Pursuit of Why: Scientific Reasoning and Botany

It's not an easy thinking teaching scientific reasoning to children because the facts and details of science can easily overwhelm any planned lesson. Facts and details are an important part of science learning, but they shouldn't be the only thing. We think scientific reasoning is best taught as a habit, and to do that, we need to give children the opportunity to observe, speculate, and criticize their speculations.

Here's something to try with your kids. Have them watch the sunflower experiment at the Plants in Motion page. These side-by-side experiments show an somewhat unexpected effect of sun on growing seedlings:



Questions:
1. What are the two growth conditions for the sunflowers? For a "good" experimental design, what variables should be kept constant (for instance, same soil, same seeds, etc.), and what one variable(sun) the experimental condition?
2. What do you see?
3. Why do you think this happens?
4. Bonus question: How could you test your hypothesis?

If you try this with your children, share some of your discussions with us! We probably do more science at home with our children than other families (we both did some stints in laboratories before), but I was surprised at how much they initially struggled with generating hypotheses. It is hard to do, so it's a good thing to practice!

We were surprised at how many interesting discussion points could come from this little web lab experiment... dark-reared plants are taller with smaller leaves, Greek root, photo (light), synthesis ("syn" = together, "tithermi"=place), energy needed or plant will die, dark-reared plant put energy and resources into vertical growth (plants without sun may be buried deeper and need to grow vertically to reach light), or photosynthesis and the making of leaves might have an energy cost, sacrificing vertical growth to the formation of broader leaves to collect more sun, the idea of the sun like a "switch" - could turn off growth factors affecting the vertical growth of a plant, or turn on factors that start the program for a leaf...

Technorati tags: science, education, parenting, homeschooling, reasoning, classical education

Art and Music for Easter: Giotto and Handel's Messiah

"And he departed from our sight that we might return to our heart, and there find Him. For He departed, and behold, He is here." ~St Augustine

Our painting of the Resurrection is from Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337), who was once a shepard, but went onto fame as a painter, sculptor, and architect and has been called "father of the Italian Renaissance."

For music, we honor George Handel, a devout Christian, composer of his remarkable Messiah (in addition to other works), and generous donor to the poor and orphaned (from The Spiritual Lives of Great Composers: "Handel donated freely to charities even in times when he faced personal financial ruin. He was a relentless optimist whose faith in God sustained him through every difficulty.")

Although many people associate Messiah with Christmas, it is a Lent / East composition. Handel composed the massive work (2 1/2 hours) in just 24 days without leaving his house. He would later say, "Not from me - but from Heaven- comes all."

It's been said the tradition of standing throughout the Hallelujah Chorus dates from when King George II was moved by emotion and chose to stand.

We wish you all the blessings of this Easter week. We'll take a short break from our blog and will be back April 16th!

Giotto - The Resurrection
Web Museum: Biography of Giotto
Listen to Excerpts from Handel's Messiah
Rediscovering Handel's Messiah
Words / Libretto to The Messiah

Writing Narrative in Progymnasmata

Narrative is one of the first exercises in rhetorical education, and we're approaching narrative first by reading, then by writing to a model, with specific variations or elaborations in mind. The essentials of the narrative are the 5 W's and an H: Who, What, Where, When, Why's, and How.

Narratives can be varied by changes in sequence (e.g. from Quintilian: "pursue it from the middle, either backwards or forwards..."), amplification with vivid details (amplificatio), or addition of dialogue or dialogismus. Additional rhetorical flourishes might include praise for the virtuous, censure for the immoral, summarization of the "take-home message" in the form of a commonplace .

We have just read the chapter on Narrative in D'Angelo's Composition in the Classical Tradition. Some of the choices of reading and writing passages are dreadful, but there are enough examples to choose from, and well-organized condensations of classical techniques of writing, that I found it one the easier books to work with in a homeschool.

The narrative variations that D'Angelo describes are: Condensed, Expanded, and Slanted (like The Three Little Pigs from the Wolf's Side of the Story. The four modes of narrative are Direct Declarative, Indirect Declarative ("It is often said that..."), Interrogative ("Why can't we do more?..."), and Comparative. The Comparative mode juxtaposes the good and the bad together to emphasize the differences or pattern of decision-making made by the individuals being discussed. This last variation is an interesting one, and I can see how it can also enrich the reading. In the example given, phrases such as "instead of" or "should have" are peppered throughout the key decisions made by Daedalus and Icarus, to highlight the mistakes they made (e.g. instead of asking King Minos, or he should have listened to his father).

In classical rhetoric, effective narration is seen as a complement to effective argumentation. From an abstract, "Both Cicero and Quintilian emphasized the place of narration in preparing and arranging orations. Argumentation was understood as the blending of several arts into a complex whole. Viewed as a whole, classical oration had two faces--logical and narrative proof. Proof (confirmatio) was the decontextualized, explicit, logical version of the narrative; and the narrative (narratio) was the contextualized, personalized, implicit version of the proof."

Our own first efforts will be more modest. We're going to rewrite some fables and myths using some variations and employing specific rhetorical figures. We'll post them if they don't look too bad. Do you have any to share? If so please share them with us as comments. We'd love to see 'em.

Writing with Voice
Writing Dialogue
Language Arts: Adding Descriptive Language and Dialogue

Narration and Argumentation - Abstract

Technorati tags: classical education, homeschooling, teaching, writing, progymnasmata, rhetoric

Classical Thinking in Physics and Newton's Laws of Motion

The discovery of the Newton's Laws of Motion provide many insights into how scientific discovery occurs - there are experiments and observations, consideration of unknown or untested variables in the experimental observations, theories knitted together from results and analogies in other systems, more experiments and use of different experimental paradigms, and finally discussions (and often disagreements) with others until one arrives at a consensus.

It was Aristotle who first noticed that masses of heavier weight tended to move more quickly in proportion to their size. This didn't make sense to Galileo Galilei, though, because he knew that projectiles like cannons didn't move in straight lines, but rather in straight curves. There has been a popular story (perhaps perpetuated by Galileo's biographer) that Galileo dropped two canon balls (one 10 times heavier than the other) from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to refute this law of Aristotle. There still remains some controversy over whether Galileo was actually able to show this, but he did try experiments using inclined planes (rolling balls down planes at different heights) to better control for the rates of acceleration and quantitate his results (in a vacuum or no air resistance), items of different mass should fall at the same rate. A page from one of his notebooks can be seen below.



The year Galileo died was 1642, the same year that Isaac Newton was born. Newton's great insight was to realize that a single law might be able to explain an apple falling from a tree, the curving movement of a cannon, and motions of the planets.

Putting his observations with the concept of Universal Gravitation, Newton imagined that if a cannonball were shot horizontally and fast enough from an iman imagined mountaintop, then it might actually orbit the earth. For an animation of Newton's cannon on a mountain, click here



Newton - What Really Happened with the Apple
PBS: Galileo's Experiments
The Galileo Controversy
Galileo's Notes on Motion

Movie: Like Something the Lord Made

Over the weekend, we Like Something the Lord Made, a movie about the life of Dr. Vivien Thomas, a man who overcame racism and poverty to help pioneer innovative techniques in heart surgery. It is an amazing story, one that includes a glimpse into America's segregated past, as well as the strength and resolve of Dr. Thomas and his family. The movie provides a realistic view of innovation in surgical research, as well as the personal courage and self-sacrifice such work takes on all involved.

In addition, there is a small role in the movie for Dr. Helen Taussig, a Cliffie (Hurrah! - Radcliffe, Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins) who had dyslexia and was also a champion tennis player, and had quite dramatic pioneering work herself in the field of pediatric cardiology. She lost her hearing by the time she had graduated from Hopkins and relied on lip reading and hearing aids, but "some of her innovations in pediatric cardiology have been attributed to her ability to distinguish the rhythms of normal and damged hearts by touch, rather than by sound."

For families: Despite the title, this is not a "Christian movie" and there is some mild profanity uttered by the chief of surgery (Blalock).

Vivien Thomas
Wikipedia: Something the Lord Made
Movie Review: Something the Lord Had Made
About Dr. Helen Taussig