Kids need recess
January 31, 2009
School recess improves behavior – from the NYTimes.
Anyone surprised?
New semester in motion
January 26, 2009
It’s day one of the second semester in the high school.
That means the start of new high school courses. Here we are at the first meeting of Physics of Motion.
The first experimental challenge: Find the relationship between the distance a ball runs down an incline and the time it takes to roll. Students are looking for patterns by graphing so they needed enough 
distance/ time points to make a recognizable curve. The class talked about the advantage of averaging multiple trials and of having larger times so that the reaction time of the person on the stop watch was minimized.Students made the decisions on each of these points as they designed the experiments.
Here they are at work in groups this morning – using the incline of the staircase in Kenyon as their laboratory.
Simple ideas: Education’s only purpose and one true test
January 26, 2009
Is the only true purpose of education to help children stay learners for life? To learn how to learn?
I was going to use the word “become” instead of “stay” but we all know that children arrive at school as avid, eager questioners and learners eager for the information and autonomy that comes with knowledge and skills.
And the true test of any class, (or course, unit of study, school) is that learners leave wanting to know (and do and create) more and continue learning.
How do we hold ourselves accountable to that?
What else?
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Alvin Toffler.
Saving the Children from Science
January 25, 2009
The Onion October 2005
There’s another of those scary science stories in today’s NYTimes: Split Outcome in Texas Battle in Teaching Evolution.
The real scary part is such ignorance is still alive and kicking, and not just in Texas.
And when it comes to textbooks – as Texas goes, there goes the nation.
Meanwhile next month we celebrate the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth.
I’ve been dipping into some of Darwins letters and notebooks describing his earliest memories, his experiences aboard the Beagle and his adventures in South America
They are all available here The Complete Works of Charles Darwin.
Fascinating.
Stephen Colbert hears the mermaids
January 24, 2009
With a president who reads Derek Walcott and quotes June Jordan it’s good to have comedians at home with T.S.Eliot. This week inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander explained metaphor to Stephen on The Colbert Report.
Meanwhile at PDS English teachers had a quick email conversation that went something like this:
Teacher#1
I’m attaching a copy of Elizabeth Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day,” which she read at yesterday’s inauguration…. I find the poem to be extremely accomplished in terms of its subtlety and precision, with evocative and accessible imagery. This all becomes clearer on the page, with the poet’s line breaks and enjambments restored. She’s clearly drawing on Whitman as an influence, and it could possibly be connected to the one school – one poem project. I’m going to try to work it into my classes this week and thought I’d share it with you.
Teacher #2
It reminded me of Berthold Brecht’s Questions from a worker who reads.
Teacher #3
(Looks like we’re composing a great English assignment.) I was reminded of this poem by Marge Piercy:
To Be of Use
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
(there’s more)
It was the lines:
Say it plain: that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of
that brought Brecht to mind.
Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the name of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished.
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
Of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go?from Questions from a Worker who Reads
There’s also the echo of W.H.Auden. In Breughel’s painting Icarus falling into the Sea- his wings melted for flying too close to the sun - Icarus falls to his death while around him life goes on as usual.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.from Musee des Beaux Arts.
In Praise Song the particularity of other and ordinary lives are the prelude, the purpose and the essential background of all the public progress, pomp and circumstance.
Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.
This is the business of daily life and how we walk
…past each other…
All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.
Frozen Hudson
January 23, 2009
The Hudson River from Mills Norrie State Park
Last year I bought some of those ice grippers you can velcro onto your boots. This year they have been put to use on walks at Canopus Lake, along the Hudson here at Mills Norrie and clearing the ice from the driveway. This year I’ve added snow shoes to the eqipment.
About those objective tests…
January 23, 2009
“Stony the road we trod”
January 21, 2009
PDS marked the inauguration at its Peacemakers Assembly on Tuesday. Entitled “Stony the road we trod” the event began with the singing of James Weldon Johnson’s Lift Every Voice and Sing.
In the collage you can see pictures of the participants from high school to lower school. Ater lunch everyone returned to the JEJ theater to watch the inauguration.
Collage of pictures from the all-school assembly on Tuesday
New furniture
January 21, 2009
As if on cue, the moving truck with the new furniture or Kenyon House arrived right as the Peacemakers Assembly ended. A willing crew of high school students soon had it inside and assembled.
Andrea, Steve and Stan were there to check the order
Many hands making light work
PDS is a part of it
January 20, 2009
More about our assembly later but here is a screenshot from the the NYTimes website. The middle school Photo Journalism class previewed some of the pictures on the site. One student sent a picture. When the class noticed that it got published it sent another one.
Picturing the Inauguration: The Readers’ Album
PDS MAKES THE NY TIMES WEBSITE
Photo of Dan jumping for joy by Liz
Photo of the all school assembly viewing Martin Luther King at the March on Washington 1963.
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