Month: September 2014

Child of Fear – Father of Ignorance

Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.

– Laurie Halse Anderson

LeatherBooksFor years I’ve told my students, “If you don’t like to read, it’s only because you haven’t found something you like to read.” No one really hates reading; they hate being told what to read and when to read it. Then, because this mandate usually comes from a “mean teacher,” they project that hatred onto the act itself. I recall one student who – on the first day of school – declared she hated reading and would rather solve long division (she hated math, too) than read a single page of another book. By the end of the year she loved reading; all it took was a little coaching to find what she actually wanted to read.

BBWPoster2013But what happens when a book you want to read has been censored or banned? I remember looking through my school’s library in Middle School and finding all the “bad words” marked out in black sharpie (which then bled through onto the next page, effectively ruining three pages of text). What good does that do? Did they really think we couldn’t figure out what was being said? If anything, it encouraged us to find non-vandalized copies and figure out what they were hiding from us.

Those that would censor books for religious, moral, or political reasons have entirely missed the point. Now, I agree that parents should have ultimate control over what their children read, but that’s where their power ends. No one should be able to dictate what someone else reads. Doing so kills creativity, stifles healthy debate, and creates citizens incapable of rational thought. It’s not enough to say “I don’t like it because my parents don’t;” that excuse stops working around the ninth grade.

Carl Sagan Open MindI never tell my students to read with an open mind; I tell them to read with a discerning mind. An open mind blindly accepts information; a discerning mind filters information. The problem is that censors view books the way others view television: as a babysitter. Books entertain and teach, and require a guide. Just because you want to shirk that responsibility doesn’t give you the right to violate the First Amendment.

By happy coincidence, Banned Books Week coincides with my Bill of Rights section of American Government. I have no idea how my students will react – I suspect less than half of them read voluntarily. We’ll just have to see how it goes.

In Search of Lost Time

Armed with a cup of coffee and two slices of cheesecake, I tackled my blog reading list.

It’s become a Saturday ritual: read the list, explore the Freshly Pressed pages, become inspired for future blog posts. But something was different – there were a lot of posts! Most of the blogs I follow might post one or two times a week, but I kept scrolling and commenting, scrolling and liking, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.

How could so much be written in one week? Then I got to the first familiar entry a realized: I haven’t read anything in three week. Well, not exactly true. I read Cloud Atlas [my favorite recently read book] and On the Road and Lolita and Heart of Darkness.

What about those posts I’d meant to finish? There they sit, waiting to be edited. Wait a minute – Banned Books Week is next week?! Sigh.

So much to do and so little time.

Thirteen

13 signThirteen years.

It seems only yesterday I sat in the dentist office listening to the radio world changing.

It seems an eternity ago I watched the end and beginning of an era.

end and beginning

Thirteen years, and where are we?

GWBushIn high school we joked George Bush had declared war on a nation of mud huts. How naïve.

Did we learn nothing from history – from the Russians, the British, the Ottomans? The Middle East will not be tamed – go ask Crassus about Parthia.

Pyrrhus has nothing on us. We are the sinner and the saint, and whether we stay or leave the cauldron of conflict continues to boil.

keep-calm-and-blame-someone-else-1Blame whomever you want: Obama, G. W. Bush, Cheney, Clinton, G. Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon.

None of them started it.

None of them finished it – or could even if they tried.

 

Instead of blame, we must ask the question:

Thirteen years from now, where will we be?

Take Your Supplements

Clio Muse

Today was a good day – one of the times I really felt I was making some headway with my classes.

50 mL water
Weapon of Math Instruction

It began with the first physics lab of the year – determining the density of a brass cylinder using linear measurement and water displacement methods. Good old Archimedes! Everything went extremely well with two groups completing the lab and all the supplemental material withing the class period. They even came to within .5 percent error on their math tables! Now, some students did get carried away the water-filled graduated cylinders, and one learned an early lesson on weak vacuum seals and centrifugal force. Good thing 50 mL of water is easy to clean, right?

Khufu. Khafre. Menkaure.

It continued in my World History section, where we were completing our section on Egypt. I wanted to jump up and down when students asked questions like

You mean Egypt was attacked by Assyria and Persia? You mean like Sennacherib and Cyrus and Xerxes? I remember those guys!

You said that Hatshepsut’s successor tried to remove her from living memory. Was that because he wanted to destroy her in the afterlife, too?

Wait. If the Greeks conquered Egypt, and Cleopatra is decidedly non-Egyptian, does that mean Cleopatra was Greek?

This class is going to love the Egypt section of Engineering an Empire, an excellent look at ancient civilizations narrated by Peter Weller – yes, that Peter Weller – and produced by the History Channel back when the History Channel was actually about history and not, well, whatever it is now.

Sinners_in_the_Hands_of_an_Angry_God_by_Jonathan_Edwards_1741Now, two good classes is one day is rare, but three is unheard of. At least, it is in my experience. Nevertheless, it happened. I taught a double American Government section wherein we discussed the Mayflower Compact and the Great Awakening. I was beaten to the punch on one of my class discussion questions when one of my students asked “Wait a minute. If the Great Awakening had such a positive impact in America, then how did people reconcile slavery?” I kid you not, I just about fainted. This is the class that getting any class-related interaction is like convincing me that e-books are a good idea. But that question set things in motion. We were able to discuss concepts of equality and the roots of slavery. We compared the slavery of the ancient and medieval world with American slavery. We talked about how things weren’t necessarily as bad as Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin but neither were they afforded basic human dignity. I didn’t teach much of what I had planned to, but this was enrichment time!

As class was winding down, I asked them what caused the change. Turns out most of them were actually paying attention to the supplemental material I’d been providing. Some of them even read it! One of them put it this way: “I figured if you were going to take the time to find extra stuff to help us understand, I’d at least make the effort to participate.”

No lie, that’s gonna keep me going for a while, even if they don’t make it through Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England or Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution.

 

An Historical Dilemma

Clio Muse
Sing, O Muse . . .

Every subject has its challenges, but history may be the most challenging of all.

There’s always more history. I can think of no other subject where this is true.

High school math – at least what I’ve seen of it – hasn’t changed much since I learned it 10+ years ago. Maybe the method has changed, but the ideas haven’t.

Science has made breakthroughs, clarifications, and corrections. This means that theories and hypotheses – and therefore formulas – have changed, but science generally doesn’t ask you to learn how things were done “in the old days.” At least, it doesn’t require you to have a practical, working knowledge of the old ways. Which is a shame, because once the technological apocalypse hits there will be no-one with the knowledge to rebuild society as we know it. Who needs time travel? It’s back the the Middle Ages (or Early Renaissance)! But that’s a different topic for a different time.

Melancholia I
And on your right, you’ll see the broken instruments of human knowledge . . . 

Melencolia I (Albrecht Dürer, 1514)

English hasn’t changed much, either. New authors may replace old ones, new words come into the vernacular and others fall out, and the way in which we communicate may vary, but English – as it is taught – remains largely unchanged from year to year.

History is not so – more is added to it every day and it all builds on what has happened before. For example, I cannot expect my students to understand the Arab-Israeli conflict without also understanding the origins of those particular people groups, the establishment of ancient Israel, the formation of Judaism and Islam, the Israeli diaspora under Roman rule, the re-creation of a modern Israeli state in 1948, and the various attempts (and failures) at co-existence since that time. How do you condense and revise to give an accurate overview without becoming swamped? Many teachers I know teach on themes or hit what they call “the highlights”. Some school districts have begun to expand the history requirements for graduation, making history a multi-year class (or multi-semester for those on block schedules). However, that doesn’t really solve that problem that . . .

And here is another point at which I disagree with the way in which you book presents . . .

Stuff You Missed in History Class
An excellent podcast for supplemental material!

Some history is going to be cut. How do we decide what to leave out? What to expand? What to assign for individual research? Granted, this may vary from state to state, from district to district, and from class to class, but Common Core (like it or not) will change that. Who’s to decide what is important and what’s not. Isn’t it all important? Once we’ve decided what to cut and what to leave in we’re left wondering . . .

How do we teach the “truth” of history? Like science, history cannot necessarily deal with “truth” (for a given value of “truth”). We can use primary sources and make assumptions, but even if we were to possess a time machine with which to view history our perceptions would be colored by our cultural prejudices and biases. Textbooks often present information in such a way to make it appear that history had to happen a certain way, that there is a linear cause-and-effect of events, and that there is a clear black and white morality of people and events. Seldom is that the case. Many times I end up providing my students with supplemental materials – primary sources when possible – so they can compare the claims of their book with other viewpoints and learn to base an opinion on logical application of all available facts. At least, that’s my goal. Success depends on the student. As the old saying goes, you only get out of an education what you are willing to put into it.

Revisionist History 1

Don’t get me wrong. I hope you haven’t thought I’ve been complaining all this time. I’m merely pointing out what history teachers go through all the time. We watch the news and read magazines because what happens today can quite literally change what we teach tomorrow. And you know what?

I LOVE IT

[a special shout-out to Phil, Philosopher Mouse of the Hedge for inspiring this post]

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