Maria Montesori

 It's the birthday of educator Maria Montessori, born in Chiaravalle, Italy (1870). She studied literature and medicine at the University of Rome and was the first woman in Italy to be granted a doctor of medicine (M.D.) degree. She worked as a psychiatric instructor at a clinic for children with learning disabilities and developed therapeutic approaches that involved appeals to the children's senses, especially the sense of touch.

She noticed that kids who were given something to put in their hands and play with had a corresponding positive cerebral response. She eventually left that clinic to direct the preschool education of children in San Lorenzo, a slum neighborhood in Rome that had become so overcrowded and problematic that the government had reorganized aspects of residents' daily lives. This included setting up children's day care houses through out the city, where parents were to drop off their kids, ages three to seven, while they were at work. Montessori was put in charge of one of these houses, and she used the opportunity to implement on normal poor children some of the methods she'd used with developmentally challenged children. These children responded positively to her techniques as well, demonstrating high levels of learning and achievement.

Dr. Montessori began to write out her educational curriculum and philosophy and lecture extensively, so that schools around the world could replicate it. Basic tenets of her approach included a very literal "hands-on" style of learning. For example, children were given building blocks to use and the shapes of cut-out alphabet letters to handle. She didn't think that teachers should impose their personalities on the children; instead, teachers, called "directors" in her system, were to provide the educational materials and then step back and be a "silent presence," ready to assist if beseeched. She said, "Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed."

She believed in the need for practical as well as academic education, so preschool children were provided with toys and tools that helped them learn to tie shoelaces. They learned to use forks and knifes, and they practiced things like washing their hands and making sandwiches. She also thought that tests and grades were not productive and that children should learn at their own pace and pursue what interests them. She wrote, "One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child."

Montessori methods became influential in America, and today there are more than 5,000 Montessori schools in the United States, 300 of which are public schools. A study in 2006 published in the journal Science tested public school children in inner-city Milwaukee, some who had won a district lottery to attend the public Montessori school, and a separate control group who had entered the Montessori lottery but did not get picked. (This was to account for differences in home environment between the sorts of parents who want their children to attend Montessori; in this study, every participant's parents had wanted their child to enroll in Montessori.)

The study showed that five-year-olds who attended Montessori had better vocabulary and math skills, as well as better social problem-solving skills — that when presented with stories of behavior dilemmas, Montessori children used "a higher level of reasoning by referring to justice or fairness to convince the other child" to share. Twelve-year-old Montessori children were deemed to have written essays that were "significantly more creative" and that employed "significantly more sophisticated sentence structures" than their non-Montessori peers, though their spelling and grammar skills were at an equal level.

Maria Montessori was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times, though she never received the award. She's the author of Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook (1911), The Secret of Childhood (1939), The Absorbent Mind (1949), and The Discovery of the Child (1948).

She said, "Free the child's potential, and you will transform him into the world."

And, "Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war."

Source:

Writer's Almanac 2008

Today's quote:

Everyone talks about peace but no one educates for peace. In this world, they educate for competition, and competition is the beginning of any war. When educating to cooperate and owe each other solidarity, that day we will be educating for peace.

~Maria Montessori

The Montessori Method:

The skin is gone, the frame remains

 The Montreal Biosphere, designed by Buckminster Fuller for Expo 67, faced a dramatic transformation in 1976 when a fire consumed its acrylic skin. This image captures the sphere engulfed in flames, with the steel geodesic framework enduring the intense blaze—a testament to Fuller’s structurally efficient design. Though the fire marked the end of the dome’s original state, its exposed framework took on a new visual identity, emphasizing transparency and geometric precision. Today, the Biosphere stands as an environmental museum, symbolizing resilience and Fuller’s enduring vision of sustainable design.

Temple Grandin

 It's the birthday of animal scientist and memoirist Temple Grandin, born in Boston (1947). At age two and a half, she was diagnosed with autism, and doctors recommended that her parents put her in an institution. Though she had developed and acted normally for the first six months of her life, she then began to stiffen up when her mother tried to hold and cuddle her. She later wrote, "This withdrawal from touch, so typical of autistic children, was followed in the next years by standard autistic behaviors: my fixation on spinning objects, my preference to be alone, destructive behavior, temper tantrums, inability to speak, sensitivity to sudden noises, appearance of deafness, and my intense interest in odors."

She didn't acquire language skills at the age that toddlers normally do; instead, she would scream and hum when in need of attention. Her parents brought her to speech therapy, and with rigorous treatment, she started speaking at age three and a half. Her parents put her in a normal private school, and for the most part, Grandin recalls that she grew up not realizing that she was different from other children. Then, one day in middle school, a girl called her a "retard" and Grandin flung a textbook at her insulter. The textbook hit the girl in the eye, and Grandin was expelled from school.

Her mother had been doing research for a film script on schools for children with learning disabilities, and she came across a school in New Hampshire that she thought would be good for her daughter. Grandin transferred there and thrived in the compassionate environment. At first, she still had outbreaks of violence, but after her horseback riding privileges were suspended for a week after such an outburst, she began to control her behavior more.

During a summer in high school, she stayed at the ranch of her aunt, fixing things around the place and also just gazing at the cattle. She became fascinated by watching cattle go through the cattle squeeze — a chute with movable panels designed to keep the cow standing in one place, so that the cow could, for example, be easily given a vaccine. Grandin observed that the cows seemed to be much calmer when they were inside the chute. She tried out the cattle squeeze herself, and had her aunt use the different controls to adjust pressure and stimulation. She found being in the squeeze chute extremely pleasurable, surmising that the experience she had inside the cattle squeeze must be similar to the comforting sensation other people received from a hug or other warm human embrace, which she had shunned and felt somewhat repulsed by all her life.

She designed her own human squeeze and used it in college, finding that it calmed her down when she felt anxious. Her parents and some mental health professionals worried about this, and so Grandin designed a psychology experiment in which she tested out the squeeze machine on other college students. She did background research on sensory interaction, and she built another version of the squeeze machine. From the experiment, she found that 25 out of the 40 normal college students tested found the squeeze machine to be pleasurable and relaxing. The squeeze machine that she designed has since been used by occupational therapists in therapy with children who have autism, ADD, and Tourette's syndrome.

After finishing a bachelor's degree, she went to graduate school to pursue psychology studies. In her first year, she also got a part time job operating the cattle chute at a livestock facility and another side job selling the chutes to farmyards. She became increasingly interested in livestock and switched her graduate studies to animal science. She wanted to find a way to see that cattle at feedlots were treated more humanely, all the way up until the moment they were slaughtered. She began writing magazine articles about this and other livestock issues, and became the livestock editor for the Arizona Farmer Ranchman.

In addition to ensuring more humane treatment of livestock, her work has led to reducing disease among livestock and to improved quality of meat coming out of the facilities she's worked with. The systems and methods she has designed affect more than half of North America's cattle.

She's the author of Emergence: Labeled Autistic (1986), Thinking in Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life with Autism (1995), Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (2004), and The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships: Decoding Social Mysteries Through the Unique Perspectives of Autism (2005). When Dustin Hoffman played an autistic man in the 1988 movie Rain Man, Grandin helped him to prepare for that role.

Thanks Writer's Almanac

Leonard Bernstein

 It's the birthday of conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, born in Lawrence, Massachusetts (1918).

leonard-bernstein-by-paul-de-hueck-courtesy-of-the-lleonard-bernstein-

His father was a Russian immigrant. He bought and sold beauty supplies, and he discouraged his son from being a musician in favor of taking over the family business. When he was 10, his Aunt Clara was going through a divorce, and she sent her piano to the Bernstein home. Leonard became a pianist. He got an assistantship with the New York Philharmonic. And on a Sunday afternoon, November 14, 1943, when the conductor Bruno Walter got sick, Leonard Bernstein filled in and got a great review on page one of The New York Times. He became a celebrity at the age of 25.

He wrote scores for many musicals, including "On the Town," "Wonderful Town," "Candide," and "West Side Story."

Bernstein also wrote a book called "The Joy of Music" (1959), a collection of essays and conversations about music. In it, he wrote, "Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own."

Leonard Bernstein: West Side Story Selection for Orchestra

After the party's over

 

Aug 18, 1969

Woodstock Aug 14, 1969

"The three-day concert known as Woodstock began on this day in 1969 in a field near a dairy farm at Bethel, New York.

Organizers promised leery town officials that no more than 50,000 people would attend; the final number was eight or nine times that many, creating a massive traffic jam. A late change in the location meant that preparations went down to the wire: there was time only to build a stage or install the fencing and ticket booths. The stage won – and most attendees simply walked in without tickets. There wasn’t enough food, proper sanitation, first aid, or protection against the bad weather.

On the morning of Sunday, August 17, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller called the festival organizer and told him that he was thinking of ordering 10,000 National Guard troops to the site, but the organizer talked him out of it. Sullivan County declared a state of emergency. With all its unexpected problems, though, Woodstock is remembered for its relative calm amid the national strife of Vietnam and civil rights protests. People got along. They listened to music, and they had a good time."

Thanks Writer's Almanac

 Wikipedia says this:

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair, commonly referred to as Woodstock, was a music festival held from August 15 to 18, 1969, on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York, 60 miles southwest of the town of Woodstock. Billed as "an Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music" and alternatively referred to as the Woodstock Rock Festival, it attracted an audience of more than 460,000. Thirty-two acts performed outdoors despite overcast and sporadic rain.

Cross country trip anyone?

 

In the summer of 1909, a 22-year-old homemaker named Alice Ramsey set out to do something utterly outrageous for her time: drive across the country. Not with her husband. Not with a mechanic. But with three other women—none of whom could drive. Her goal wasn’t to break speed records or prove technical prowess. It was to show that women belonged on the road just as much as men.

Back then, “roads” were more often than not little more than rutted trails, dust-choked tracks, or muddy messes barely passable by wagon. Maps were laughable. Gas stations were scarce. And the idea of a woman driving long distances was seen as a novelty—if not an outright act of rebellion. But that didn’t stop Alice. She loaded up a dark green Maxwell touring car and set off from New York City, determined to reach San Francisco.

The journey took 59 days. Along the way, they changed 11 tires, crossed treacherous terrain, drove through blinding rain and searing heat, and sometimes relied on telegraph poles for navigation. They were chased by men on horseback, stared at by stunned farmers, and even encountered Native American families still living on reservations. There were no hotel reservations. No GPS. No AAA.

Alice did all the driving. She also did most of the repairs. She had taken a car apart and put it back together before the trip, just in case. The other women—her two sisters-in-law and a friend—provided moral support, conversation, and an extra set of hands when needed. They were ladies of their time, wearing long skirts and wide-brimmed hats, but they were also bold enough to laugh in the face of convention.

When they rolled into San Francisco, they were met with astonishment. Newspapers across the country ran headlines about their feat. Men were impressed. Women were inspired. And Alice Ramsey became the first woman to drive coast-to-coast—a pioneer not only of the automobile age but of a new kind of female independence. Not flashy. Not angry. Just determined. Practical. And brave as hell.

The existence of life on earth

 

It's a long video, so I'm posting it here, where I can continue watching.

The Great Wagon Road through Appalachia

 The Great Wagon Road

For countless early American families of Scots-Irish, German, and English descent, the Great Wagon Road was more than a route—it was a lifeline to opportunity.

Stretching over 700 miles from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, down into the backcountry of the Carolinas, and ending in Augusta, Georgia, it was one of the most traveled routes of colonial America.

This early highway helped shape the frontier, as thousands of immigrants moved southward in search of fertile land and a fresh start. Along the way, communities sprang up, and new settlements were born.

But the journey was anything but easy. Travelers navigated rugged terrain, unpredictable weather, and the ever-present threat of danger—whether from theft, illness, or conflict with those who had long called the land home.

Despite the hardships, the Great Wagon Road played a critical role in shaping the cultural and geographic landscape of the American South and beyond. Its legacy still echoes in the towns, family names, and traditions found all along its path

Indian Fry Bread

 By 1890, the Lakota people, once powerful and free, were entirely dependant on the U.S. government. The U.S. had forcibly removed our people from our homeland, confined them to reservations and cut their rations by half.

That 'ol Indian Fry Bread' made of lard & flour ~

"Do you know where the 'idea' of frybread comes from, young one?", asked the Elder...

Everyone sat back and looked so eager to hear the story this beautiful Elder was about to tell, all smiles...

"Buggy flour and rancid lard", he said softly with his head down... Flour, you know, with bugs in it, and lard that had gone bad... that was all we got from the Indian Agent.

That was all we had to cook with, it was all we had to eat... Buggy flour and rancid lard... And so we 'cooked' with both... That is how this European mystical and wonderful idea of 'frybread' came about... I just thought I would tell you."

Source: https://www.facebook.com/LakotaCreations