough different things from week to week for them to write a different newsletter article every Friday. PE, after all, is still PE, especially if we’re playing the same game this week as we did during the last.
So I’ve been thinking of ways to disabuse them of the notion that anything can be boring or uninteresting in this wonderful, remarkable world. A world of fractal symmetry, where a variegated leaf, a deciduous tree and a continental river system all look the same from slightly different points of view. A counterintuitive world where the smallest change, a handshake at the end of a game, or a butterfly flapping its wings can fundamentally change the nature of the simplest and the most complex systems.
“Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.”
— Terry Pratchett (Interesting Times)
There are two things I want to try, and I may do them in tandem. The first is to give special writing assignments where students have to describe a set of increasingly simple objects, with increasingly longer minimum word limits. I have not had to impose minimum word limits for writing assignments because peer sharing and peer review have established good standards on their own. Describing a tree, a coin, a 2×4, a racquetball in a few hundred words would be an exercise in observation and figurative language.
To do good writing and observation it often helps to have good mentor texts. We’re doing poetry this cycle and students are presenting their poems to the class during our morning community meetings. It had been my intention to make this an ongoing thing, so I think I’ll continue it, but for the next phase of presentations, have them chose descriptive poems like Wordsworth’s “Yew Trees“*.
iPod Touches are quite convenient little PDA’s. Beautifully tactile, they are a pleasure to use. A few of my students have them and I’ve had to think long and hard about allowing iPods in the classroom because, for a little while there, students were using them under the table for all sorts of illicit applications (games). I was tempted to ban them outright, and I have not yet made a final decision but I thought I’d try co-opting the devices first.
So I now have a few students using the iPod Calendar, taking notes, and now one has found a nice little flashcard app called Cramberry. Apparently, the major selling point was its catch-phrase, “Studying doesn’t have to be painful.” The app costs $4.99 for the full version (the Lite version is useless). I’ve also tested Flashcard Touch myself, which is free this month (March), and it seems to work well (see the screen capture).
PDA’s are still on probation; they can be very useful. The outstanding question is one of trust. Will students use them appropriately, or are they too much of a temptation. A key Montessori principle is that students should take responsibility for their learning and trust is an essential component. I am cautiously optimistic.
In going over the timeline of human rights today, we realized that it did not have a card for the civil rights struggle of the 1950’s and 60’s. One of the key events that middle school students should be able to relate to is the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas. Imagine having to have troops escort you into school. Imagine having to endure racial taunts every day when you were only one of nine African American students in the entire school.
The Eisenhower Presidential Library has some of the primary documents related to the events. They give a vivid account of the events from the perspective of what the president saw.
Gay marriage is one of those current issues that allows for a fascinating perspective on civil and human rights. Although in many parts of the US racial discrimination and prejudice are still alive and pertinent, the issue has been decided; arguing for racial discrimination has no place in government policy and in the vast majority of society. The right of gay people to marry, however, still splits the country.
Terry Gross’ NPR interview with reporter Margaret Talbot is an excellent introduction to the topic based around the court case being argued in California right now. It starts with a discussion of fact that one of the lawyers arguing for marriage rights is a conservative, while the other is a liberal. This fact allows for a discussion that is much broader than a simple left-right political argument.
The interview also goes in to the role of the supreme court and its interpretation of the constitution in assuring civil rights for minorities. Loving vs. Virginia, the case striking down bans on interracial marriage, is a precedence that is key to the arguments of supporters of gay marriage.
Gross and Talbot also talk about the “orginialist” position that many conservatives take, where the Supreme Court must interpret the Constitution based on what the people who wrote it believed rather than allowing for the changes that have occurred over the past two centuries.
It’s a fascinating interview, that delves into a number of topics relating to government, courts and human rights, and uses intelligent, challenging, but not impossible language. Our next immersion trip deals with civil rights, and I plan on playing this podcast on the drive to our camping site. I suspect the students may not be too happy about this, but if it puts them to sleep, at least they’ll be well rested when we get to our destination.
The Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, are still going and making new discoveries. They are after all the man-made objects that are furthest away from the center of the solar system, beyond the orbit of Pluto, and are now approaching interstellar space.
Where does the solar system end and interstellar space begin? Well, the Sun gives off light, but it also emits a plasma of charged particles (protons and electrons typically) that’s called the solar wind. These charged particles are launched from the Sun pretty fast, but as they get to the edge of the solar system they start to slow down, because the solar system is moving through a magnetic cloud, and, as we all know, charged particles are affected by magnetic fields.
The solar wind, assisted by the Sun’s magnetic field, pushes against the interstellar magnetic cloud, creating a bubble, called the heliosphere (helio=sun, sphere=sphere) that is pretty much the edge of the solar system.
Both Voyager spacecraft are approaching the heliosphere, and we’ve recently discovered that as the solar system moves through the interstellar magnetic cloud, the heliosphere is pushing against the cloud and the cloud is pushing back quite a bit. As a result, the heliosphere is shaped like the bow wave of water around a speeding boat.
It is difficult not to personify these two lonely spacecraft as the get further and further away from home, with no way to get back, but sending signals that tell of their discoveries and ensure their immortality.
Cooking is chemistry writ large. You start by learning how to measure volumes, mass and ratios, but end up talking about polymers and stoichiometry. It can get very complicated, but it’s easy enough that anyone can do it, going into different depths.
I’m planning on jam making this fall and in testing a recipe I became curious about if I could do it without adding store-bought pectin. Red currants should have enough pectin but the question of extracting it came up.
I was curious to see if I actually get more pectin from the liquid squeezed last through the handkerchief (with much wringing) than I get from the pulp and juice of the red currants I initially squeezed through a coarse strainer. So, I tested the two batches of liquid for pectin. A simple application of science in cooking.
Date: 12/29/09.
Hypothesis: The juice (the filtrate) squeezed out of the currants through the strainer will have less pectin than the juice strained out of the seed and skin leftover of the straining (the retentate) because I think I remember reading somewhere (always dangerous) that pectin can be found in or just beneath the surface of the skin of fruits.
Procedure: Using the test from the University of Minnesota extension service: Add 1 teaspoon of juice to 1 tablespoon of rubbing alcohol and observe how well it coagulates after 2 minutes. This test is performed in two small shot glasses.
Observations: It is difficult to quantify how firm are the gels that forms at the bottom of the shot glasses. Although I could construct a simple device to test gels resistance for force, I opt to assess the gels by swirling the glasses and observing how they move. Eyeballing the results, it seems that the first extraction of pulp and juice has more pectin. An independent observer agrees with this observation.
Conclusion: My initial hypothesis is wrong. Based on this experiment I now hypothesize that the pulp of the currants has more pectin. Five minutes of internet searching seems to confirm this new hypothesis, and suggests that my initial belief that pectin can be found under the skin of fruits comes from the fact that this is true for citrus fruits.
