Category: Teaching

Here we are, in the midst of what I have always considered to be the worst part of a Spring semester.  January and the start up has gone by the wayside and Spring Break doesn’t arrive until March.  In between we have the long hard slog towards midterm exams.

It is also the time in which that “extra” stuff gets emphasized.  “Oh, by the way…” starts piling up work for next semester.  “If you are not too busy…” add to it.

I get to be the center attraction in a Women’s Studies class discussion on gender in the next couple of weeks.  Once more into the cage, Dr. LabRat.  Maybe we can have a fruitful discussion about the meaning of the phrases “real women” and “real men.”  But I’m only the specimen, so that’s probably unlikely.

More beyond…

Originally posted as part of Teacher’s Lounge at Daily Kos

Crossposted at Daily Kos

Every student of American History knows that only two serving United States Senators (Warren G. Harding in 1920 and John F. Kennedy in 1960) have ever been elected directly to the Office of President of the United States.  Add James Garfield in 1880 as the only serving member from the United States House of Representatives and that’s all the serving legislators ever who have gone directly from the national legislature to the White House since 1789.

Barring a major and unexpected surprise, another first will occur in presidential politics in November 2008: for the very first time in our political history, nominees of both major political parties will be serving United States Senators.  Mitt Romney’s withdrawal from the Republican race today also ensures a first in American politics since the 1960 Election: it’s a near certainty that a serving United States Senator will be elected President.

In the intervening forty eight years since JFK’s election, dozens of serving Members of Congress had tried, with most of them failing miserably.  In fact, only four even became their party’s nominee — Goldwater ’64, McGovern ’72, Dole ’96, and Kerry ’04 — only to lose in the general election.

Is this historic first an utter coincidence?

source

Martin Van Buren was better at acquiring presidential power than using it for himself. Van Buren was elected president in 1836, but he saw financial problems beginning even before he entered the White House.

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On Thursday night students, faculty and staff at Bloomfield College gathered for a discussion of the issues and the candidates in the current campaign.  I have to admit I missed it.  I was in the midst of becoming rather ill and in need of horizontal collapse.

I do have to admit that Edwards and Giulliani dropping out on Wednesday ticked off the students who were preparing the event for Thursday.  Students always hate it when work they’ve done becomes irrelevant.  But at least those students were able to participate in the issues discussion.

This event and other events are the brainchildren of a collaboration between the political science, history disciplines and women’s studies disciplines and Student Government.  The candidate event kicks off Black History month for us.

There are two kinds of history going on in the Cave of the Moonbat tonight: that of an ancient Southwest Asian superpower, and the historiography of historioranting itself.  I’ve been doing this pretty-much-weekly history thing for nigh on two years, and with my impending anniversary, I figured now’s as good a time as any to go back into the scrolls and update some of those first History for Kossacks – the ones that didn’t have any pictures (nor, for that matter, many commenters), were less than half as long as a contemporary HfK, and predate even the word I now use to describe the manner in which I seek to tell tales of the human experience.

So join me, if you will, for a redux of the very first HfK series – a proto-historiorant on Persia, land of the Aryans, now updated to fit the format that evolved in its wake.  In addition to new maps, pics, and stage-setting for the impending Islamic invasion in Part II, it never hurts to take a refresher on a land whose history seems to include every major historical figure in the ancient Middle Eastern world, from Alexander to Zoroaster.

What if they had a special week and nobody noticed?

Last week was No Name-Calling Week.  From all appearances, at least on the level of the blogs, there wasn’t much notice.  Name-calling is de rigeur.

Which raises a good question.  If adults demand their right to call people names as part of what they think is intelligent debate, why would we expect the children to behave any differently.

It would probably be prudent of me not to mention that fact.  I’ve never been accused of being prudent.

I think about the children.  Big surprise.  I’m a teacher.

Thursday was first day of classes, Day #2.  School actually started on Wednesday, but of course we only met the students and teachers in our classes that meet on Wednesdays.

So I walked into my morning class…Computer Literacy at 10 am…and watched as my students slowly arrived, making myself useful by passing our syllabi.

I was not expecting anything out of the ordinary…such as, for example, all the students to show up on that first day of class.  I was hoping for something bigger than 50%.  In fact, ever single student registered for the class was in class and seated by 10:05.

The students helped me up from where I had fainted from surprise (no, not really).  Then one of them called me over to her computer station and informed me of a problem.  “I am visually impaired,”  she said.  “So am I,” I said.  “What can I do to help?”

There is no one thing I can say I like about working in higher education.  The sense of accomplishment I feel when a student succeeds at learning can be as exhilarating as any drug I know.  I would hope it would only be surpassed by the feeling a student has in learning the material.

The knowledge that I am doing something worthwhile in this world, something that, I hope and choose to believe, can only improve the lives of those I teach, for the benefit of the world at large is why I became a teacher in the first place.

But right up there towards the top of the list is the fact that every year provides two or three opportunities for me and my students to have a fresh start.  Last semester and last year is in the past and it is time to start anew.  

Some diseases are worth bragging about – how many times, after all, have we heard Denny Crane blame something or another on his Mad Cow, or seen Peter Griffin utilize a bizarre ailment to justify even more bizarrely cartoonish behavior?  In non-tropical circles, certain maladies are conversation stoppers; it’s tough not to ask a follow-up question when someone tells you she was once afflicted with break-bone fever, nor to listen without morbid curiosity to someone telling a story of having a brush with African sleeping sickness.

There are other diagnoses, though, that we tend to keep to ourselves – and some these might be appropriate for an historiorant coming the week after many a misspent New Year’s Eve.  Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we’ll take a look at the odd story of one such affliction-that-must-not-be-named.  Ladies and gentlemen, an STD that’s changed world history… Syphilis!

Don’t get me wrong.  If there were not winter breaks, I’d not have survived to be as old as I am.  I’ve spent the last month or so of every semester with my mind on its knees begging for rest.  But rest never happens.  It can’t.  I’m a teacher.

Being a teacher is a 24/7 thing.  One doesn’t turn one’s mind off when not in the classroom.  One eats, sleeps and dreams teaching.    At least I have always assumed other people are like me.

So when “rest time” comes, all that really happens is refocusing.  The time is meant to be used and the teacher in me will fill it with work.  

The kids in my classroom don’t remember the Cold War, most of them having been born after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The only enemy they’ve ever known are a few tens of thousands of religious fanatics; they don’t remember the days when entire nation-states aimed nuclear missiles at one another in pursuit of foreign policy goals that extended past the 24-hour news cycle.  This makes it hard to explain that the threat posed by the Soviet bloc was the type that could cause a country to do some pretty extreme things to “protect” itself – not that it rose to the sort of “terrorists made me do it” waterboarding that we see today, but back in the heady days of the Iron Curtain, for example, the thought of surgically implanting a live cat with eavesdropping equipment wasn’t considered outside the realm of ethical behavior.

Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we’ll take a short romp through the CIA’s litter box of secrets.  Among the “presents” we’ll unearth:  a Frankensteinish feline, paranoia-induced stupidity not equaled until recent times, and $20 million turd of an idea.

Originally posted at Teacher’s Lounge

One of the reasons I put such a high value on commentary is that there are times when a comment or two can snap things back into focus…or at least remind us of another time and another focus that perhaps needs to be revisited.

At the end of this semester, besides being 60 years old, I will have been a teacher for 32 years.  I have taken it as an article of faith that what I have been doing is trying to find more and better ways of expound upon Truth.  I have told the same stories over and over again in a myriad different ways, looking for the light bulbs and trying to measure their luminosity.

Outside the classroom the world becomes my classroom and Truth is no longer restricted to learning mathematics or computer languages, but rather about life in general.  In particular I have focused on what goes on in the human brain.  The only one I happen to be able to experiment upon is my own, so there is bound to be bias in my sample.  But I have concentrated on the possible, not on the probable, so I’ve not considered that too much of a flaw.