The Intersection of Poetry and Art with Chemistry

One of the great things about living around a city like Raleigh is that there is so much good and interesting local work going on in all the arts--music, visual arts, theater, dance, and writing.  I think it is a great thing to bring middle school students to local venues where they can see art being created by "real people" (rather than celebrity artists whom they may never meet).  Not only does seeing local art inspire them and suggest that it is actually possible for do art for a career, but usually local artists are great about talking to students and being able to answer questions about their work and their creative process.

So I occasionally take my son to First Fridays in Raleigh (like I noted in last Friday's blog post), and more frequently to Final Fridays in Cary (same general idea, but much lower key--but we can walk to it).  But this afternoon we visited two other local venues that support the arts, and had an incredible mixture of artistic experiences.

First I went to visit my friend Charlene's business, Gallery C, an art gallery located in the Wellspring Shopping Center on Wade Avenue.   Charlene, besides being a great person, runs a wonderful gallery that specializes in contemporary American artist, with a focus on North Carolina art (although she also does a brisk business in antique maps--I have even gotten to see there some original prints of the De Bry engravings of early 17th century America).  And while I usually enjoy her exhibits, she has a phenomenal one there right now.

Entitled "Mothers of Abstraction," the walls are adorned with Diane Patton's colorful abstracts of her hikes along the Blue Ridge Parkway.  Those are great, but what really captured my attention were the unique blown glass sculptures created by a revolutionary new Chatham county artist, Sally Resnik Rockriver.

I'm pretty good with language, but I can't find the words to describe these pieces.  They literally do not look like they are from this world--unless, perhaps, from the depth of the oceans or the furnace of a volcano.  Indeed, many of them have names from outside our terrestrial experience--names like "Saturn's Birth" or "Angel's Reef" or "Candy Cave" or "Pluto's Castle."  So just look at them at the bottom of this webpage or this webpage.

If you think you've never seen anything like this before, it is because you haven't.  And this where the neat thing about going to small local galleries comes in.  Charlene told us the story of Ms. Rockriver, the daughter of a famous North Carolina potter mother (Resnik) and someone who taught science at UNC.  Rockriver was a potter until she started fooling around blowing glass with a colleague of hers who works in that medium.  But Rockriver wanted to add the ceramic glazes she used in her pottery to her glass work. The conventional wisdom was "It physically can't be done."  But drawing on the chemical science part of her background, she figured out how to do it.  So her pieces combine traditional blown glass with ceramic glazes from pottery, making her art unique in the industry.

So by getting to know our local galleries, we not only get exposed to great art, but get to hear the stories behind the creations.

We followed up our art with a poetry reading at our marvelous independent book store, Quail Ridge Books.  The poetry reading was in honor of a new poetry anthology, printed by a local publisher, called The Sound of Poets Cooking.  This book features NC poet laureates and other local and national poets who contributed both recipes and poems dealing with food.  There are all kinds of different poems and different types of recipes in the book, the proceeds of which go to fund writing workshops in disadvantaged communities.  Food is a great topic for poetry that a younger audience will listen and respond to, so that was another great educational event made possible by a different kind of business that supports other types of artists.  Plus, cooking is counted as chemistry in our homeschool.

Anyway, when you are looking for ways to supplement your middle schoolers education, don't overlook all the wonderful businesses we have in our area supporting the arts.  And when you can, support those organizations with your purchases; especially in these hard economic times, they won't always be around if we don't give them any business.

The "Mother of Abstraction" exhibit will only be on display for another couple of weeks, so if you are in the area, make a point of stopping by and checking it out.

What Will Your Middle Schoolers Do With Their iPads?

We were at a post-Halloween costume party tonight where one person came with a shirt with a built-in iPad holder that displayed video on his iPad that was part of his costume.  It was really incredible!  But it got me to thinking about what other ways our middle school students will be using this type of technology--especially ways we might never even imagine they would.

So I came home and we (my middle school son and I) googled some of the most ingenious uses for the iPad.  Some categories that really caught our attention/imagination were:

• Artists are using iPads in their creations.  Some of the standout videos you can see are
• the artist David Kassan making incredible portraits of studio models...using only one finger
• Chinese piano prodigy Lang Lang playing "Flight of the Bumblebee" on the iPad
• a magician, instead of pulling a rabbit from a hat, pulls a dove, a piece of cheese, and lots of money from their images on the iPad
• People are using iPads to entertain and communicate with their animals.
• aquatic researchers in Mexico are finding dolphins can communicate with iPad by touching it with their beaks
• pets, particularly cats, seem intrigued with the colors, displays, and apps available on the iPad, sometimes even when the owners aren't there
• Some people are using it for more practical, everyday uses.  A couple of examples include:
• attaching it to the door of a cabinet in the kitchen to use to access recipes or cooking instructions while one's hands are occupied doing the actual food preparation
• wearing it on your back when biking to inform cars behind that you intend to do (like turning or stopping)
• hanging it around your neck at a convention with a default image of a giant name tag (presumably with the person's actual name), but available at a moment's notice to take notes of people met or presentations attended

This is not to suggest that any of us actually want to use an iPad or similar technologies in this way.  But I think it is a sign that our children may be using these tools in ways that we never imagined. My friend and colleague Maria D. and I have been talking a lot about divergent thinking lately, and I think this is one avenue where our children's divergent thinking may really manifest itself in an important and powerful way.  And if it is important and powerful enough....well, then our retirement may be much sweeter than we anticipated.

Note:  So this post really refers to any of this type of emerging technology, not just the iPad per se.  But I will admit that our family is all Mac, all the way.

Happy Guy Fawkes Night!

November 5th is a holiday in England--Guy Fawkes Night.  Guy Fawkes was the man who was caught trying to blow up King James 1, the Stuart king from Scotland who was adamently Protestant, and replace him with a Catholic king.  The evening is celebrated by building outdoors bonfires, throwing a dummy figure that is supposed to be Guy Fawkes into the fire, and shooting off fireworks.

The Oxford, an English restaurant in downtown Raleigh, was holding a public gathering for Guy Fawkes Night in the street in front of the building as part of the monthly First Friday night tour of the city's art galleries and museums.  So we spent the first part of the evening admiring, talking about, and even creating some art, then headed down to the Guy Fawkes celebrations.

This version was highly influenced by the movie "V for Vendetta," which features a call to revolution on a November 5th of the future.  Many people, including the Guy Fawkes effigy, were wearing the V mask worn by Hugo Weaving in the film.  There was also a local band playing classic rock, as well some Cirque du Soleil type fire dancers and gymnasts. 

So I don't know how authentic it was, but it was fun, it was a beautiful fall night, and it was a good excuse to brush up on our early 17th century British history.

Curriculum Resource: Story-Rich Math Game for Middle Schoolers

Last night I attended a Math 2.0 webinar that I heard about from my friend, Maria D. of Natural Math.  It was about an online math game that was developed by a middle school teacher for his own classes.  Entitled Ko’s Journey, the special thing about this math game is that the math is embedded within a compelling story--the tale of a 12-year-old Native American girl who has been separated from her family and is trying to return to her clan. 

What is so nice about this program, at least in what I’ve seen of it, is that the math isn’t the POINT of the story--getting reconnected to family is.  But doing the math is the means that makes it possible for Ko to reach her family, and in a very real way.  Each morning begins with gathering enough food to survive.  Given how much time is left, Ko’s daily progress is determined by how much weight she is carrying (so, for example, if you gather extra food, you can carry it for tomorrow, but it will slow your progress) and what environment she is traveling through (so traveling through the desert drains more energy than traveling through the forest). Plus, of course, she needs to interpret maps, understand astral navigation, prepare proportional folk remedies for injuries or diseases, and use other applied mathematical concepts.  However, the math is all a means to the desired ends of reaching her family.

I haven’t used this with my son, but I’m impressed by the concept.  The author of the program, Scott Laidlaw, developed and used this with his own middle school students, who improved over 80% in their state math test scores after using the program.  But I think the thing he values more than that (since I believe that, in general, teachers are less enamored with just test scores than politicians and other non-educators) is the change in his students in their feelings towards math.  Before this program,  Laidlaw cites a study that says 84% of middle school students have something negative to say about the subject of math (no specifics about where that statistic came from, but unless you have been blessed enough to be around a math educator as wonderful as Miss Maria or others of the Math 2.0 community, I wouldn’t be surprised by that figure).  However, through playing this game, Laidlaw’s students finally grasped the application of math to real-life situations, and their opinions about the value of math raised significantly (just like their test scores).

Although Laidlaw has concentrated on putting the story first, there are 25 national standard middle school math skills that are needed to navigate through Ko’s Journey.  So while it is not a comprehensive curriculum, it is a supplemental program that should appeal to most middle schoolers, but particularly the right-brained, non-sequential, global and applied thinkers.  And it is particularly geared towards those students who think math is boring and a waste of time!

I really think this is something that I will try with my son.  If I do, I’ll report back about my experience.

For more information about the program, check it out at http://www.kosjourney.com/ .

Lesson Plan: MBTI for Tweens/Teens

In our psychology class today, we covered the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which is probably the most widely-used psychologically-validated personality test in this country, and probably the world.  While I have taught this to hundreds of adults, it was particularly satisfying to cover this material with this age group (middle school to young teens).  As opposed to adults, who usually have at least some inkling about some of the MBTI traits, this age group has usually never been exposed to these terms before.  But as it is presented, you can really see them taking it in and applying it to themselves and other people among their families and friends.  And I personally think this is a fabulous thing to expose them to early, because I think understanding Myers-Briggs differences between people can really reduce judgement and conflict between people, whether applied to your family, your friends, your community, or your world.

There are four trait continuums in the Myers-Briggs test:
Extrovert (outward focused, get energy from social interaction) vs. Introvert (inwardly focused, gets energy from being alone)
Sensory (gets information from senses, usually linear and sequential thinker, focused on the tangible, component thinker/sees trees rather than forest) vs. Intuitive (gets information from mental connections between items, usually broad/web-like thinker, focused on patterns and relationships, big picture thinker/sees forest rather than trees)
Thinking (makes decision based on logical, rational, data-driven process) vs. Feeling (makes decisions based on feelings, emotions, or non-logical process)
Judging (prefers life that is known, routine, fixed, organized, closed-ended or settled) vs. Perceiving (prefers life that is casual, flexible, changing, unpredictable, open-ended or unsettled)

I tried to come up with an experiential exercise to help introduce each trait.  For Extrovert vs. Introvert, I had one side throw a ball into a bag held by a partner on the other side after saying a word they related to the word “outgoing.”  The other side had to get the ball out of the bag, say a word they related to the word “introspective,” then throw it back to the other side.  The point of this exchange, besides having them think about what it is to be outgoing (extroverted) or introspective (introverted), is that extroverts are always willing to throw the conversational ball to you, but introverts usually have to go within (in this case, within the bag) before coming up with a conversational ball to return to the other side.

For Sensory vs. Intuitive, I gave them slices of apples, told them to look at them, feel them, smell them, then close their eyes and eat them, then write down what they noticed/thought about.  Some people stuck strictly to describing the apple (Sensory information).  Others began to drift off to other topics:  from apples to oatmeal (from eating apple cinnamon oatmeal) to thinking about being hungry (or not) to eating something else to nutritional science to something as far flung as Reese Witherspoon (OK, so that was me, but it’s not as crazy as you might think...apples made me think of apple picking, which made me think of the rumor that Taylor Swift went on an apple-picking date with Jake Gyllenhaal, which made me think about him breaking up with...Reese Witherspoon!)  The answers to this question helped them see who stuck to more tangible or sensory information, and who wandered over to the realm of the Intuitives.

For Thinking vs. Feeling, I gave them this dilemma.  Our class of eight students have been offered an all-expense-paid trip to a fabulous place that everyone would enjoy (such as Disneyworld).  However, the offer is only good for a maximum of six students.  Should we turn it down if everyone can’t go?  Or if we accept, how do we decide who should go and who should be left behind?  Again, there isn’t a right or wrong answer to this.  However, during the discussion of their reasoning in answering this question, it was pretty easy to see who was thinking logically(give preference to those who haven’t been before, or just choose randomly, etc. ) and who was thinking emotionally (we should stay instead of leaving people out, or I would rather not go then leave a friend behind).

For our final trait (Judging vs. Perceiving), I gave them an easy example:  Describe the scene at your house as you prepare to come to the coop where the class is being given today.  A few had stories of a quiet, organized, prepared morning (everyone Judging), but most of the students were telling tales out of school, confessing that their mothers were yelling at them to hurry up because they were running late (Judging parent, Perceiving children) or children who were fussing at their parents to hurry up or they would be late as the mother was still running off sheets for today’s class (Judging children, Perceiving parent). 

This was a fun, but more accessible way, to present the MBTI to the students.  After each trait discussion, we also created a continuum in the classroom and had the students place themselves where they thought they were on each trait (extreme E, slight E, borderline E/I, slight I, exteme I, etc.).  Then they are supposed to go home and take an online MBTI test and see if their test results fit where they rate themselves.

A Walking Dialogue on Government

I had a fabulous experience this afternoon.  Voting days are always special to me (especially coming from DC), and I never, NEVER miss voting--not primaries, not run-offs, and especially days when we had as many offices and judges to vote on as we did in Wake County, NC today.  Voting to me is a right and a responsibility, a duty and a joy, an honor and a privilege, and a celebration and expression of what it is to be an American.  And I feel that way whether or not my candidates are flying in the polls or, as is the case this year, looking like they won't be the winners this time around.

And ever since my son was born, he has accompanied me to every vote on every election.  With the low numbers of young people voting (although that figure certainly went up in the last presidential election), I hope that I can convey to him what a gift it is to be able to vote, and that he will come to participate as whole-heartedly as I do.  So we have tended to make Election Day kind of a party day, and we usually have a special lunch or dinner or something to make it a festive occasion (in addition to getting to stand in line, fill out our ballet, insert it in the machine, and proudly wear our "I Voted" sticker for the rest of the day).

But now that he is a middle schooler, he is beginning to think about these things a little more carefully.  I showed him the voters guide and we talked about it some, but I think he was intimidated by the idea of making the right choice for all these different offices (and frankly, as at least of couple of us were discussing at a curriculum planning meeting tonight, we adults are too).  So he was asking about how he would be able to understand all the policies and issues involved when he was older so that he could make an informed vote.

Our polling site is about a mile away from our house, and since it was a beautiful autumn day, I decided we would put our "school work" aside and walk over there.  Walking is better for the environment (he did say that I should vote for the candidate who would protect the trees), better for our health, and better for making this a more memorable occasion.

What I didn't realize was that walking would be a better time for us to discuss the many topics related to today's vote.  We discussed the branches of government, the rotating system of who gets elected when and how it is designed to always have some continuity and have some change, and the system of checks and balances build into the American system of government.  We talked about the different levels of courts and why why we were voting for so many different offices--federal, state, and county (our town elections are held on off years).  We reviewed some of what we had studied last year about the Constitution and explored what areas it covers and what it doesn't.  We also brought up the fact that today the U.S. Supreme Court was hearing arguments about the constitutionality of the California law banning the sale of violent video games to minors (a topic I discussed in a previous post) and what "free speech" really means.  We walked by a sign in one neighbor's yard that was saying something derogatory about the national Speaker of the House, and noted that was covered by the free speech clause.  But what if it said something bad about the U.S. President?  What if it urged violence against the President?  And how does the new technology effect the idea of free speech in general?

And to top it off, these dialogues were also interspersed with him pointing out various plants that he has been learning about in the nature hikes led by a local biologist that we've been taking this month.

In short, we put aside our work to enjoy this day of civic involvement.  But I bet it also ends up being one of the most educational discussions we have all week.  It's a great reminder, when we find ourselves caught up with curriculum planning and enrolling our children in educational programs and participating in extracurriculur activities, etc., that, to paraphrase John Lennon,  sometimes learning, just like life, is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.

Plans for the NC Museum of Natural Sciences New Research Center

As I discussed in a previous post, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences is building an addition that will house new educational, research, and exhibition areas to help visitors understand how science has developed the scientific knowledge it has attained.  While there are all sorts of exciting plans in the works--multimedia presentations, interactive displays, and working state-of-the-art labs, particularly exciting for those of us with middle schoolers students and above are the possible of expanded educational programs that can go into greater depth about some of science's most pressing issues.

Today we got a preview of some of the plans under development from one of the Museum's educational staff.  First, the bad news:  the new facility will probably not be operational until 2012.  They expect to complete construction by late 2011, but preparing the exhibits and laboratories will take additional time.  In particular, there has to be a "settling in" period of some months that will allow dust, particles, or other cast-offs of the construction materials to clear the air before they can bring in the sensitive computer and laboratory equipment that will outfit the building.

However, once things get underway, they expect to be running educational programs in several different labs.  The labs specifically mentioned were a macrobiology lab, a microbiology lab, and a digital visualization lab that will specialize in helping us to understand how all the data scientists collect can be displayed in a visual way so that humans can actually understand it.  It sounds like these labs will come complete with fantastic microscopes and other equipment that will allow a small class to have hands-on experience with some advanced science topics.

So we still have to be patient for a little while.  However, particularly for those of us in the Raleigh area, it seems like this will be a great addition to our children's access to high-quality hands-on science education.  Also, for those of us who homeschool, the Museum is definitely open to and enthusiastic about working with homeschoolers to make sure their new offerings help meet our needs for the kinds of hands-on laboratory science that prepares our students for college.