Sweet home Ontari-ama (L'Harmas posts)

Leaves all down now on the red maple

Melanie Walker-Malone may be a less familiar name to some Treehouse readers.  I met Melanie for the first time at last year's L'Harmas, while I was still trying to wrap my head around the idea that people would actually come up HERE for a conference, from down THERE.

This year Melanie's talk was about the world-famous and inspiring people who were born in her home state, Alabama, and how learning about the heroes right around you often creates wider connections.  For instance, Helen Keller, from Alabama, had a close connection with Alexander Graham Bell, and when we were chatting after her talk Melanie mentioned that she (Melanie) had been to the Bell Historic Site in Nova Scotia.  But she didn't know that there's also a Bell Homestead in Brantford, Ontario, much closer to us, where the first telephone calls were made! So the connections continue to grow.

Melanie mentioned not only people but local resources; in her case, marble which is quarried nearby and used in Birmingham for everything from statues to kitchen islands. Teaching children to recognize their "own" rocks, wood, whatever, is another way to get them to notice what's around them in a new way.  A building, a wall, a monument that they would have passed over before, takes on new meaning when they know not only who or what it represents, but also why the material was chosen, where it came from.

So guess what I found online today? A local geologist has put together a self-guided walking tour of some of the city buildings, pointing out what they're made of, where fossils are embedded in stone walls, and so on.  Anybody local who wants to know, contact me and I'll send you the link.  Is that cool or what?

Our front steps and retaining wall

Little ideas...they just hatch out and hop all over the place.

Teacher training this week

"Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools. But teaching is a creative profession. Teaching, properly conceived, is not a delivery system. You know, you're not there just to pass on received information. Great teachers do that, but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage. You see, in the end, education is about learning."  ~~ Sir Ken Robinson

Reading:

Consider This, by Karen Glass (done re-reading)
The Seashell on the Mountaintop, by Alan Cutler (done and reviewed)
All for Love (done)
Why Geology Matters, by Douglas Macdougall
How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, by Edward Hirsch

Watching:
Sir Ken Robinson, How to escape education's death valley  (TED talk)

The Seashell on the Mountaintop (Book review)

The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius who Discovered a New History of the Earth, by Alan Cutler.  Dutton, 2003.

In Dr. Jay Wile's Exploring Creation With General Science, my seventh grader and I read about the principle of superposition, along with other basic geologic principles.  It wasn't a hard concept to grasp: the older things are lower down in the ground than the newer things. We compared it to a hypothetical bedroom floor that hasn't been picked up in several years and that holds an accumulation of clutter and debris relating to the owner's life over that time period.  Birthday cards from two years ago would be found somewhere below last week's dirty socks, and so on.  The scientist who is honoured by having those principles named for him, is Nicolaus (or Nicolas) Steno (1638-1686). In the 1600's, names were somewhat fluid, and Steno started out with a Danish name, but it changed depending on where he was and who he was writing to.

When we think of creationism today, there are certain points that we assume that Christians taking the Bible either "literally," or at least seriously, believe. But in the seventeenth century, taking the Bible literally included ideas that even creationists today would find strange; for example, that extinction of any species was Biblically impossible, because that would mean that God wasn't taking perfect care of his Creation. Any suggestion that any part of creation could change over time, or at least since the time of Noah's flood, was viewed with disdain and suspicion. It was impossible to imagine that dry land, especially high places and mountains, could at one time have been seas, and that those seas had deposited sediment that had become rock, and that inside that rock were the fossilized remains of creatures that were sometimes familiar, sometimes not. God's world a) just wasn't old enough to have gone through that much change, and b) wasn't supposed to change anyway. Everything was where it had been put at Creation, or possibly where it had gotten dumped in a short period of time during the Flood. Anything that didn't fit those parameters...well, there were always explanations. Fossilized sharks' teeth, seashells far from the sea, even stones must have fallen from the sky, or maybe grew from the ground. After all, didn't farmers find a brand new crop of stones in their fields every spring?

And this is where Nicolaus Steno entered the story.  He began as an anatomist, and quite a well known and skilled one; he discovered tear ducts and a few other important things about the human body. But a chance opportunity to dissect a very large shark's head forced him to notice the similarities between all those rows of teeth, and the petrified sharks' teeth that were popular for their "medicinal properties" but which were believed to be just tooth-shaped stones.  He gradually abandoned his anatomical studies for geological ones...except that there really was no such thing as geology, until he invented it, or specifically, stratigraphy.

There is much more to his personal story, his travels, his writing, and his discoveries; and as the author says somewhat regretfully, this particular book could not spend as many pages as he would have liked discussing Steno as an anatomist, and Steno as a priest (he converted to Catholicism, became a priest and then a bishop, and was beatified in 1988).  However, we do get quite a bit of those different sides of Steno's life, and I don't think most readers would find the story unbalanced.

I was a bit put off at first by a tone of  "people used to believe this, but we don't mix religion with science now," but as the book went on it seemed that the author expressed more respect for Steno's strong religious beliefs. As Cutler points out at the end of the book, in the post-Galileo world it was often not the church that argued with new ideas in science, but other scientists--physicists, for example, who wanted everything to line up neatly and rationally. He makes this comment in the epilogue: "Until very recently, religious and scientific arguments were advanced by both sides in every important scientific controversy. Too often what filters down to us in the history books are the scientific arguments of the winners and the religious arguments of the losers. Thus the picture of a long-standing rift between the two."

Having finished Seashell, and chewing on some of Steno's observations that would seem to cause trouble for young-earth creationists today (perhaps more than they did in his own time?), I did a short Google search for Nicolaus Steno plus creationism. I was not surprised to find a Christian Science Monitor article referring to him as "the saint who undermined Creationism"; but I was very surprised to see a page praising him highly on the Creation Ministries International website. I think that is due to the fact that although Steno opened the doors to a new understanding of the earth's history, which eventually led to the more problematic doctrines of geologists like Lyell, he did not get specific about when all this might have happened. What was revolutionary enough in his time was simply saying, first this, then this.

The book isn't difficult to read, and I think it would be quite suitable for students in middle school and up. It offers such a good introduction to the state of European religion, science, and life in general in the late seventeenth century, that it would be an excellent addition to a study of that time period.

Mama Squirrel's Library Pile

From the public library, reading and leafing through:

The Map That Changed the World, by Simon Winchester
Why Geology Matters, by Doug Macdougall
The Seashell on the Mountaintop, by Alan Cutler
Eric Sloane's Weather Almanac

Natural History: Our School of Rocks

Photos by Mr Fixit; copyright 2013, Dewey's Treehouse.

Countdown to school: Grade 7 Science Plans

It's three weeks till school starts; for us, anyway.  I know some of you start school next Monday, some of you started this week, and some of you never stopped.  But we still have three weeks.

Since I had been looking at the World Book Typical Course of Study for 7th Grade Language and Math, I figured I might as well check out the Science topics as well.  I remember Mary Pride going through some of these lists, or something like them, in one of her books, and pointing out where there can be a lot of overlap and repetition between the grades, along with a few politically-correct or twaddly topics.  However, when I looked at the lists for 6th, 7th, and 8th grade, and compared them with the two Apologia textbooks we have for middle school (General Science and Physical Science), I was a bit startled at how closely they lined up. General Science covers World Book topics such as microbes, algae and fungi, food for growth and energy, the cell, rocks, soil and minerals, weathering and erosion, the scientific method, and laboratory techniques (lab reports are required all through the book).  Physical Science includes chapters on climate and weather, atmosphere, electricity, and Newton's laws.   In fact, about the only major things missing would be a unit on chemistry (elements and compounds), maybe a space or astronomy unit, an oceans unit (which would be covered by The Sea Around Us if you had done Ambleside Online Year 6), and maybe some work on ecosystems, conservation, ecology and the environment.

Now obviously using the Apologia books is not the only way to cover those topics.  And when you say a textbook "covers" a topic, that can mean all kinds of things.  For instance, General Science has a chapter title that includes Paleontology, which might lead you to believe you're going to be discussing dinosaurs. Actually dinosaurs per se are mentioned about twice in the whole book.  Lots of fossils, studied in an age-of-the-earth context, but very little discussion of dinosaur life.  Just saying.  Also, the way that a Christian-based book "covers" a topic such as geology might be a little different from the way that a mainstream book handles it.  But since we do have the two books (plus some resources for the missing units), and I was planning on using them over the next two years anyway, the lists just reinforced that plan.

What I did change, while looking both at the lists and the textbooks, was the earlier plan to cover only half the General Science book this year.  Instead, we'll spend six weeks on the first three modules, which are an introduction to science history and the scientific method; skip Module 4, Simple Machines, since we've done lots of that before; and spend the rest of terms 1 and 2 on the Geology and Life Science modules, but saving most of the human-body chapters for next year.  The third term will be based on the DK Science Explorer bind-up volume we have (and other resources), using the sections on Matter and Chemistry (there's a lot of overlap in content).

Another thing I want to emphasize this year is getting out and letting Dollygirl have some fun being homeschooled.  Really.  Sometimes you just forget what's out there, or don't realize your kids have never gotten to do such and such.  Recently I downloaded Bucket List Learning, by Kimberlee Wilkes (when it was free--now it's not).  It was a reminder that sometimes you can actually cover a lot of lengthy school objectives through real-life experiences, field trips, community happenings.  In our own area, we are privileged to have an earth-sciences museum that not only provides school tours and talks, but also has a "rock garden"--not the kind you might have with flowers, but a "garden" of unusual geological specimens to walk through.  So obviously this is the year for us to make at least a couple of visits there.  Also there's a conservation area and nature centre within a short drive, that of course also offers school programs (for homeschoolers too) and places to just walk through the woods or look at pond life.  As the Bucket List book points out, once you start listing the stuff that's available (noon hour concerts! homeschool days at the museum! an archaeological site!), you can get carried away.

I'm looking forward to science...and I'm hoping that Dollygirl will get good things from this year's studies.

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #28: Sunday Ponderings from the Parents Review

"Geology I dabbled in, having met with "Lyell's Principles" in the School Library. A piece of spar still remains which I obtained from the lowest Lias at the deep cutting, then being made, on the London and Birmingham Railway; I loved to gaze from the top of its banks on the three spires of Coventry. The slight knowledge acquired of what was then a new science was like a seed thrown into the ground, which did not germinate till long years after. I still eagerly pursued Entomology, chiefly with Wratislaw."--"Memories of Arnold and Rugby 60 Years Ago," by a Member of the School, in 1835, '36 and '37. Parent's Review, Volume 7, 1896, pg. 127

"Fifty years ago, when that famous pioneer of science, Dr. William Buckland, was Professor of Geology in the University of Oxford, it was his pleasant custom on occasion to announce to his class at the close of a lecture, 'Tomorrow, gentlemen, we shall meet at the top of Shotover, at ten o'clock.' And to the top of Shotover Hill the class would ride or walk from Oxford the next morning, and there the professor would talk to them in his vivacious, impressive fashion about the formation of the hill on which they stood, its limestones, clays, ironstones, gravels or fossils, on the evidences of denudation or the methods of stratification. And if things got a bit dull he would take especial delight in giving the most fastidious of the equestrian freshmen a practical lesson in geology by leading their horses through the stickfast mud on the slopes so that they might remember the nature of the Kimmeridge clay. And, doubtless, they did remember it, with the help of Common Room jokes thereon.

"Dr. Buckland, like every great man of science (and if one may presume to judge from programmes alone, like the truly scientific promoters of the work of this Union) was thoroughly convinced of the supreme importance of the school out of school, of out-door education. Buckland used often to say that such geological terms as stratification, denudation, faults,--to mention only a few of the commonest--could never be understood through lecture-room teaching alone. Shotover Hill was to him a lesson in geology, far superior in force to any which could be learnt from books or lectures, however admirable, and however rich the illustration by diagrams or pictures, or even by actual specimens of rocks and fossils. And all such illustrations in the lecture-room itself, Buckland used with a liberality that was utterly astounding and disconcerting to the academic Oxford of his day.

"Yet Buckland was teaching young men, not mere children, and might justly have relied to some extent on their fairly mature intelligence to grasp his verbal explanations of geological phenomena. But with the true teacher's instinct he studied his own mental processes, and asked himself, 'Now, could I really, thoroughly understand what a fault looks like, could I have a vivid mental picture of it from books and diagrams if I had never seen the thing itself in the rocks?' And being aware that the intense reality of his knowledge came purely from his early friendship with the rocks themselves at Lyme Regis, and Bristol, and elsewhere, from a long-continued intimacy with the thing and not the name or even the picture of the thing, he made it his business to bring his students to see the thing itself, since in such a case the thing could not be brought to the students.

"This, then, is the testimony and the practice of one who was a master of earth-lore. No less significant is the evidence of one whose study lay amongst the great stone-books of art. As Buckland was the pioneer of geological studies in Oxford, so was John Henry Parker (now resting in the quiet of St. Sepulchre's, near Jowett and T. H. Green) the pioneer of the study of Historical Architecture. In one of his books on Gothic Architecture, which have been the source of a new joy in life to throngs of students, Mr. Parker tells us with the brief unmistakable words of a master: 'The only real way of thoroughly understanding architectural history is to go about and see the buildings themselves.'"

"If Buckland and Parker thus insist on the necessity of bringing the real thing before the eyes of students of university age so that the thing may teach its own lesson, how much more essential to right understanding is this 'real' teaching for children of school age, and how absolutely the only right sort of teaching for the very young whose school days have not yet come."

--"At School on Hampstead Heath," Parent's Review, by Mrs. Grindrod, 1897

Terrible Lizard, by Deborah Cadbury (book review)

I had mentioned that I was reading Terrible Lizard, but hadn't posted much about what I learned or whether it was a good book.

Yes, it is an excellent book. In fact, I would say that if you want to understand where Charlotte Mason and her PNEU cohorts were coming from in their views of the natural world, this is essential reading. It covers the whole digging-up-dinosaurs-in-Britain story from Mary Anning's discoveries around 1810 to the huge shift in thinking fifty years later. It connects geology and anatomy...and, more exactly, geologists and anatomists...with the race to identify, name, and take credit for the new/old creatures. The story starts with a poverty-stricken girl digging up bones, and an aspiring geologist puzzling over a tooth that just had to belong to an herbivore but didn't fit any known category of creature. It peaks with an 1850's dinner party inside a model Iguanodon. It ends with people looking towards the established heads of science, those who had always come up with Biblically-acceptable answers, to respond to Darwin and Huxley...and those same sources of knowledge and faith finally throwing up their hands.

Actually Darwin and Huxley play only a small part in this story--they were the rebels who took over from the previous generation of geologists. Geology was a sort of gentleman's science in the first half of the nineteenth century; if you wanted to be taken seriously, you had to be a member of the Geological Society. The pre-Darwin British geologists were careful to present their findings in a God-inspired, Biblical context; some of them, like William Buckland, held high positions in the Church of England; few of them agreed with "evolution," but they were finding themselves believing less and less in a literal six days of creation, in a worldwide deluge, and in a world that was only a few thousand years old. The stories they read in the rocks and the bones seemed to show without any question that the large creatures must have existed in a time before man--perhaps in a whole other time that God had also created.

And then the evolutionists came along and took even that away.

"When he met Darwin in December 1859, [Richard]Owen praised him for his original ideas on the formation of species. Owen did not accept that Man was a transmuted ape, but in the Origin Darwin had only hinted at Man's relationship with apes. He was eager to build bridges with the famous anatomist, and it is possible that Owen may have imagined that there was some common ground between them: each step in Darwin's evolution could still be planned by God."--Cadbury, page 307

But it didn't work out that way.

"[In 1860, Thomas Huxley] discussed Man's relationship to the apes, highlighting similarities. Owen was furious; had always sought to show that Man was zoologically distinct from the animals. Those seeking to reconcile the findings of science with their belief in the Bible faced a terrible dilemma. How could the 'monkey theory' fit with Creation in Genesis? Owen was the obvious scientific leader who could surely be relied upon to expose the flaws in Darwin's thinking....[but] Owen could no longer shelter behind the ambiguous language he had used for so long....Even though Owen was not a Creationist the sides became polarised, with Darwin and his supporters, 'the Devil's Disciples' Huxley and Hooker, standing in opposition to Owen, who was trying to uphold traditional values....One by one, Owen's cherished notions on the dinosaurs were seen to fall apart."--Cadbury, pages 307-317

There are other fascinating people in this story--Gideon Mantell, the doctor and geologist who puzzled over the herbivore's tooth; Charles Lyell, who had a strong influence in moving scientific beliefs away from having to agree with the Bible; Georges Cuvier. And Mary Anning, who never got enough credit or enough compensation.

But for me the most interesting aspect of the book--aside from the actual dinosaur discoveries--was the clear presentation of how Creationist Christianity was suddenly left in the lurch. I don't have good answers for that even now. I don't know if I could have handled this book twenty years ago, or if I would have wanted to read anything at all where the "good guys" didn't believe that it all happened exactly as the Bible said. Today Christians who don't want to "leave their brains at the door" are being offered Creationist research to consider that was not available then. I'd like to believe all the young-earth-creationist material, because the fact that God made us in his image--really made us--is as central to our beliefs as it was to Buckland and Owen. However, I did not grow up with the idea that men and dinosaurs co-existed, so I have as hard a time trying to fit that all together as they did their piles of bones. I'm trying to keep an open mind on both sides.

Anyway--a very good read, very worthwhile especially for high school students. There are only two places I could see that you might want to have them skip over--an early adventure of Owen's involving body parts, and some other graphic material on page 270.