Category: Teaching

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“In a little more than one hour, five or six hundred of these barbarians

were dismissed from a world that was burdened with them.”

“It may be demanded…Should not Christians have more mercy and

compassion? But…sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents…. We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”

-Puritan divine Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana

Crossposted at Native American Netroots &
Progressive Historians

There are no numbers here.  There will be no links to research backing up my assertions.  Because this is not about data, it’s about people.  As one teacher out of many I will tell you my opinion.  As someone who teaches purely for altruistic and idealistic purposes and has done so for 31 years, I will tell you what I think.

What I do know is that drawing any connection between the performance of students on a high stakes test and the quality of the teacher is tenuous at best.  Some might say non-existent.  Even if there does exist such a connection, assumptions about what such a connection means really ought to be examined.

How does one tell the difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher?  I hate that phrasing.  Bad Teacher?   Really?  People are dedicating their lives to doing public service, teaching our young people…and increasingly our older people as well…and other people think they have the right, even the duty, to call some of us Bad Teachers  Let’s get out the scarlet letters.  Lets burn them at the stake.  Bad Teacher?  

The Medicine Bluffs are very sacred to me personally, and I want to share the feeling of awe, mystery, and power that I get whenever I have been there with very few words, letting the Medicine Bluffs and its history speak for itself.

This unique landmark at the eastern end of the Wichita Mountains was noted, described, and explored by all early expeditions and was held in deep reverence by the Indian tribes of this area from time immemorial . The four contiguous bluffs form a picturesque crescent a mile in length on the south side of Medicine Bluff Creek, a tributary of Cache Creek and Red River; it is evidently the result of a ancient cataclysm in which half of a rock dome was raised along a crack or fault.

Crossposted at Native American Netroots

Part One of a collaborative two-diary, cross-curricular series – look for pico‘s diary on Gilgamesh in Tuesday’s Literature for Kossacks.

One of the moonbatisms that least endears me to the faculty of my school’s Language Arts department is my relatively frequent assertion that all English teachers are, in fact, wannabe Social Studies teachers.  It’s really only a joke – in truth, I recognize that the one can hardly exist without the other.  Without history, literature has no context; without storytelling, history becomes a dry pile of dates, names, and un-understood, colorless societies.

Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight your resident historiorantologist will attempt to avoid the latter fate in setting the stage for pico‘s upcoming piece on that Sumerian par excellance, Gilgamesh the Wrestler.  Our tale begins, appropriately enough, at the very dawn of civilization itself…

I have been vastly preoccupied lately about the removal of people like me from among those who are considered worthy of civil rights protections.  I wrote about that here:  If only you were gay….  It was one of those pieces I wish everyone at Daily Kos would have read in order to gain maybe just a smidgen of insight, but as usual, people had more important things to do, like bash the other candidates.  Issues get set aside at times like this.

But I did manage to read a few diaries on education during the week.  Some were very good.  Some were appalling, from my point of view.  But I don’t only link to the ones I agree with.

I am far from an expert on anything concerning elementary education (apart from the topic of gender as it relates to child development, which I will claim as a topic of study about a decade ago).  But I have some personal experiences.  And I try hard to exercise the part of my brain which deals with fairness issues whenever I think about….well…anything.

At the same time, the better students need to be challenged.  I grew up in the era of “gifted and talented” programs and think it was good for me to get to do things that the other students didn’t.  But I didn’t think it was fair, necessarily, that I got to go to places that they may never go to and be exposed to knowledge reserved for the few.

I made a comment in “We Will Never Sell (Our Sacred Black Hills),”
and I want to share it with everyone.

You know,

When I listened to the radio show on Native American Calling that discussed “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee” before it was on HBO, a question was asked, “Are they ready to hear the truth about Native American History?”

My first thought was & is yes.
 

Your comments and all the others here are just proof that that is in fact so.

Thankyou from the bottom of my heart. 

Here is the radio show I was referring to, that was on Native American Calling.

Source
Tuesday, May 22, 2007 ? Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee:

HBO Films presents the epic film adaptation of Dee Brown’s seminal nonfiction book ?Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.?

Crossposted at Progressive Historians

One of the things that always troubled me about the application of the term “Machiavellian” to the zany antics of the Bush misadministration is the extent to which Rovian Math – and even Cheneyian Cloak & Daggerism – ignores the master manipulator’s precepts.  Indeed, like a conservative Christian who cherry-picks Leviticus, the architects of the failed philosophy of neoconservatism ignored some of the Prince’s very clear warnings about things like rulers relying on hired soldiers to look out for their interests – and look at the quagmire of black water it’s gotten us into.

Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we’ll look into another occasion in which the use of mercenaries has bitten an empire in the ass.  As usual, we Americans are by no means the first to experience the sort of happening-since-at-least-the-time-of-Rome setback that so shocks (shocks!) the neocons every time one of them so predictably comes to pass.

It has been my custom to post the essay portion of Teacher’s Lounge here at Docudharma an hour or so after posting Teacher’s Lounge at Daily Kos.  That’s about when the conversation slows down a bit.

I’m modifying this one a bit because it really is specifically about Daily Kos in many ways.  Or maybe it’s not.

I’ll let you decide…

The adage that one learns something new everyday is certainly fairly close to the truth especially when one applies it to Americas Society of Wingnuts. So put on your MOP gear (chemical protection suit) and let’s see what the Wingnuts have taught us.

Hey, it happens.  History is replete with stories where the good guys don’t win in the end, where horrific acts go unavenged and unpunished, where leaders of nations descend into madness, dragging their countrymen down with them.  At many various times and in many various places, peoples have found themselves saddled with rule by psychopaths, paranoids, and delusional megalomaniacs of all stripes – and simply being alive now, in the “modern” age, is no guarantee that it can’t, won’t, or hasn’t happened again.

Far be it from me to try to psychoanalyze any contemporary political figures, but it recently occurred to your resident historiorantologist that, given the proverbial insanity of American policymaking over the past few years, a look at a couple of the less-balanced monarchs who have walked the tightrope of power in the past might be in order.  Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight the tortuous paths of logic will take us from Rome to a fairy-tale castle in the Bavarian Alps…with absolutely no implied connection to anything happening in Washington today.  😉

Throughout the long ages, the proponents of societal reform have traditionally found themselves with the fuzzy end of the lollipop when it came to battling the entrenched Powers That Be’d, at least in terms of military strength.  In dozens of eras and in hundreds of contexts, however, those who would change society have learned that the force of numbers is where the power of the people lies, and from this they derived and perfected several ways of exerting considerable (sometimes government-changing) pressure upon the oligarchs, tyrants, and unprincipled politicians of their day.

Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight your resident historiorantologist will offer for progressive consideration a look at a handful of the means our side has traditionally employed when all appeared lost and the aristocrats were running amok.  As we begin, please direct your gaze toward the Eternal City on the Seven Hills, and one of the first successful general strikes…