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Electing the pope. Dot net.

Since we're coming up on the papal conclave -- the See will be vacant as of 8 pm this Friday -- I thought I'd point you to a project started by blogger, sometime commenter, and web designer Dorian Speed (of Convolare Design).

Electingthepope.net is a question-and-answer site about the papal election:

Electingthepope.net is a collaborative effort among Catholic writers, bloggers, educators, and catechists. We’ve come together to answer the basic questions that many people have asked about Pope Benedict XVI’s unexpected resignation and the upcoming papal election. Our aim is to provide well-researched, clear answers to questions about these topics and to share other reliable sources of information with our readers....

This site is designed to provide accurate answers to basic questions about Catholic beliefs and practices and isn’t focused on speculation about the results of the conclave or theological discussion. We want this to be a resource for students, teachers, and journalists. ElectingthePope.net is an independent project not affiliated with any Catholic diocese or institution.

Dorian asked me to be part of the site, along with some great other bloggers who may be familiar to you, so I've been having fun combing through the questions and looking for interesting challenges.  

The main result, so far, is that I've become very familiar with Universi Dominici Gregis.  

Several of my posts are awaiting SEO checks and things, but I have a few of them up.  So far the longest one has been an answer to the submitted question, "Will it not appear hypocritical if Cardinal Mahony participates in the conclave?  Is there nothing the other cardinals can do to prevent him from participating?"

(Short answer:  (a) The only person who can stop him, under the rules, is Pope Benedict XVI, and he only has until 8 PM Friday. (b) Following rules is generally thought to be a good idea when it comes to elections.)

(Just as an aside -- you think you are facing a long to-do list this Monday morning?  Wonder what the Holy Father's looks like.  Got to get all of this done by Friday 8 PM.)

Some closure in Indianapolis.

Because I have an unhealthy interest in the investigations that follow upon things that blow up, I have been following the story from Indianapolis about the house that exploded -- in an extraordinarily, unusually powerful natural gas explosion -- on November 10. (It's been on Twitter under the hashtag #indyboom since thirty seconds after the explosion, later supplemented by the somewhat less gauche #indyexplosion after it became clear that people had likely died.)

Arson and murder charges were filed a couple of days ago against the homeowner, her live-in boyfriend, and the boyfriend's brother, who apparently blew up the house in order to split the insurance money.

This lengthy article from the Indianapolis Star details what has to be one of the most boneheaded criminal scheme (in the sense of the criminals' almost guaranteeing that they'd be caught) ever. It would be laughable, if it weren't for the fact that two neighbors lost their lives, other neighbors were injured, 31 houses were destroyed or condemned, and about 60 more houses were damaged.

The piece seems to be a pretty good example of in-depth reporting, assuming that the facts as reported are accurate. I hope the affected families will feel one step closer to justice by Christmastime. Spare the young daughter of the homeowner a thought or prayer if you can; she will have a tough Christmas.

Literature-based American History (III): Topics of the twentieth century.

The other two parents that I co-school with really liked the topic-based format that I used for the year we studied 19th-century America, so I went with that again for the twentieth century.  

There's so much that happens in the twentieth century, it was very hard to narrow down the topics.  In the end I let two principles guide me:

(1) Since this is American history, I would stick with a U. S. perspective on global events.  I wouldn't, for example, explain what led up to World War One over in Europe.  We would cover that material in World History.  So instead I would limit my discussion of WWI to the Americans' entry into the Great War and afterward.  I applied this same principle to a number of other global events.

(2) I would favor topics that would help explain "how we got where we are today."   If something is important in today's news, I wanted to try to give the last hundred years of context for it.

After much fruitful discussion, we came to this arrangement of topics:

• American foreign relations and the roots of the War on Terror
• Economics (including the Depression, the effects of unionization, Social Security, the national debt)
• American mobility (including the interstate highway system, migrations, immigrants)
• Parties and ideologies (FDR, Reagan, the 2000 presidential election, Bush v. Gore)
• Civil rights (women's suffrage, Brown vs Board of Education, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the disability rights movement,  important Supreme Court cases, and homeschooling rights)
• Twentieth-century changes to the American experience of childhood (child labor, schooling, gender and race restrictions are lifted, the American family mutates, the unborn lose protection)
• Communication technology (radio, television, movies, computers, Internet and social media)

Meanwhile, I completed my short list of dates for the kids to memorize, and we did various exercises with the dates all year long.  Previously learned memory dates include:

• 1492, Columbus sails 
• 1776, Declaration of Independence 
• 1860, Lincoln elected
• 1865, Civil War ends; Lincoln assassinated 
• 1900, remember that McKinley was the president at the turn of the century

Here's a week-by-week book list.  "Hakim" refers to Joy Hakim, A History of US.

Week 1------ MEMORY DATE: 1918, the "Spanish" flu epidemic and the end of World War I.

• Hakim vol. 9 Preface about world war I 
• Marquette, World War I 
• Hibbert, In the Trenches in World War I
•  "U. S. Enters World War I" short film at http://www.newseum.org 
• Kudlinski K, Hero Over Here (Spanish flu) 
• Sergeant York (film)

Week 2 ------

• Blassingame, Combat Nurses of World War II .  This book is twelve kinds of awesome.  You get the stories of women who saw combat, you get a close look at the Pacific theater, and you get lots of interesting details that never make it into textbooks.
• Hakim vol. 9, chapters 26, 27, 29, 30 
• The Great Escape (film)  (okay, they were Brits, but it's such a great movie)
• Sands of Iwo Jima (film)
• Leckie R, The Battle of Iwo Jima

Week 3 ------ MEMORY DATE:  1941, Pearl Harbor attack, U. S. enters WWII.

• "Japan Bombs Pearl Harbor;"  "Nazi Holocaust Exposed;" "Hiroshima" all at  http://www.newseum.org 
• Stein, The U. S. S. Arizona 
• McGowen, Battle for Iwo Jima
•  Blassingame, Combat Nurses of World War II (continued) 
• "The Great Escape" (PBS NOVA documentary)

Week 4 ------ MEMORY DATE:  1945, the first nuclear attack on a city; WWII ends.

• Elish,The Story of the Manhattan Project

Week 5 ------

• Foster, The Story of the Cold War (read parts through 1957)
• Kallen, The Race to Space 
• Grant, NATO 
• Various books about Apollo and Mercury missions
• Doeden, Weapons of the Cold War
• WarGames (film)
• Russkies (film)  DO NOT LAUGH AT THE EIGHTIES FILM LOVE.  I wanted to show the kids what the pop-culture notions of Russians and of nuclear war were like in the mid-eighties.

Week 6 ------

• Hakim, vol. 10, chapter 7 
• Leckie, The War in Korea 1950-1953 chapters 1, 2, 12, 13.  This is a fantastic Landmark book.  I wish I had had time to read it all to the kids.
• Foster, The Story of the Cold War (read from Sputnik to Johnson) 
• Kent, The Story of the Saigon Airlift
•  Discussion question: If the war in Vietnam is over, why continue to argue about whether the US sould have fought it, or when it should have come to an end? 
• Huynh Q, The Land I Lost - a memoir about Vietnam from a Vietnamese refugee

Week 7 ------ MEMORY DATE: 1989, the Berlin Wall is opened.

• Foster, The Story of the Cold War (finished)
•  Schmemann, How the Wall Came Down (parts) 
• "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech by Reagan, Youtube
•  "The opening of the Wall at Berlin Bornholmer Strasse 1989" 

Week 8 ------ MEMORY DATE: 2001, the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon

• Meltzer, The Day the Sky Fell.  This is a history of terrorism in general.  It is a Landmark book and was revised after September 11, 2001; older editions won't have a discussion of the 9/11 attacks.  It's really wonderfully comprehensive.

Week 9 ------

• Meltzer, The Day the Sky Fell (continued)

Week 10 -------

• Meltzer, The Day the Sky Fell (continued)
• Several news articles about terrorism in the past week, to show that it continues to be a significant global threat

Week 11 -------

•    14 Cows for America

Week 12 ------- MEMORY DATE: 1929, the great stock market crash

• Downing, The Great Depression (free browsing) 
• Blumenthal, Six Days in October 
• Sandler, The Dust Bowl through the Lens
• Lange, "Migrant Mother" (photograph)

Week 13 -------

• Appelt and Schmitzer, Down Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky.  Love.  This.  Book.  

Week 14 -------

• Discuss current economic recession 
• Lauber, Flood: Wrestling with the Mississippi.  This book didn't really fit in anywhere but I liked it so much I wanted to use it, so I decided it went in with economics (since natural disasters are economic disasters, right?)   Patricia Lauber is a prolific writer of kids' science titles.

Week 15 -------

• Paradis, From Trails to Superhighways: The Story of America's Roads to show how we got our interstate system
• Williams, Road and Rail Transportation (pgs 20-26) for a handful of technical details

Week 16 -------

• Stanley J, Children of the Dust Bowl: The True Story of the School at Weedpatch Camp.  This is an utterly amazing story of how Okie children, rejected by Californians, built their own school with their own hands under the leadership of a visionary and kind public school official.  It is sobering to think how far we have come from the regionalistic xenophobia of just a couple generations ago, when citizens of one state regarded migrants from another state  as dangerous aliens.
• Discuss other migrations (African-American "Great Migration;" Mormon migration; Gold Rush)

Week 17 -------

• Paul, North Across the Border (Mexican immigrants) 
• Springstubb T, The Vietnamese Americans.  I picked these two books not because I particularly favored Mexican or Vietnamese immigrants over others, but because they seemed the best books our library had about the immigrant experience

Week 18 -------

• "The Rainmaker" (from Armstrong, The American Story) about FDR
•  Church and Lacayo, "Social Insecurity," TIME magazine, March 20, 1995 
• Hakim vol. 9, chapters 20, 22, 23, 24, 25 
• Discussion about how Social Security works and potential for insolvency; possible solutions.

Week 19 -------

• Hakim, vol. 10, ch. 36 and 37 (Nixon) 
• Lewis and others, "5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats' Office Here" The Washington Post, June 18, 1972 
• Discuss the attitude that one's political opponents are one's enemies.

Week 20 -------

• Hakim, vol. 10, chapters about Ronald Reagan 
• Discuss: Reagan as polarizing figure, liberal vs. conservative economic philosophies, pros and cons of progressive taxation, arguments about trickle-down economics, Reagan as "the great communicator."

Week 21 -------

• The American Experience: Ronald Reagan (film)

Week 22 -------

• Discuss 2000 presidential election, close elections, electoral college, Florida recount, mechanics of voting machines, chads; 
• 2008 Minnesota senate race (close race with hand recount) "Challenged Ballots: You Be the Judge." Activity from Minnesota Public Radio website,  I printed out the challenged ballots, cut them apart, and had the three kids pretend to be election judges and decide how to allocate the challenged ballots.
• CBS News archive coverage of presidential election night, 2000. 
• Hakim, vol. 10, chapters 46-47 
• Greene A, Understanding the 2000 Election (background chapter)

Week 23 -------

• Separate but Equal (film): first half.  It's a made-for-TV movie about Brown v. Board of Education.

Week 24 -------

• Finish Separate but Equal (film). 
• Read Justice Earl Warren's opinion in Brown vs. Board of Education.

Week 25 -------

• Hakim, vol. 10, chapter 16 (integration of Little Rock Central High)
•  "1920: Votes for Women" (from Armstrong, The American Story) 
• McKissack P and Zarembka A, To Establish Justice: Citizenship and the Constitution, chapter 10 on the disability rights movement.  There's some adult and controversial material in this book so I excerpted carefully.

Week 26 -------

• "I Have a Dream" Martin Luther King speech, full, on Youtube 
• Short clip of Malcolm X speaking 
• Hakim vol. 10, chapters 14, 15, 19 (Martin Luther King) 
• King ML, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (excerpts) 
• Graves R, Malcolm X (Cornerstones of Freedom series) 
• "The Black Revolution" from The World's Great Speeches (Malcolm X speech to socialists organization, 1964) 
• Discuss Malcolm X and MLK: influences of religion on them, name change, assassinations, opinions of the method of nonviolence

Week 27 -------

• Curtis CP, The Watsons Go to Birmingham -- 1963 (fiction, used as independent reading)
• Writing assignment: Curtis places a real event (the 1963 Birmingham church bombing) in a fictional story. Does it make a fictional story more interesting if it contains a real event? Does the fictional context make it easier to understand the impact of the historical event?

Week 28-------

•  Laws and court cases relevant to homeschooling rights and regulations: 
  • Meyer v. Nebraska 
  • Pierce v. Society of Sisters 
  • Wisconsin v. Yoder
  • Minnesota v. Newstrom (relevant in Minnesota only)
  • Current Minnesota statutes about home schools 
• Discuss: Should the state regulate the subjects taught? Should the state regulate the credentials of homeschooling parents? Should the state regulate the number of days of instruction? Should the state ban homeschooled children from working during school hours? Should the state require public schools to allow homeschooled students to use their facilities?

Week 29 -------

• Discussion about how the lives of children changed between about 1920 and 1990. (consumer safety regulations, equality in education, overall better health but more obesity, labor laws, sanitation, vaccinations, antibiotics, extended families living more often far away, fewer family members lost to premature death, more divorce, working mothers, smaller families, racial and gender diversity of role models) 
• Discussed growing awareness of diversity by discussing the role models who were available to young people. 
• Ryan, When Marian Sang (about Marian Anderson) 
• Weatherford, Jesse Owens: Fastest Man Alive 
• Szabo C, Sky Pioneer: A Photobiography of Amelia Earhart 
• (Biographies of others were available, including Jackie Robinson and Jim Thorpe)

Week 30 -------

•  Cleary B, Dear Mr. Henshaw (fiction; first half) 
• Themes of 20th-century child life: divorce, working parents, child support, moving to a new school, small family, lack of connection to extended family 
• Discuss various literary styles of Dear Mr. Henshaw: first- person; "epistolary" or letter format ; writing in dialogue; diary format; book review . 
• What do we think Mr. Henshaw thinks about Leigh? How do we learn what Mr. Henshaw has written to Leigh? How does Leigh express his feelings?
• (this actually appeared a few weeks later and we discussed it then, but thematically it goes here:) "Census: Saying No to Marriage," Star Tribune, May 12, 2011. Less than fifty percent of Twin Cities households include married couples. Read the article, list the main points, and discuss the implications.

Week 31 -------

• Cleary B, Dear Mr. Henshaw (second half) 
• Continue discussions of themes of 20th-century child life
• 20th-century child life: Roe v. Wade. Discussion with parent.  (I did not teach this to the group.)
•  My take: 
  • What it means. 
  • How it changed U. S. law. 
  • Current legal controversy (aside from moral controversy) about whether there is a constitutional right to privacy. 
  • Rights of the unborn compared to what we have learned about civil rights, women's rights, and the rights of the disabled. 
  • What mechanisms exist under which the law could be changed? What can an ordinary citizen do about it?

Week 32 -------

• Discuss radio, cinema, silent movies, newsreels 
• "1938: The War of the Worlds" from Armstrong, The American Story 
• Watch: "Keystone Kops: Fatty Joins the Force"
•  Watch: Newsreel of the Queen Mum's 1923 wedding, side by side with TV highlights of Prince William's wedding to Kate Middleton in 2011 
• Watch: Trailer for movie "THEM!" 
• Discuss the social and cultural purposes and effects of movies in different periods 
• Are there fewer moviegoers now? Why? What do theaters do to keep customers coming?
•  For browsing: Parkinson D, The Young Oxford Book of the Movies

week 33 -------

• Kent, Z. The Story of Television. 
• Clarification of the differences among broadcast television, cable television, VCRs, DVDs, streaming video, hard drive storage of video. 
• Discussion of expanding choices; role of advertising; and cultural and economic changes brought about by television. 
• Discussion of genres of television shows. 
• Watch: Two episodes of I Love Lucy. "Switching Jobs" and "Lucy Does a TV Commercial."

Week 34 -------

• Sherman J, The History of the Internet 
• McPherson SS, Tim Berners-Lee: Inventor of the World Wide Web (parts) 
• Stewart GB, Larry Page and Sergey Brin: The Google Guys (parts) 
• Discussion (mostly of technical details and GenX reminiscings): ARPAnet, Usenet, bulletin board analogy, gopher, email, world wide web, browsers, search engines.
•  How the Web brings people together bycommon interest. "Cyberspace."

Week 35 ------- MEMORY DATE: 1991, the World Wide Web opens to the general public

• Discussion of safety while using email, online shopping, and social media. 
• Predators; viruses; identity theft; inappropriate or dangerous material; privacy settings; information that should remain personal; precautions that kids should take. 
• Risks organized from most to least dangerous: encountering people who intend physical harm; encountering people who intend harm via internet communications; identity theft; monetary fraud; spreading of private or secret information; bullying; malware; inaccurate information or lies; harvesting personal information for targeted advertising.
•  "1500 Crash Birthday Party After Facebook Slip Up," Stephen Spencer Davis, 6/6/2011.  
• Frontline: Digital Nation (TV documentary)

Week 36 ------- final exam.

 

Sins magnified.

One of my Lenten disciplines is going to be to avoid political outrage on the Internet.  I think I've found a helpful mantra this morning, ironically, in a political-economic blog.

From Megan McArdle:  A useful insight about the office of the President, one that extends to politics and politicians in general, and applies to both Dems and Repubs:

To me, a better explanation [for the Obama administration's treatment of accused leaker Bradly Manning, which some argue constitutes torture] --one that explains the fact that there's not that much daylight between Bush and Obama on these issues--is that being president makes you want to do these things.  The president has access to more information than the rest of us...

Not only does the president hear about threats we don't, but he's the guy who gets in trouble if any of these threats come off. The combination of heightened threat-alertness, and personal risk aversion, makes him willing to do bad things to avert the potential threat. And since the president knows that he's a good person, and the people around him are basically good people, he's willing to trust them with power that no institution should have.

...I mean, I used to think that Janet Reno was evil--SWAT teams and tanks in child custody disputes? Really? Then we had a succession of new Attorneys General who all seemed to err on the side of megalomaniacal overreach. At which point I decided that it probably wasn't the person; it was the office. When you're sitting up there in that lofty perch, hearing about all the bad things that are happening in the country, and you know that you could do a lot more to fight them if you just had a little bit more power--well, sure, maybe it's not a good idea in abstract, but you're not going to abuse it, you're just trying to solve problems. Et voila, Waco.

So too, I suspect, with tormenting prisoners, and civil liberties. Maybe if Mark and I were president, we'd support this stuff too. Which is not, by the way, an argument for doing it. It's an argument that we need to serve as a check on the president. Because we're not going to fix it by just electing a better person to be president. Whoever we elect will still be president, with all that implies.

I think this is a good insight because it can help us avoid the temptation to assume bad faith, stupidity, or consciously evil motives -- personal evil -- in the officeholders we disagree with. 

I think if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we all tend to give the guys "on our side" the benefit of the doubt while assailing the integrity of the guys on "the other side."  It's subtly dangerous to our own spirits to divide the political-social world up into good guys and bad guys. 

Good ideas and bad ideas, or good actions and bad actions -- sure!  

Good people and evil people... stupid people and intelligent people... noble people and base people... not so much. 

(And watch out for the temptation to insist, "I'm not saying he's an evil person, I'm saying he has evil motives!"  Since you can't actually observe motives the way you can observe actions and statements, and can only guess at them, to declare someone's motives bad is really just a circular way of declaring him a bad person:  you believe the motives to be bad because you believe him to be bad and therefore incapable of having good motives.  Fess up.)

I get really tired of the "Obama is evil" movement, and am equally tired of the "Bush is evil" movement.  Similarly tired of the smaller "He or she is evil" movements that play out in smaller theaters, like the one going on now in the Wisconsin State Capitol building. 

McArdle suggests that maybe it's just being President that tempts human beings to do apparently bad stuff.  Gee, I can't imagine that -- holding one of the most powerful offices in the world, a severe temptation to evil acts and omissions?!?  Sarcasm aside, it also seems pretty obvious to me that men with different leanings would be tempted to a slightly different variety of evils, but also that universal desires -- say, to increase one's own personal power, or to be thought well of by others, might lead to startlingly similar behaviors even by men of quite different political beliefs.  Hence McArdle's suggestion that this theory explains why President GW Bush's reviled policies towards certain prisoners appear to have been continued rather than reversed under President Obama.

I think we would do well to reserve our indignation towards the personalities of our political opponents, even in the most upsetting of policy debates, even the ones that seem to us the starkest battlegrounds between good and evil.   Better, I think, to recognize that high offices themselves constitute high opportunities to commit dreadful sins and injustices.   Yes, they also present opportunities to do great good... which means nothing more than opportunities to commit terrible sins of omission.  

And it's really just our preference for some sins over others that leads us to condemn some sinners over others, I think.  They're all freaking sinners, as are we.

During this Lent, one way I'm going to temper my political outrage is by avoiding the blogs and websites that tend to exacerbate feelings of irritation.  (That's not all political blogs and websites, incidentally -- some of them generally inform and entertain me without making me angry, at least if I don't go on to read the comments.)    But since it's impossible to avoid political information and opinion entirely, I think it will also help to have in my pocket the little mantra:  "It's not the person, it's the office."   Because without the publicity and power the office has granted, the officeholder's flaws would never, ever have become so magnified as to attract and hold my attention and my judgment, through my own distorted lens.

History jackpot.

Two new books and one new insight that are really going to help me this year in my  mission to teach literature-based, topically-organized 20th-century American history.  I have a rough schedule, but now it's time to select books and other materials.

First the insight, which Hannah and I hashed out at the playground last week.  I can solve the problem of  hagiography of U. S. Presidential biographies simply by examining the modern results of some of their policies.  In the case of F. D. Roosevelt in specific (which is what caused me to moan and groan about hagiography), all we really need to do to balance the false heroic treatment of the man and his policies in the biographies is find a good, comprehensive article of the problems with Social Security today.  That should give us a chance to discuss a lot of good issues (economics, the best-laid plans of mice and men, etc.) and will also mesh really well with our planned approach, which is to show how the historical events of the twentieth century have created the issues we are dealing with today.

Now, book number one:

When the Wall Came Down: The Berlin Wall and the Fall of Soviet Communism by Serge Schmemann

This looks really great -- lots of maps and photographs and excerpts from New York Times articles and personal stories.  It covers the history of post-WWII Europe with just the right amount of scope, and brings it up to personal memoir of the fall of the Berlin wall.  Exactly what we are looking for.  It's not written specifically for children, but I can deal with that with our fifth-graders.

The Day the Sky Fell: A History of Terrorism by Milton Meltzer

I figured it would take me a long time to pull together enough resources to cover "The Roots of the War On Terror," so I scheduled it at the end of the year.  Not so anymore:  this book, which is yet another in the fabulous Landmark Series of nonfiction books for older kids, covers exactly what I need.  We can now take several weeks to read this book, stopping  to supplement with multimedia or maps now and again, and discussing, discussing, discussing.  It explains why terrorism is so effective and so hard to fight, and it goes all the way back to 19th-century anarchists as well as all the way up to September 11. 

Hagiography.

Searching for biographies of U. S. presidents in the juvenile literature section can be very annoying.  It's not bad, per se, that there are 272 copies of 22 different juvenile biographies of the current president in the library system (although since all of them will be outdated shortly, I question the financial wisdom of such a large purchase).    It seems that all the other presidents have been crowded off the shelf, at least at my local branch.  But the others are there, it's just that many are in the stacks at the central library.  There are almost as many copies about FDR (29 titles, 220 or so copies).    Whom I went searching for yesterday.

I took home three titles.  And was immediately annoyed.  According to all three of them, FDR was basically flawless.  As were pretty much all  the policies mentioned in the books.  No reasonable opposition to, say, the Social Security program is described in any detail whatsoever, unless it was to say the law didn't go far enough -- not even in books written well into the era when the flaws in funding Social Security are obvious to everyone.   And then there's the scanty coverage of bad moves like Roosevelt's attempt to pack the Supreme Court.  The author of a book for teens writes about this one as if some mysterious illness had taken over the normally perfect Roosevelt's brain.  

Roosevelt's remarkable political gifts... deserted him during the court-packing battle.  The decision to "pack" the Supreme Court was made differently from almost every other important decision of his presidency... Then, as the battle raged, Roosevelt never showed his characteristic flexibility...

Roosevelt was perfect, so it's a mystery why he supported such a crazy idea!

I don't think it's a matter of partisanship (although I will let you know when I go looking for Reagan biographies shortly).  I suspect it's more this idea that we can't let kids think that the big stars of American history are anything other than visionaries, the policies that passed being the ones that were predestined from the beginning by history's inevitable march.   A generation from now, some future homeschooler will probably be annoyed about the library books portraying the saintliness of President George W. Bush. 

Well, I have other sources -- the TIME magazine archive, for instance, and the American Presidency Project's Audio/Video Archive. Some opposition commentary will surely turn up.  It's really important, I think, to point out that the presidential administrations of the past ran up against serious opposition as well as support, usually for good reasons on both sides.  Otherwise, you get this idea that partisan rancor is worse now than it has ever been, and that's simply not supported by the evidence.

Sequelae.

I live far, far away from the Gulf of Mexico.  I have never walked its beaches and have not seen its waters (unless you want to count a single airplane flight into New Orleans for an American Chemical Society conference some years ago).

The kind of natural getaway that's within a day's drive of my family is the north woods of Minnesota.  Also beautiful and fun for the family, but not much like a beach.

So I appreciated this:   a brief, wistful description of the immediate effects from the BP oil disaster, on a family with kids, much like mine.

Noticed this at the bottom and thought it was worth repeating:

We plan on still supporting our beach towns by returning here throughout the year. Although we may not have been able to prevent the ecological destruction caused by BP, we can prevent the economical fallout and keep our beach towns alive. If you live nearby, I encourage you to do the same.

History, threaded.

I'm trying to organize my third year of literature-based U.S. history for my family and two other families, and as I've written before -- see my "History" category -- I'm considering organizing it not chronologically, but topically.  Or rather, by "threads" connecting the start of the 20th century to today.  I'd like to use it to explain "how we got here," that is, put into a hundred years of context the stories they hear about on today's news, on the radio and at the dinner table.

You can't teach everything.  Time is limited.  Whenever you design a history curriculum, really any curriculum,  you must decide what's important enough to cover.  I thought maybe my criterion for "importance" might be:  Does this story help explain anything the children see around them, reflected on the news, in the lives of themselves and their friends, in the popular culture they are absorbing?  

And when I started thinking about it that way, it made sense to arrange history by topic, in terms of what it explains, rather than strictly chronologically as most textbooks do it:  "The Depression Era," "The Postwar Era," and so forth.

Here are my stabs at potential "threads" through the twentieth century -- which, in a topical and cultural sense, is not from 1900 to 1999, but rather is from American involvement in World War I to 9-11.  (I say September 11, 2001 is the cultural beginning of the twenty-first century in America -- and I will bet you it will be regarded as such by cultural historians.)

I present them in no particular order.  Within each thread we can cover the subtopics chronologically.

Thread 1.  America as a superpower.  World Wars I and II, the Manhattan Project, the UN, NATO, Marshall Plan, Truman Doctrine, Cold War (including Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Cuba), cultural opposition to and support for Communism, nuclear proliferation and fear of "the bomb" as a cultural meme, U.S. foreign aid, fall of Eastern bloc leaving China as the "other" superpower.

Thread 2.  Establishing the current U. S. borders and holdings.  Alaska, Hawaii, other U. S. holdings, how we wound up with U. S. military bases all over the place.

Thread 3.  African-American history and civil rights/equality in general.  Pick up where we left off with Ida B. Wells and WEB Dubois.  Legal segregation, great migration of African Americans to north and to cities, female suffrage, Brown v. Board of Education and school integration, bios of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, civil disobedience in the civil rights movement, general civil rights legislation including for women and the disabled, election of the first African-American president.

Thread 4.  Changes to American experience of childhood.  The economic work of children changes with child labor laws; most children attend institutional schools; many gender-based restrictions are lifted; more children spend time with sitters or in institutional day care; more children grow up in divorced families; more children are raised by single parents.   

Two special note on this one:  

1. This category contains some sensitive topics that our families will probably want to teach within our families rather than as a group.  For example, as a historical topic, I think Roe v. Wade belongs here, I trust the other families will cover or not cover it in a manner appropriate to their kids' readiness.  Ditto with any implications for sexual morality, etc.   
2. Much of this thread incorporates what is, in other history texts, folded into a "women's rights" chapter, but I'm shifting things like women's suffrage to the civil rights thread, and keeping here a discussion of how women's equality affected the experience of children.  That makes it sound as if I'm going to stick to "children suffered when their women's libber moms went to work," but no -- remember that the experience of girlhood was transformed in many good ways, too, with more opportunities for education, athletics... more possible futures.  The important thing is to put in context the purpose of work: for the good of the family.  More options increases the potential for abuse, but for effective service as well.

Thread 5.  Economics.  Depression, war industries, GI bill, postwar baby boom, postwar industrialization, the "war on poverty," federal programs like Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, inflation and recession cycles, waves of immigration, the housing bubble and the current recession.  Talk about the tension between large government and small government ideals -- lots of entitlement programs and a big safety net, or a smaller safety net and lower taxes.  

One of my philosophies about teaching that involves politics at this age (in the classical/trivium domain, rhetoric or "pert" age):  It is my job to teach children that reasonable people can and do disagree.  I like to point out the existence of, and the reasons for, a tension between two political ideals, and make sure that the children are able to articulate the basic arguments of both "ends."    I don't want to impose a requirement that my kids think like me or agree with me in arenas where reasonable disagreement is, well, reasonable (and that's most of politics).  It's especially important when I'm teaching children other than my own, as I am doing with history.  The families I teach with share many values with me, but those same values can inform very different political positions!  Anyway, at this stage, neither am I asking the children to argue or articulate their own political or historical opinions.  Rather, I'm asking them to understand, and maybe to parrot back, the reasonable arguments behind each of opposing positions.  These, I hope, will incubate for a couple of years and help them develop opinions that really are their own.  And then they can discover the fun of attempting to convince and win over their reasonable opponents.

This has gotten long, so I'll continue in the next post, when I'll  talk about the rest of my threads:  [Update:  Missed one -- added it and reordered these] (6) roots of the so-called "war on terror," (7) the environmental movement, (8) party lines, (9) American mobility, (10) mass communication, and (11) selected Presidential biographies.  Can you guess which three presidential administrations I plan to highlight, and why?

Consensus.

I continue to follow the so-called Climategate stories with great interest.  This morning the most interesting comment thread appears to be at the NYT dotearth blog, with many comments from a variety of people including the apparently technically trained and from both "sides" of the AGW debate, if it can be said to have clean sides.

Let's talk a little bit about the "consensus," the one that supposedly includes
thousands and thousands of the well-informed.  Here is a little Venn diagram for you:

PEOPLE WHO HAVE AN OPINION ABOUT AGW (anthropogenic global warming)

Here we have some nested groups.  General public is on the outside.  Within that, laypeople with enough technical education -- they paid attention in high school or college science classes, they may have an amateur interest in science, etc. -- to understand the arguments about it that appear in newspapers, magazines, or the popular literature. 

Within that, technically trained scientists, engineers, statisticians, and the like.  I am a member of this group.   We know how research is supposed to work and maybe we know a bit about how it really works.  We might at some point have attended a seminar or taken a class on climate change, for instance, and at any case we know quite a bit of physics, mathematics, statistics and the like, and are used to reading and evaluating papers.  The key feature of this group:  We are all pretty sure that if we wanted to take the time to read the climate-change literature, take a look at the code, we could make an educated and independent judgment about it. 

A bit farther in, climatologists and oceanographers and geologists, perhaps a few biologists who specialize in species affected by climate change, earth scientists in general:  the sort of people who are expected to be familiar with the literature on AGW.  They know the research intimately.

And then in the middle, a much much smaller group: those climatologists, oceanographers, geologists who actually produce the research, write the papers, design the models, manage and manipulate the data.

I have no doubt whatsoever that, as you move inward from circle to circle, you see that a greater and greater fraction of the people are convinced that (a) the globe is warming, (b) it's caused by human activity, (c) there's something we could do about it.  That's what you call a "consensus."

What's not clear to me as a member of the third group from the center:  How much of that conviction rests heavily on the integrity and good judgment of the people farther in, and on the soundness and objectivity of the peer-review process?  This is especially important when you consider the interface between the two centermost circles -- because those second-ring people know enough and are familiar enough with the literature to critique the research of the inner-ring people, and then have the authority to add their voices to the "consensus" that is supposed to carry so much weight.

I rather suspect it's a lot.  I'll raise my hand right now and tell you that I am a trained scientist who has generally assumed the peer review process regarding AGW to work the way it's supposed to, and has assumed good faith and rigorous adherence to professional values on the part of the global-warming researchers (I don't assume they are unbiased -- who is?).  We're seeing a crack in that facade.  It's clear that the values are compromised at major research facilities.  That there's been an attempt to compromise the peer review process -- whether it has been compromised isn't clear, we haven't heard from the journals as far as I know.   My assumption wasn't valid.  Is my part in the "consensus" (such as my part was) back to square one?  Maybe so.

History and today.

I've started thinking already about next year's literature-based American History study.  Last year we did "prehistorical North America through the War of 1812."  This year we're doing "19th century" -- really, "war of 1812 through U.S. entry into WWI," with half the year spent on Civil War and related topics.  Next year we'll wrap it up with "Twentieth-Century America" -- which is really going to be "World War I through 9/11/01," I think.

When I prepared the book lists for the first two-thirds, I started by picking up a couple of good high-school history textbooks and reading through them to get an idea of which topics to cover.  I think this time around, though, I am not going to do that.  That approach forces you to start in the past and look forward.  It's also an approach in which everything is important -- in which it's hard to make priority choices, given the limited time we have to spend.  But I need a way to decide which topics we must cover and which must be set aside.   So I think maybe the best approach is to start in the present and look back.  I want to ask myself, "Where are we now?  And how did we get here?"

It's not that I want to focus heavily on current events with the kids I'm teaching, who will be two fifth-grade boys and one seventh-grade girl next year (plus whichever younger kids "tag along" with the subject from day to day).   I don't think they are old enough to really dig into the complexities of modern-day politics, domestic and global.  

But I do want to supply them with the basic historical background they will need to understand today's United States and its place in the world.  I want to steep them at least a bit in the past, so that when it comes time to understand a complicated present, they'll have some idea that it didn't come out of nowhere.  And so when I select topics, I want to do it with an eye toward setting the stage for today.  That, I think, will be my primary organizing principle, since I can't cover everything.  Does this topic help us understand where we are today?  Here in the U. S.?

I think it has a way of focusing how to teach about things.  It's so easy to think of the twentieth century as a string of "eras:"  the World War I era, the Depression era, the WWII era, the Cold War era, the era of the Civil Rights Movement, and so on.  I was tempted to break it up like that myself.  But there are other ways to think about all these pieces, less as discrete time blocks than... phenomena maybe?   The end of American isolationism and the beginnings of intensive global involvement, for better or worse.  The great migrations from rural areas to cities, and from south to north.   U.S. involvement in the Mideast.

Let's talk presidents.  I'd rather cover a few in depth than all of them superficially.  In the 19th century I planned to cover biographies of only three presidents, the most interesting ones:  Jackson, Lincoln, T. Roosevelt.  In the twentieth century, whose full biographies to cover?  It strikes me that two are no-brainers:  FDR and Reagan.  They make interesting counterpoints, if nothing else.  When I was talking it over with Hannah I also ticked off "and Kennedy," but when I mentioned that to Mark he said "No way.  Kennedy's only interesting because he was assassinated.  You want an interesting character study, you want to do Lyndon Johnson."   

"Nixon maybe?"

"Well, sure, he's a character too, but a lot of interesting things happened under Johnson.  Think about it."  And I am thinking about it -- he has a point.

Anyway, I am a long way from committing anything to paper, but I will definitely have food for thought over the next few weeks.