Final Blog Reflection

1. The technology that will be most useful to me is the stock market simulation Rick introduced to me. It provides a great way for students to actually understand how the free market works and, more to my purposes, how the free market has been known to collapse (either due to internal or external pressure).

2. I will use this technology to help my students get their hands dirty. If students don't *feel* a topic, they will not learn it except as a hoop to jump through. Students can learn to trade stocks, form corporations, and appeal to the government for assistance, thus teaching them the nature of today's economy in all of its messiness.

3. My goal as a teacher is to give students independent learning skills so that they know how to analyze truth claims. I am a history instructor; most of my students will not pursue history as a career. Therefore, my job is to use history as a venue for showing students how evidence can be used and misused. One of the ways this class will help me do that is through the class wiki assignment. I want all students to feel like they have a vested interest in the outcome of the class; they are part of a community, and communities help its members.

Final blog post for class: Haunting moral questions

The more I think about how best to teach history, the more I realize that if our history doesn't *haunt* the students, then it's not very effective. By haunt, I only mean that the lesson material resonates in their bones, that it isn't merely the cold analysis of a science or math class. After all, most who teach history would suggest that at some level, we're teaching students how to be good citizens, how to be active thinkers. In essence, we're teaching them a kind of morality (and those involved in education know that that's hardly right-wing nuttery--the quasi-socialist Goodspeed made a name for himself by discussing the "Moral Foundations" of education).

So how to break that resonance barrier The key is that students need to *actually* see how the topic they're studying is part of contemporary discourse. I've considered a few ways. I'll use specific history units to illustrate, but these techniques can be applied across the board with a little ingenuity.

1) Re-enact the Salem Witch Trials without informing the students before hand. Have one of your more dramatic students play the role of Bridget Bishop, for example. Make sure she does a *good* job, enough to scare her fellow students a little (you might also want to pick someone who has a pretty strong rapport with her fellow students--the kind that endure one class period of insanity :). After about 5-10 minutes of that, inform the students what just happened. Have them write down a "journal account" of what they saw.

2) Have students compile a soundtrack to a favorite war--the Civil War, the Vietnam War, etc, using contemporary songs to illustrate various battles, episodes in the war. They form groups and must agree on the final song selections (requiring that they sharpen their debating skills). Have them present their soundtracks to the class and defend their song choices. This helps them to conceptualize the wars in ways that they genuinely understand.

3) Model a totalitarian government. One student is chosen as a chairman who exacts all control over the grades of other students. If they are late, fail to tell the chairman where they will be at a particular time, or do not pay due deference to the state, then they lose points. The teacher acts as the #2 man, basically advising the chairman on how best to maintain control over his people. And make sure you're *serious* about this. Send people to check up on where each student says they're going to be. It's complicated, but it provokes the students into understanding exactly what the 20th-century totalitarian experience was about.

This, in my mind, is the best way for students to start asking the great moral questions about human nature, the role of government, and the reality of war. Just some Saturday morning thoughts.

Last week's blog post

I'm now finishing up writing my first multiple-choice examination. Especially in history teaching, these exams are infamous for being mind-numbingly difficult and worse still, largely irrelevant. Here's how I work to ensure the relevance of my questions:

1) A focus on cultural literacy

I look for the terms that are used in common, educated discourse about a particular topic. This way, I'm emphasizing knowledge as a part of community discussion rather than for its own sake. I want students to walk away from the exam with the ability to recognize once-obscure names as a part of a larger milieu: "I remember answering a question about so-and-so, etc." This will help them not to feel like fools when having conversations on the topic.

2) Direct it back to the Big Ideas

Even when using obscure names, those obscure names should reveal something about Big Ideas. If they do not, then according to the dictates of cold, historical logic, they should remain obscure. For example, most people don't know the name Anthony Johnson from Russell Stevenson; however, if they understand that Anthony Johnson was one of the first African-American slaveholders in America, then he helps to evoke a larger thought process about the birth of race slavery in America.

3) Truth will out

Multiple-choice exams are good b/c they don't give the student the opportunity to haze their ignorance in a lot of moralizing and platitudes. But for them to succeed, But it also leaves the students vulnerable to their own misunderstandings. It definitely reveals how little/how much they know of the facts of history, even if it's raw knowledge. Multiple-choice exams are therefore quite important for determining if they have the requisite facts running around in their head in order to have an intelligent conversation about the topic.

Multiple choice exams can be highly useful if used properly but utterly ridiculous if not. Next up: grading final essay exams.

Project Proposal

For my project proposal, I will learn how to use Virtual Stock Exchange. I haven't been exposed to this technology before, so it should be interesting, to say the least. It will help me to teach the Great Depression as well as the idea of "stock market bubbles."

Chalk and eraser style

So every once in a while, I like to go au natural with my teaching. Not naked, mind you (though that would add a certain dynamic to the lecture)--rather, I like to go sans technology. Kick up the chalk, tell a few stories, and ask a few questions. Of course, this isn't exactly smiled upon these days, esp. when our kids live at the speed of text.

How to do it? It's something I working up to, even now. But I've formulated these three keys to doing an au natural lecture right:

1) Every story is boring; every story is exciting

I think about the famous historians of our generation (I use the term loosely, if only b/c some of these writers are frowned upon by the academy, and sometimes for good reasons): McCullough, Goodwin, Ellis, and Ulrich--all of them knew something about details, about characters, and about anecdotes. They wrote their stories as though someone might actually care about who these people are. Their characters could be boring under most circumstances--yet they know how to contextualize them in ways that go beyond "he was a man of his times."

2) Show the power
No one likes hearing a story about the pathetically oppressed--even stories of Communism highlight the "people's revolt," riots, and populist action. Showing the character's *agency* under even horrible circumstances moves students more than any analysis ever can (Elizabeth Smart is a good example of this).

3) Be a little quirky
Go out of the box occasionally--it'll jolt the students out of their txtmsg stupr. Get happy, get sad, even get a *little* angry at the topics being discussed. Bottom line: get something.

No one else in America cares about history, except in some sort of abstract way. If we don't do it, then their historical understanding is hosed.

It's been a long time, blog...

Welcome back, friends of history teaching. I had surgery last week, so I've been a bit MIA for the past little while. That said, my thoughts on teaching for the week.

Surgery is a funny thing. The same tools used to kill a person can also be used to help a person heal. There's blood, lowered heart rate, even the risk of death when a person "goes under." Yet we do it--all in the hopes that we can attain some greater good.

Forgive me for waxing metaphorical, but I see the teaching of history in the same way, and I wish that more teachers would share this vision. When I present an issue during my classroom lecture, I find that I generally am not doing it to "uplift" but to pose moral questions. I *want* my students to sweat over the questions I present. If they walk away from class thinking about slavery, workers' rights, or war all with a smile on their face as they think about their date that night, then I have indeed failed. The truth cuts, hopefully to the core.

So maybe I should just teach all history classes with the intent of overturning everything they know, upending worldviews, and shifting paradigms? That's generally what most "activist" history teachers do. Yet in our delight as we see our students sweat, I have to constantly remind myself that I too am wielding a surgeon's scalpel. Am I carefully helping the student to rid themselves of what could be cancerous ignorance or am I just cutting recklessly, doing "surgery" after "surgery" with no regard to the students' capacities to embrace new understanding and truth? Without care, our delight in questioning assumptions can culminate not in enlightened students but in crushed ones who have trust issues towards.

This has been a little stream of consciousness-esque, so let's boil it down to brass tacks. I'm going to teach a class on the Mountain Meadows Massacre at some point in my life (so I anticipate--I do live in Utah, after all). That's a difficult topic for Utahns to comprehend. It brings to bare all kinds of issues about Mormon exceptionalism, zealotry, and Utah-federal relations. It is also loaded with a century's worth of bitterness and activism. In such a context, it's easy to react violently: to see ignorance and wield the "surgeon's scalpel" in the defense of truth. Yet the reality is that such a reaction sheds more heat than light. The best reaction is the reaction of the skilled surgeon: calmness, measured response, and even a little sedation. Then...and only then...can we as teachers hope to remove the tumors of ignorance that burden our students minds.

Multimedia Project

This is a short film on the role of Walter Cronkite in forming American public opinion during the Vietnam War.

Another non-linguistic mode of teaching

I am preparing a lesson plan for teaching the Vietnam War during the Nixon era. I want especially to highlight how Nixon was able to break the New Deal coalition to his own advantage. Here are the plans. Any thoughts are welcome.

I am going to recreate the atmosphere surrounding the "Hard Hat Riot" of 1970. I am going to divide the room up into three theaters. The left side of the room (student's perspective) will have a Vietnam War-era musician singing Country Joe McDonald's I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die. The right side of the room will have men dressed as construction workers carrying an American flag and chanting "USA! USA! USA!" and "Love it or Leave it!" The center portion of the room will have footage of President Richard Nixon giving his "Great Silent Majority" speech. I will have each group perform their part separately, then I will play them altogether, with it culminating in an imitation riot at the end between the VN singers and the construction workers (a mild one, to be sure :).

After this little bit of socio-political theater, I am going to have the students write out whom they sympathized with the most. Even more, I want them to write out three similarities and three differences of all the different factions by using a three part Venn diagram. I think it will help give them some perspective on the idea of civil dissent in America.

Thoughts? Compliments? Snide remarks?

Instructional Video Storyboard

Enclosed is my storyboard for my instructional video.

Storyboard

View more presentations from russellwades.

Wedding in Vegas

So I just had what could well be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Wedding. in. Vegas. On the sidewalk. Lots of people around. Phil Collins music in the background. Random people walking by cheering as my relatives said I-do. A Shrek impersonator approximately 100 feet away. Yet in the midst of this mayhem, the happy couple had forgotten one key element: the marriage certificate. So we, the happy-go-lucky-wedding-party sat by while the best man ran back to the car so the Reverend could proceed with the ceremony. Awkward.

Those of you who know my teaching style know that I have tendencies towards the unorthodox. I'm proud of it; call me the House of history teaching. So this Vegas experience resonated with my mischievous side, the side that likes to see unconventionality, kitsch, and edginess. But the reality remained the same: all the edginess in the world could not compensate for following protocl, getting the paperwork, and making sure the trains run on time.


I see my role as a history teacher in the same way. I could be innovative, funny, and mind-blowing, but if I can get their papers back in a timely manner, if I can't keep the classroom under control, and if I can't play to "the man" and his never-ending thirst for more paperwork, then I might as well get a new job.

Just one lesson learned in Vegas.

YouTube analysis

This is my analysis of YouTube video clips.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMIcCY1mB3E">Video #1

Purpose and Character:

The purpose and character of this clip is the broadcasting of his/her friend's innovative wedding procession. The original purpose of the wedding processional was largely for the entertainment of the audience; the recording was intended to extend the entertainment value of the procession to the YouTube viewing community.

The question: did the wedding procession derive its routine from the music or did it seek to co-opt it for personal gain? Given that the content of the music is romantic in nature, their decision to use it as a backdrop for a wedding routine fits with the original intent of the music. It meets the need for the promotion of the public good and does not garner a profit from it. In my estimation, this situation falls under the Fair Use doctrine.

Nature of the Work:

As a published song, the work is already in public dissemination. While it does not communicate facts, it communicates commonly expressed emotions. Therefore, since the wedding party was staying true to the fundamental nature of the work, their use of the music again fall under the Fair Use doctrine.


Amount and Sustainability:

On this point, the video is clearly more sketchy. It uses the song in its entirety. Since even samples need to now be licensed, the wedding party's use of the song wanders into the category of copyright violation.

Effect on Work's Value

This is regarding whether this kind of use of the song would undermine its value, if such usage were widespread. To the contrary, this kind of widespread usage would make the song more popular and therefore increase the musician's marketability. On this point, the song falls under the Fair Use doctrine.

Video #2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOfZLb33uCg&ob=av2e">Video #2

Purpose and Nature:

This Weird Al Yankovic music video is intended to parody "Gangster Paradise." Since it is derivative of the original music video and not transformative of the original material, Weird Al's work falls under the Fair Use doctrine (though Weird Al always gets the approval of the artists before he makes a music video).

Group Analysis of a Monograph

So you're a history instructor, and you want your students to know how a book is put together. But for crying out loud, the book is 300 pages long and far too dense for your cute little high school juniors to digest.

The solution...

Break it down according to chapters. Have the students form the same number of groups as there are chapters in the books. Then have each students present the essence of the book to the rest of the class. Walk them through how/why the book is structured as it is. Emphasis the role of each chapter in forming the argument or key elements/turning points of the narrative. This allows the students to see how a book works in scholarship, and it also teaches them how to distill a complex argument in simple terms to an audience.

Haunting Moral Questions

The more I think about how best to teach history, the more I realize that if our history doesn't *haunt* the students, then it's not very effective. By haunt, I only mean that the lesson material resonates in their bones, that it isn't merely the cold analysis of a science or math class. After all, most who teach history would suggest that at some level, we're teaching students how to be good citizens, how to be active thinkers. In essence, we're teaching them a kind of morality (and those involved in education know that that's hardly right-wing nuttery--the quasi-socialist Goodspeed made a name for himself by discussing the "Moral Foundations" of education).

So how to break that resonance barrier The key is that students need to *actually* see how the topic they're studying is part of contemporary discourse. I've considered a few ways. I'll use specific history units to illustrate, but these techniques can be applied across the board with a little ingenuity.

1) Re-enact the Salem Witch Trials without informing the students before hand. Have one of your more dramatic students play the role of Bridget Bishop, for example. Make sure she does a *good* job, enough to scare her fellow students a little (you might also want to pick someone who has a pretty strong rapport with her fellow students--the kind that endure one class period of insanity :). After about 5-10 minutes of that, inform the students what just happened. Have them write down a "journal account" of what they saw.

2) Have students compile a soundtrack to a favorite war--the Civil War, the Vietnam War, etc, using contemporary songs to illustrate various battles, episodes in the war. They form groups and must agree on the final song selections (requiring that they sharpen their debating skills). Have them present their soundtracks to the class and defend their song choices. This helps them to conceptualize the wars in ways that they genuinely understand.

3) Model a totalitarian government. One student is chosen as a chairman who exacts all control over the grades of other students. If they are late, fail to tell the chairman where they will be at a particular time, or do not pay due deference to the state, then they lose points. The teacher acts as the #2 man, basically advising the chairman on how best to maintain control over his people. And make sure you're *serious* about this. Send people to check up on where each student says they're going to be. It's complicated, but it provokes the students into understanding exactly what the 20th-century totalitarian experience was about.

This, in my mind, is the best way for students to start asking the great moral questions about human nature, the role of government, and the reality of war. Just some Saturday morning thoughts.

Free Market/Home Schooling vs. State-run Education

My sister-in-law has recently decided to her homeschool her children. Being the free market man I am (more on a gut level than an intellectual level, to be sure), I'm generally all for a mother taking hold of her children's education. There's something to be said for wanting to devote your personal lifetime not only to your child's moral education but to their cognitive education as well.

But...

Let's face it: those who embrace home-schooling often do it out of semi-ideological reasons. They don't trust those corrupted school districts. They view the home as a kind of "Fortress Zion" (which it should be), but transfer that model to how they see *everything* else around them. Their home is under siege, and a key weapon in defending it is a strange faux history that pays almost no attention to the complexities of the documentation. Books on the Constitution can't be trusted unless written by David McCullough. Thomas Jefferson's extensive involvement in slavery is bypassed: "he was merely a man of his time" while his words in the Declaration are fawned over as transcending time itself. Add to this that the curricula used, while claiming to be LDS-friendly, is more Calvinist through its dogged insistence in the absolute predestination of all things rah-rah-rah American (at least for white landholders). I do not believe my sister-in-law fits into this category. I pray that she does not.

Academics tend to simply curl their lips in sneering at these types. But I firmly believe that there is a way to build bridges between the homeschoolers and the academic historians. Any tips?

War Games

I would like to introduce my students to the realities of archival research. To teach them about archival research, we are going to recreate a war. I will divide the class into two teams. Before the war, each student will produce their own primary document to describe how they are feeling about the war, what they expect, and why they're "fighting" it. Each team will have designated leaders in order to recreate the military structure.

I will find a location (preferably a park with places to hide, thus enhancing the guerilla aspects). The students will draw up operation- and tactic-level battle plans on how they will take down the most soldiers from the other team. The war will last until the other team is either decimated or surrenders. When the students return to class (after having dried off, they will write their recollections of the war. They will name names: whose fault was the loss? Who was the most heroic? Who shirked their duties?

The major assignment associated with this course will the writing of a "primary source" narrative based on the documents the students produce. Additionally, I will insert some documents written by students I have specifically instructed not to participate. These documents will consist of hearsay, conjecture, or their own personal communications with the combatants. I might also insert a "forged" document or two, depending on how bright the students are.

This will enable the students to get a feel for the historian's work. How do historians choose what stays in the book and what gets left out? How do they choose what to emphasize? This project will provide an excellent opportunity for students to understand how difficult it is to truly understand "what really happened."

Gadgets and Gizmos a-plenty

I chose two gadgets: one practical and the other fun

1) The "Followers" Gadget
I want to know who loves me and what their needs are. By knowing who is on the Russ-boat, I can know how to best meet the needs of those who follow my work. Further, I can connect to them through having access to their blogs.

2) The Daily General Knowledge Gadget
I want my blog to be an e-house of learning. What better way than through contributing to my readers' knowledge random fact upon fact, precept upon precept.

My Choices of Blog/Twitter Subscriptions

Blogs of Choice:

1) Hope Foundation: What's Working in Schools
http://hopefoundation.org/hope/blog/

This looks to be a practically-minded blog founded by a think-tank. Good for wonkish thought; not good if you're looking for someone to relate to.
2) A Passion for Teaching and Opinions
http://ukiahcoachbrown.blogspot.com/

A good ra-ra website for those more interested in basically maintaining the status quo in how Constitutional history is taught. I'm skeptical.

3) Charter School Insights
http://charterinsights.blogspot.com/

Charter schools are the best hybrid I know in appealing to individual parents' needs without abandoning the public school system. We need to talk more about how best to make this approach work.

4) Education Policy Blog
http://educationpolicyblog.blogspot.com/

I hate politics, but politics determine where the money goes. Hate them or love them, politics matter.

5) The Education Optimists
http://eduoptimists.blogspot.com/

A feel-good site for people who need a teaching pick-me-up.

Twitter:
1) Education Sector
http://twitter.com/EducationSector

Looks useful in spreading the latest political think-tanking from Washington.
2) Best Education
http://twitter.com/BestEducation

A blog intended for parents to help them get the most out of their education. This Twitter site will help teachers understand how best to meet parents' needs.

Columbus and the Price of Modernity

I teach a History 220 class in the BYU Salt Lake Center. Only one of the students is actually a history major. When I was introducing the class to the glorious truth that is Thomas Paine, I was met with awkward, painful, stares.

"Everyone knows who Thomas Paine is, right?" More awkwardness.

"Was he the archbishop of Canterbury?" The people I work with.

Yet, I realized something beautiful about this scenario. My class is woefully illiterate in matters of history. Henry VIII is simply another in a long line of who-knows, who-cares royalty. The Revolution was important if only because it allows us to have our IPods and Big Macs today.

But during one lecture, I caught a glimpse of what might be in a moment of true transparency. I asked my students to reconcile for me the verses in 1 Nephi 13 (typically interpreted as referring to Columbus et al.) with the reality that the Columbian Exchange decimated millions of Arawak natives in the Caribbean. The class almost universally justified the conquest based on the Europeans' superior "civilization," as eggs that make modernity's omelette, or as simply what people do. In any case, why are we fretting over it?

In the midst of this hayday of imperial hagiography, one student looked thoughtfully at the numbers of deaths in front of him. Hardly the historian, he was simply taking the class to get a GE out of the way. He cocked back his head, pursed his lips, and mused thoughtfully: "8 million...that's a lot of people." Connection. All of this from simply putting a number on a well-designed PowerPoint slide.

He may not remember the name of Cortes, Vespucci, or Henry the Navigator. But if he knows the difference between 8 million people and "the price of modernity," my work there will have been a success.

Self-Reliance in an Akha School

After working with a number of Akha children at an anti-human trafficking school in Chiang Rai, Thailand, it was brought to my attention how real the threat of human trafficking is. One of the best defenses against human trafficking is real-world, practical education. When children are well-trained, they become economic boons rather than burdens to their parents.

When I was chatting with the school's director about what she needed most right now to further this work, her request was simple: a sewing machine. This would teach the children vital tailoring skills that they could use to sell wares at the night market. Of all the things they could ask for,a sewing machine is a relatively simple request, one that a couple hundred American dollars can procure without anyone breaking a sweat.
Yet with this simple gift, we're not just giving them a handout: we're purchasing a tool that will give these kids vital life training that will both bless their families economically and provide them the foundation for a productive life in the years to come.

Please donate. These kids are shrewd, capable, and ready to learn. They're good kids who are fighting very adult problems. The reward will be more than apparent when you see the pictures of the happy students gaining new skills to provide for both their families and community.

HELP International Donations

Friends,

I have not posted on this website in many, many moons. Frankly, Facebook has proven to be far more effective in spreading my thoughts--both great and small--to those who care to listen.

But now, I have something a little more significant to share, so I'm looking to spread it in as many ways as possible. I will going to Thailand this summer to do humanitarian work in the Hmong community of northern Thailand. Those of you who know me know that I speak Hmong, and that I *love* to speak Hmong. I will be assessing needs when I get on site, teach some English, and perhaps even build a few stoves.

However, as we all know, these endeavors can be pricey. So I am soliciting your assistance to help meet the needs of the Hmong people whom I love so much. While I will certainly gain personally from the experience, it will be only because I am using my talents and abilities to help an underprivileged people living in a less-than-prosperous region.

So please donate whatever you can. One dollar, five dollars, ten dollars. This isn't some overhead-heavy, sensationalistic enterprise like you see on television. This is Russ. And I just want to give back.

Just click on the button below to make your payment through PayPal. Every dime will be worth it and well-spent.