bearing blog

"Colored Me."

A fascinating story that begins with a curious anecdote of family genealogy and leads to a discussion of the history of eugenics and racial classifications in midcentury Virginia.

This [photo] is the mar­riage license of my great-great grand­fa­ther,  born in Ire­land in 1854 and mar­ried to a Vir­ginia native in 1884. His race, you’ll notice, is given as “col­ored.” Since when are Irish­men colored?

My father found this when he started doing fam­ily his­tory after he retired. We mostly laughed, a lot, when he revealed it at a fam­ily Christ­mas party: that year he sent us all Kwanza cards as a joke.

But being a his­to­rian I couldn’t help but be fas­ci­nated.... I thought the “Irish were not white” bit was wildly overstated.

I was clearly wrong, and look­ing into it a lit­tle more resulted in a whole class les­son around the image of the Irish in the 19th cen­tury and the range of anti-Irish nativism. It focused on the mal­leabil­ity of stereo­types, and how what seems “nat­ural” and obvi­ous in one era seems odd in the next.

But still how to explain this doc­u­ment? It was his mar­riage cer­tifi­cate: surely even the green­est Irish immi­grant knew enough to avoid being classed as “colored.”

If you take a close look at it, it gets more and more interesting....

Read the whole thing.  

(h/t commenter HCCarey in this really interesting comment thread on Ta-Nehisi Coates's Atlantic blog about mutual cultural understanding, or the lack thereof, between American Jews and African-Americans.)

Saint Nicholas the badass.

A day late, but (thanks to Taylor Marshall of the blog Canterbury Tales) here is some stuff about St. Nicholas I didn't know:

...the good Saint Nick allegedly "h-slapped" ("heretic slapped") the heresiarch Arius. You see, Arius wrongly taught that Christ was not fully divine. Rather, Arius taught that Christ had been created by God the Father.

During the First Ecumenical Council of Nicea (AD 325), Arius was called upon to defend his position on the inferiority of Christ. Saint Nicholas just couldn't listen to all of Arius' nonsense and so he stood up and laid in to Arius with his fist.

The Emperor Constantine and the bishops present at the Council were alarmed by Nicholas' act of violence against Arius. They immediately stripped Nicholas of his office as a bishop by confiscating the two items that marked out a man as a Christian bishop: Nicholas' personal copy of the Gospels and his pallium (the vestment worn by all bishops in the East)...

See, I didn't even know that St. Nick was at the council of Nicaea, let alone that he personally punched Arius in the face.  The things we leave out of our tales to children these days!  

(We could have been promising the kids a stocking if they were good, and a socking if they turned out to be filthy little heretics.)

More at the link, including the story of the miracle that gives us the traditional Eastern iconography for St. Nicholas, and a painting of St. Nick waving his fist (and undoubtedly going, "Why, I oughta...bam! To the moon, Arius!")

Now, I happen to own a children's book called The Miracle of Saint Nicholas, and it's really quite a sweet one too, about a small village whose church has lain disused and empty since the soldiers came, and how (after the soldiers have gone) the villagers reveal one by one that they have preserved its treasures.  The "miracle" in the book is just the "miracle" of human ingenuity, memory, service, and charity.  And there's nothing wrong with that; it certainly seems like a miracle sometimes.  

But I can't help but think that a kid's book based on this episode would be pretty darn cool.

He knows if you've been good

He knows if you've been rotten

He knows if you've been teaching that Jesus Christ was created, not begotten

SO you better not spout Christological lies,

You better not flout, I'm telling you why,

Santa Claus is taking YOU doooooown!

I wonder how this would fly if my eight-year-old performed it at the annual parish "Saints and Scholars" pageant.  

SO SO TEMPTING.

Everything I remember from fourth-grade Ohio history.

MrsDarwin mentions having to get the Ohio state history requirements in:

The oldest two are heading into 3rd and 4th this year, and since it works well to have them do things in unison we're leaning towards putting them through two years of US history and kids literature (with enough Ohio specific side-lights to say that we met the state education requirements)...

Although the whole Darwin family is recently transplanted from Texas, MrsD also grew up in Ohio, I think, but just in case I thought I'd help her out.

Everything I Remember From Fourth-Grade Ohio History

1. The glaciers stopped partway across. That is why southern Ohio is so hilly and interesting, while northern Ohio is so flat and boring.

2. The boundary of the glacier-scoured area is called a "moraine." 

3. Many trilobite fossils can be found in Ohio, possibly more than in any other part of the world.

(Fun fact: once while hiking in Red Rock Canyon outside of Las Vegas I met an upper-level college geology class from the University of Dayton, who were presumably having a field trip to somewhere less flat, even though comparatively lacking in trilobites. By casually dropping the above information in conversation, I managed to be mistaken for a geologist.)

4. First there were the Mound Builders. They built mounds. The most famous mound is the Serpent Mound. They were a peaceful people, i.e.., they were already gone by the time white settlers got to Ohio.

5. Then there were the Miami people. They were very interesting. They were not already gone when white settlers came to Ohio. They gave Ohio its name.

6. The first capital of Ohio wasn't Columbus, but Chillicothe.   There's some story about how it got changed but I forget it.

7. Ohio was an important destination along the Underground Railroad. Some houses had secret rooms for hiding fugitives. Maybe even YOUR house!!!!!  That would be SO COOL.  Or at least that's how I remember it from being nine years old.  

8.  Ahem.

 A comparison of the contributions of North Carolina ("First in Flight") and Ohio ("The Buckeye State") to powered flight:

 Ohio:

• Orville
• Wilbur

North Carolina:

• Wind
• Sand

9. Ohio is nicknamed "Birthplace of Presidents" because a bunch of U. S. presidents were born in Ohio, including William Henry Harrison (He died in thirty days).

10. Also the electric automobile starter. You know that crank sticking out of the front of your car that sometimes kicks back and breaks your arm? No? WELL, then. Did North Carolina have anything to do with that? I think not. 

The full literature-based U.S. history curriculum.

I thought maybe this deserved its own index post.

You may use it freely, but please attribute or link back.

U. S. History I: Prehistory through 1812
U. S. History II(a) The Civil War
U. S. History II(b): Topical survey of the 19th century
U. S. History III: Topics of the twentieth century

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.

 

Literature-based American History (II-b): Topical survey of the 19th-century.

In Part II-a, I wrote about why I divided the second year of American history into two semesters and treated the Civil War all by itself, and I gave the syllabus I used for that first semester on the Civil War. 

In the second semester, that serious business being out of the way, we moved on to other topics for the rest of the year.  They don't really arrange themselves chronologically very neatly, so I took the nineteenth century (roughly; I went from "the end of the war of 1812" to "the U. S. entry into the Great War") as a single chunk, and then covered several different topics.  I would go on to use that same approach with the twentieth century the next year (more on that in another post, natch.)

The flow of topics went like this:

• Pre-Civil War foreign policy and conflicts
  •  Monroe Doctrine (dealings with Europe)
  •  dealings with Indian nations, such as Seminole War, Trail of Tears, etc., Jackson
  •  dealings with Mexico/Texas
• All that pioneer stuff - Western expansion
  • Midwest/Great Plains settlement
  • Oregon Trail, Santa Fe Trail, Mormon Trail, etc.
  • Relations with Indian nations during the Western expansion period
• Growth of cities
  • Midcentury wave of European immigration
  • Working conditions
• Political/social movements
  • Labor unions
  • Urban social welfare
  • Women's suffrage
• Everyday life
  • On the frontier
  • Children's schooling
  • National parks
  • New technologies
• Post-Civil War politics
  • Spanish-American War
  • Presidents

 

Point one: selection.

If it all seems a little haphazard, that's because it is.  If it seems that something very important has been left out, that's because it probably was.  There are only eighteen weeks in which to do it, after all.   The only way to cover everything is to cover nothing in depth.

Point two:  This is not a neutral list.

Some of my choices betray my own values (as I hope they should)!  For example, I made a point of including the establishment of national parks as an important historical and cultural mark.  That's because it's something that distinguishes the U. S. -- other countries haven't done nearly as well in setting aside land in a more-or-less natural state for public use.  If there is such a thing as an "American character," I think our relationship with our lands is something worth exploring in depth.   It's not all gold-digging and monoculture, you know; Americans have a strong naturalist and conservationist tradition as well.  Also because our family enjoys outdoor activities, often in national and state parkland, and I wanted the kids to understand and appreciate why we have national parks to go to.  

(Love of country may be out of style these days, but when I list my reasons to be grateful that I am an American, I don't have trouble coming up with items; and national parks are one.)

 

Point three:  How I deal with teaching controversial topics to middle schoolers.

Remember, I'm working with middle schoolers -- I had two 4th-graders and one 6th-grader for this year.  At this age, I think, they are only just beginning to be ready to stake a position and defend it.  So I never asked them to do this.  I avoided putting them on the spot with "What do you think is the right choice?  Do you think this was a good law or a bad one?  Do you think such and such a person acted rightly or wrongly?"

Instead I tried  to introduce at least two different points of view and make sure that the kids all understand two concepts that are sadly lacking in our public discourse:

1.  Reasonable people can come down on different sides of most controversial issues.  
2. Members of distinctly visible groups -- like "workers," "black Americans," "women" -- don't always line up on the same side of political questions. 

So, instead of telling me what their position was, I required the kids to list reasonable arguments and philosophies held by people on different sides of a position.  For example, I'd want them to be able to tell me why some 19th-century people would think a law establishing a minimum wage was good for workers, business owners, and the American public; and then to come back and tell me why establishing a legally enforced minimum wage might, in the views of others, be bad for workers, business owners, and the American public.  (Note my refusal to frame the question as "Why did workers support a minimum wage and business owners fight against it?")

Being able to competently and accurately explain a position -- whether you hold it or not -- is a prerequisite for defending and promoting a position you do hold.  The former, being a more fundamental skill, is what I emphasized.

 

Preliminaries aside:  what did we read?

 

SEMESTER II

Week 19
-------
Dangerfield G., Defiance to the Old World (explains the historical world context of the Monroe Doctrine).  First part of the book up to where Andrew Jackson comes in.
Begin learning the names of the first 16 presidents in order.

Week 20
-------
Finish Defiance to the Old World
Discuss Monroe Doctrine
Hakim volume 4, chapters 18, 20, 24, 25, 26 about Jackson, the trail of tears, the 2nd Seminole War; chapter 33 on the series of presidents
Worksheet putting the first 16 presidents in order

Week 21
-------

Downey, Texas and the War With Mexico (parts)

Week 22
-------
Downey, Texas and the War with Mexico (about the Alamo)
Cousins, M., We Were There at the Battle of the Alamo (fiction)
Discuss the Texas Republic
Havighurst, First Book of Pioneers (first part.  This book deals with the settlement of Southwestern Ohio, where my kids' grandparents live.  If you live in or have ties to another part of the Midwest or Great Plains, it might be good to pick something else specific to that locale)

Week 23
-------
Havighurst, First Book of Pioneers (finish)

Week 24
-------
Tunis, Frontier Living, chapter 13 "The Harried Saints" (about the Mormon trail.  Because one of the children I teach is a member of the LDS church, it was very important to me to find a source that treated the people who participated in the Mormon migration positively or at least neutrally; many books, especially older ones, are surprisingly dismissive or hostile towards them.  At the same time, I didn't want to use material produced by LDS organizations.   This chapter fit the bill very nicely, not getting into details about religious differences, but positively appraising the hard work and endurance of the people who followed the Mormon trail.  And all the books by E. Tunis are very cool for other reasons.  If I had discovered him in time I would have used his book on the Colonial period in the previous year.)
Draw the Mormon trail on the US Map
Label Mississippi R., Platte R., Missouri R., Great Salt Lake; Nauvoo, IL; Salt Lake City, UT; Council Bluffs, IA
Freedman, The Life of Crazy Horse (begin.)  I decided to use a biography of Crazy Horse as our entry point for discussing the encounters between the Indian nations of the Great Plains and settlers from the East.  This bio is long and I had to stretch the reading over several weeks, but it's well-written, interesting, and attractively illustrated.

Week 25
-------
Trace the Oregon Trail on the map from Week 24
Tunis, Frontier Living, "The Bitter Road to Oregon"
Freedman, The Life of Crazy Horse (continued)

Week 26
-------
Freedman, The Life of Crazy Horse (continued)
Discuss Sand Creek massacre
Wells, R. Streets of Gold (this is a picture book drawn from an immigrant's autobiography)
Sandin J., The Long Way to a New Land (an easy reader, again about immigration)
Heaps, W. A., The Story of Ellis Island (parts; this is an extremely cool book, with lots of details about what it was like for people who came through the Ellis Island bureaucracy, and I would have used more of it except it is written at too high a level for these kids)
Discuss immigration in mid-to-late 1800s from Europe

week 27
-------
Littlefield H., Fire at the Triangle Factory (an easy reader)
McCully E. A., The Bobbin Girl (pretty good picture book about one of those paternalistic factories that employed many young women and provided housing;  gives an entry point into the idea of unions and strikes, and also into women's economic situations)
Hakim vol. 8, ch 16, "Harvest at Haymarket."  Discuss: maximum workday; minimum wage; minimum working age; safety regulations; tension between the economic costs and benefits of these rules.  Discuss strikes and unions.

Began memorizing important dates:  1492, 1776, 1860, 1865

Week 28 (two sessions this week)
-------
Klingel, C., Clara Barton:  Founder of the American Red Cross
Wooldridge, When Esther Morris Headed West: Women, Wyoming, and the Right to Vote
Fritz, J. You Want Women to Vote, Lizzie Stanton?
Discuss suffrage
Everyday life in the 19th century:
Tunis, Frontier Living, about oxen, canal locks, Iowa squatters
Hakim vol 5, ch. 19

Week 29
-------
Bial R., One Room School
Discuss how schooling has changed since then
Douglas W. O., Muir of the Mountains (biography of John Muir.  Oh I love this book.  John Muir is a fascinating figure.)
Discuss extinction of passenger pigeon; modern management of natural resources; Muir's motivation for abandoning his career in engineering and turning to the outdoors

Week 30
-------
Finish reading Muir of the Mountains

Week 31
-------
off this week -- we made it up in advance in Week 28

Week 32
-------
Levine, I. E.  Inventive Wizard:  George Westinghouse (first part).  Why do yet another Thomas Edison biography when instead you can read about George Westinghouse?

week 33
-------
Levine, I. E. Inventive Wizard:  George Westinghouse (continued)

Week 34
-------
Levine, I. E. Inventive Wizard: George Westinghouse (finish)
Fritz, J. Bully for you, Teddy Roosevelt!  (begin)

Week 35
-------
Fritz, J. Bully for you, Teddy Roosevelt! (finish)
Discuss Panama canal, the vice presidential succession to the presidency
Memorize that McKinley was president in 1900 (just a milestone for the turn of the century to help remember dates)

Week 36
-------
Hunter V., Stagecoach Days  (this really belonged earlier in the semester, but it was late coming from the library.)

Literature-based American history (II-a): 1812 through 1914, The Civil War in particular.

Part I, prehistory through 1812, is here.

+ + +

Stipulation:

The American Civil War is a huge topic.  

You could, if you wanted to, spend a whole year of social studies on the Civil War alone.  Not only is the topic huge, but -- almost more importantly for my purposes -- there is a lot of really good children's literature out there.  

It's also a topic that is necessarily solemn.  And that is why I chose to avoid a purely chronological approach to the time period.  I had about a hundred years of history to cover in this year, and of course things happen in the 19th-century U.S. that seem to be part of a different world.  Soldiers fight in foreign wars.  Pioneers cross the Great Plains.  The railroad makes its way across the continent.  Various inventions transform ordinary lives.  But even though these things are all intertwined with the sorry history of chattel slavery and the great purging conflict that burned it away and the aftermath and the scars that still remain, I hated to interrupt the main thrust of the narrative for jaunty little side trips about stagecoaches and electric light bulbs.  

So I decided to divide the year into two semesters.  In the first semester, I tried to encompass the American Civil War, including some background and also the political and social aftermath through Reconstruction.  Within that semester, the approach is chronological, out of necessity -- because it does tell a coherent story, or narrative, of a kind.  (With the caveat that the whole history must be simplified drastically for any one person to grasp it as "a" story.) In the second semester, I considered other changes that happened during the nineteenth century, with an approach that was topical, rather than straightforward chronological.

See, I figure that eventually these kids are all going to do a one-year survey of American history.  I don't need to do it now while they're little.  Right now I need to get them interested in the stories.  

Meanwhile, a note about textbooks.

Even with a literature-based approach to history education, I think it's helpful to have a "spine" -- a textbook, to put it bluntly -- that you can draw from to fill in any important gaps in the literature that is available to you.  Sometimes you just can't find a "good" book about this or that important topic, and the textbook will have to do.  It's also a good reference for what happened when and where.

In my first year, I used the materials from Seton, which worked pretty well from my perspective because they provided material about the Catholic heritage that's often missing in the Pilgrim-o-centric materials that are usually available on the colonial period.  But I've never been particularly impressed with the literary quality of the Seton textbooks.  Still, I was happy to use them as a supplement.

Between the first year and the second I discovered Joy Hakim's multivolume American history entitled The History of US.  I switched to Hakim's books for the spine after that.  (Also, by the end of the first year, I was co-schooling more heavily, and as a result, teaching children who are being raised in non-Catholic faiths.  So while I continued to make sure that the material we used wasn't exclusively WASP-centered -- and it prompted me to take more pains to talk about the historical importance of Quakers and Mormons, both of which are pretty significant -- I wasn't looking for religious content in a reference spine anymore.)   I mention this to explain that I didn't ditch Seton because I thought it was bad or anything, although I do prefer the tone and style of Hakim's books.   Tone and style of a textbook are much less important when it's being used as a supplement than when it's basically the only book you're using.  I imagine that Seton's materials will work very well as reference spines for Catholic families.  Hakim was the better choice for our co-schooling situation.

So what did we use?   In this post I'll write about the Civil War material, and I'll save the second semester for another post.

SEMESTER I:  THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

Week 1
------
Hakim Vol 4 on Missouri Compromise
Hakim Vol 5, chapters 32, 33, 34
Swain G, Dred and Harriet Scott:  A Family's Struggle for Freedom (first half).   I prefer telling specific stories to generalities.  It's true that Dred and Harriet Scott led unusual lives and aren't representative of slaves in general; but don't we all lead unique lives?  None of us are "representative."  Truth is in the specifics.  Anyway, some points that this book gets across:  (1) Slavery screwed up people's family lives.  (2) Slavery happened in the North as well as the South, and Northerners as well as Southerners owned slaves.  (3) Slaves were not devoid of agency and could and did use the legal system to exert what rights they did have.

Week 2
------
Continue with Swain G. Dred and Harriet Scott

Week 3
------
Kent Z., The Story of John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry
John Brown's speech upon being sentenced to death 

Much fruitful discussion can be had about John Brown.  I won't presume to tell other people which aspects of his story to emphasize.

Week 4
------
Douglass F, adapted by McCurdy.  Escape from Slavery:  The Boyhood of Frederick Douglass (This is a children's adaptation of Frederick Douglass's autobiography.  You could work with the original rather than the adaptation if the children are older.  This particular adaptation is well done.)
Winter J., Follow the Drinking Gourd  (We included some discussion of the legends about the Underground Railroad that are fairly unsupported by data.  People love a good story about secret messages encoded in quilt blocks or laundry hanging on the line, but not all the stories seem really to have happened.)
Field trip to Fort Snelling Historical Site:  Civil War Days (Depending on where you live in the U. S., there may be some very cool historical sites near you.  I live near Fort Snelling, which is notable because Dred Scott lived and worked there, and his time there, enslaved outside "slave states," formed part of the basis for his lawsuit.  Although annoyingly, the reenactors running "Civil War Days" seemed not to know much about it.  They were more into battlefield amputations and Morse code.)


Week 5
------
Kamma A., If You Lived When There Was Slavery in America  

Week 6
------
Levine E., Henry's Freedom Box  (The story of Henry Brown, who mailed himself north)
Chapter 1 of A Separate Battle:  Women in the Civil War (about abolitionists H. B. Stowe, A. Grimke, S. Truth)
"Ain't I a Woman?" speech by Sojourner Truth

Week 7
------

Here we start some biographies.  Lincoln is a necessity.  Robert E. Lee is also worth getting to know.  He raises the question:  What use is being an honorable person if you exert your honor on behalf of evil?

St. George, J., Stand Tall, Abe Lincoln
Material from several different books about the life of Robert E. Lee (I couldn't find one single biography that I liked enough to use exclusively)
parts of James Daugherty's Abraham Lincoln

Week 8
------

Here we start discussing the Civil War itself.  I preferred to cover only a few battles, but to really spend time on them, with maps and showing the movement of troops and stuff.  I wanted to give the kids a taste of genuine military history.  

Rapaport D., Freedom Ship  (About Captain Robert Smalls, a slave who seized the Confederate ship he piloted and delivered it to the Union Army)
parts of Foster, G. Abraham Lincoln's World (election/inauguration; Scott, Lee)
DuPuy, The Military History of Civil War Land Battles (introduction)  
Use DuPuy to learn the symbols and vocabulary of battle maps (artillery, cavalry, infantry, flank, etc.)
Kent Z., The Battle of Bull Run
Discuss graphic in Hakim comparing the assets and populations of the Union and the Confederacy at the start of the Civil War

Week 9
------
Pratt F., The Monitor and the Merrimac (first half, up through the Battle of Hampton Roads).  I cannot praise this book enough.  We only had time to read half of it, but later my 10-year-old finished it in his spare time.


Week 10  -- Life on the battlefield.
-------
Make hardtack for snack
Polacco P., Pink and Say
Murphy J., The Boys' War, parts about drummer boys, camp life, food, sutlers, supply issues and how they differ as the war lengthens

Week 11
-------
parts of Daugherty's Abraham Lincoln about Second Bull Run; replacing General McClellan; the drafting of the Emancipation Proclamation; Antietam
Part of DuPuy, The Military History of Civil War Land Battles, about Antietam and how McClellan failed to drive Lee back
Text of the Emancipation Proclamation; discuss its meaning.  Why did Lincoln free slaves only in the rebellious parts of the country?
Watch DVD "Battle of Stones River" (Murfreesboro)  (We picked this up at the interpretive center at Murfreesboro when we happened to be in Tennessee for a family wedding that year.)

Week 12
-------
The Gettysburg Address (picture book illustrated by McCurdy)
Dupuy, The Military History of Civil War Land Battles, about the battle of Gettysburg
Elish, book about Gettysburg
Discuss battle maps and troop movements at Gettysburg
A Separate Battle:  Women in the Civil War, chapters on hospital duty and suffering on the home front
Daugherty's Abraham Lincoln, parts on draft riots, Lincoln's pardoning of deserters, the "Bixby letter," and the Gettysburg address

Week 13
-------
Kent Z., Sherman's March to the Sea
Discuss concept of "total war" and looting
Kantor, M., Lee and Grant at Appomattox (first half).  This book is great for a couple of reasons.  First of all, it paints fine portraits of Lee and Grant.  Second, it includes a fairly exciting story of notes passed back and forth across battle lines as Lee tries to figure out how he's going to surrender.  Third, the terms of surrender are described in great detail, in a way that leaves the reader impressed by both men's characters.  It's a novel-length treatment of a subject that gets only a paragraph in most kids' textbooks.

Week 14
-------
Kantor, M., Lee and Grant at Appomattox (second half)
Kent, Z., Ford's Theater and the Death of Lincoln  

Notice all the books by Z. Kent?  These are from the "Cornerstones of Freedom" series, all of which are good sources.

Week 15
-------
Harness, C., biography of George Washington Carver (parts that fit into the post-civil-war time period).  This biography gives us a good chance to talk about life for African Americans in the post civil war south.
Discuss Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, and legally enforced segregation
Joy Hakim, Volume 7, chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 about Reconstruction, Andrew Johnson, "Presidential Reconstruction," and the concept of states' rights

Week 16
-------

Knowing that next year I have the Civil Rights movement to cover, I wanted to show the basic dichotomy of philosophy that appears here in the persons of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois.  Two threads of "conservative" and "progressive" black America appear vividly here and can be carried forward into the twentieth century.  Caveat about "it's really much more complicated than that," etc.  My main point:  There isn't just one way to think about the African-American experience.

Harness, C. continue the biography of G. W. Carver, up through 1914 or so
Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington -- selections from Chapter II, "Boyhood Days;" III, "The Struggle for an Education;" entire chapter V, "The Reconstruction Period;" VII "Early Days at Tuskegee;" X "A Harder Task than Making Bricks Without Straw"
Discuss B. T. Washington's philosophy of self-reliance and disdain for superficial success
Discuss appropriate terminology for ethnic groups as used in Booker T. Washington's 1901 writings and as is considered appropriate today 

Week 17
-------
Hakim, volume 7, chapter 32 on Jim Crow laws
Discussion of Plessy v. Ferguson  (this is absolutely necessary for comprehending Brown v. Board of Education next year, so we looked at the Supreme Court decision in detail)
Freedman, S., Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the Anti-Lynching Crusade
Discuss the poem, "Booker T. and W. E. B." by D. Randall.  We discussed whether we thought the poet had fairly characterized Booker T. Washington's philosophy.  The poem served as a transition from Booker T. to W. E. B.

Week 18
-------
Scott, Memorial Day
Discuss why we have memorials for veterans and for those who fall in war
Parts of McKissack, P., biography of W. E. B. DuBois:  chapters 1,2 about early life, chapters about Booker T. Washington, chapters about his book The Souls of Black Folk
Discuss the differences between the backgrounds of DuBois and Washington
Discuss how the differences between their backgrounds influenced their differing philosophies
Short excerpt from The Souls of Black Folk to get a sense for the difference in writing style between DuBois and Washington.

(It's a little tough to teach Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois equally to middle schoolers, because BTW writes much more approachably, in my opinion.  DuBois's writing is more high-flown and abstract and difficult to get.  I would say that BTW's work is high school level -- so it can be carefully selected and presented to interested middle schoolers -- but DuBois's work is college level, and I don't think the middle schoolers can grasp it.  But they can, I think, grasp a comparison and contrast of the two men's philosophy, and see where they can be reconciled and where they can't, and understand why both philosophies continue to be appealing today.)

OK, on that note, I'll save the second semester (roughly, "The nineteenth century, but not the Civil War parts") for another post.

Literature-based American History (I): Prehistory through 1812.

The weather is gorgeous, and it's the first real week of summer vacation, but I have one seven-year-old with pneumonia, and so we're all more or less stuck around the house this week. 

I guess the timing isn't too bad, since I have a number of things I want to do to put the school year properly to bed.  I'm writing up a little summary of the year for the two older kids -- sort of a report card -- and trying to put together a final summary of my three-year literature-based American History survey, which I finished just a couple of weeks ago.

There's another place where the timing is good.  I'm going to be starting all over again in the fall teaching "Prehistory through 1812" to  another crop of children.

Anyway, I've posted on this before, but I thought I'd share my American history curriculum choices.  This is the first year:  Pre-history through 1812.  I've provided some links to other posts I've written.  Incidentally, beside what's here, we also used appropriate pages in a good history encyclopedia -- Usborne has one, for example.

I should note that I used a couple of materials from Seton in order to supplement the program with some Catholic heritage (such as, for example, the notion that converting Mexico to Christianity was on balance a good thing).   When I started this program I was not working with any other families on it -- so I still have to run the Catholic materials by the parents of the other children I'm teaching, who are not Catholics, in order to find out whether I should use them with their children, or save them for use just in our own family.  I will likely draw heavily, too, from Joy Hakim's The History of US,  which I didn't discover till I was doing the second year.

So here goes...

American History I

Unit 1. First Immigrants and Native Peoples   (4 weeks).  More detail in this post.

• Fradin, Hiawatha, Messenger of Peace       
• Yue, The Wigwam and the Longhouse   [Note:  There are a number of books by Yue about historical housing structures.  They are all good.]
• Bauer, Story of the World, Volume II, Ch 32 "The American Kingdoms"
• Seton, The Catholic Faith Comes to the New World, Chapter One, "The Dawn of History"
• Seton, TCFCTTNW, Chapter Two, "The Norsemen"
• SOTW, part of chapter 14, "The Arrival Of The Norsemen"
• SOTW, Chapter 33 "Spain, Portugal, and the New World"

Unit 2.  Europeans Get Interested In The Americas  4 weeks.  More detail here.  Particularly if you want to know how I handled the "Columbus problem."

• Seton, TCFCTTNW, Chapter Three, "The Holy Land and Beyond"
• SOTW Chapters 31, 41, 33, 28
• A Child's History of the World Chapters 62, 63
• Maestro, The Discovery of the Americas      
• Optional:  Fritz, Around The World in a Hundred Years:  From Henry the Navigator to Magellan
• Optional:  Fritz, Where Do You Think You're Going, Christopher Columbus?

Unit 3.  The Spanish, French, Dutch, and English Settlers  (4 weeks).  More detail here.  Including what I decided not to use, and why.

• Seton, TCFCTTNW, Chapter 5 "The Spanish Influence"
• Jones, Protector of the Indians (novel length)  -- finding this is my pride and joy.  It is a biography of Fray Bartolome de las Casas.  Even if you can't find the biography, studying him would be totally worthwhile.  
• Whiting, Junipero Jose Serra 
• Seton, American History for Young Catholics, Chapter 3, "The Conversion of Mexico" 
• Seton, AHFYC, Chapter 4, "St. Augustine, Oldest City in the U. S."     
• Seton, TCFCTTNW, Chapter 6, "The English Settlers"
• SOTW Chapters 40, 41:  "New Ventures to the Americas," "Explorations in the North"
• Seton, TCFCTTNW, Chapter 7, "The French, Dutch, and English Settlers"
• Orfeo, St. Isaac Jogues:  With Burning Heart
• Foster, 1620:  Year of the Pilgrims    
• Dalgliesh, America Builds Homes     
• Fritz, Who's Saying What in Jamestown, Thomas Savage? <--Note:  Includes non-sucky story of Pocahontas

 Unit 4.  Colonial Expansion and the Western Frontier  2 weeks.  

• Seton, TCFCTTNW, Chapter 8, "Colonial Expansion"
• Foster, The World of William Penn (1660-1718)   
• Daugherty, Daniel Boone (fairly long)     
• Gridley, Pontiac           

 Here's more detail, including a discussion of the surprisingly balanced treatment that Daugherty gives the Shawnee.

Unit 5.  Life in Colonial America  (4 weeks)

• Seton, TCFCTTNW, Chapter 9, "Life in Colonial America"
• Foster, George Washington's World:  I, "When George Washington Was A Boy"
• Haskins, Building a New Land:  African Americans in Colonial America (covers wider time period, though.)  James Haskins is an author I returned to again and again over all three years for material about experiences of African-Americans.  
• Schaun, Everyday Life in Colonial Maryland
• Benjamin Franklin, The Whistle     
• D'Aulaire, Benjamin Franklin   
• Meadowcroft, Benjamin Franklin  (optional; novel-length)  
• Pinkney, Dear Benjamin Banneker
• Benjamin Franklin, "A Narrative of the Late Massacres, in Lancaster County, of a Number of Indians, Friends of this Province, by Persons Unknown" 1764 

 More detail here.

Unit 6.  The French and Indian War (1 week)

• Seton, TCFCTTNW, Chapter 10, "The French and British Struggle"
• Foster, George Washington's World:  II, "When George Washington Was A Soldier"

 

Unit 7.  Setup of the American Revolution   (5 weeks)

• Seton, TCFCTTNW, Chapter 11, "Liberty and Justice For All"
• Foster, George Washington's World, III.  "When George Washington Was A Farmer"
• Fritz, Can't You Make Them Behave, King George?  
• Schanzer, George vs. George        
• Fradin, The Boston Tea Party      
• Fritz, And Then What Happened, Paul Revere?
• Fritz, Where was Patrick Henry on the 29th of May?      
• Henry, Patrick, speech:  "The War Inevitable"
• Fritz, Why Don't You Get A Horse, Sam Adams?  <--- my very very very favorite Jean Fritz book
• Jefferson, "A Summary of the View of the Rights of British America"

 More detail here including some discussion of other good books that I didn't use for one reason or another.

Unit 8.  The American Revolutionary War  (4 weeks)

• Seton, TCFCTTNW, Chapter 12, "The American War of Independence"
• Millender, Crispus Attucks, Boy of Valor (selected chapters)  
• Seton, TCFCTTNW, Chapter 13, "The Tide Turns"
• Foster, George Washington's World, IV.  "When George Washington Was The Commander"
• Morris, The American Revolution (for coverage of major battles)  
• Ferris, Remember the Ladies:  A Story about Abigail Adams
• Holbrook, The Swamp Fox of the Revolution (optional; novel length) 

 Unit 9.  How the Government Began  (3 weeks)

• Foster, George Washington's World, V.  "When George Washington was Just A Citizen"
• Fritz, Shh!  We're Writing the Constitution!  (note, this is longer than most Fritz books) 
• Morris, First Book of the Constitution (to supplement Fritz above)  
• Fisher, Our Independence and the Constitution  
• Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, Federalist Papers (selected)
• Constitution of the United States (selected, particularly the entire Bill of Rights)
• Brindze, All About Courts and the Law

 Unit 10.  Early U. S. Expansion and War  (4 weeks)

• Foster, George Washington's World, VI. "When George Washington Was President"
• Yero, The Bill of Rights (National Geographic)      l
• Keller, Alexander Hamilton (second half)       l
• Falkner, John Adams:  Reluctant Patriot of the Revolution
• Harness, Thomas Jefferson
• Optional alternative:  Fradin, Who Was Thomas Jefferson?  (This intermediate reader may be used if parents judge its brief but frank discussion of Sally Hemings to be appropriate)
• Tallant, The Louisiana Purchase (some)       bought $5
• Daugherty, Of Courage Undaunted
• Fritz, The Great Little Madison (for the War of 1812; selected passages)   l

 

Postscript:  The American Legend and overview 1 week

• Fritz, Who's That Stepping On Plymouth Rock?

 I like the last book because it's Jean Fritz, of course, but also because it's the story of how historical facts got distorted into a myth and a local legend.  Something to keep in mind as they continue to encounter historical information!

Internet safety lesson.

So, you'll recall that I have been teaching history and Latin to two families besides my own, right?  

I wrapped up my three-year American history program (more on that again later) with a few weeks' study of mass communication in the twentieth century, and finished that off with a discussion of social media and email.  

Why did I put this in the context of history class?  Well, for starters, for our family anyway, the timing is just about right.  My ten-year-old is ready to have his own email address and to be a little bit freer to use and find things on the Web -- and you know, before you send them out in the world you have to have "the talk," right?

It's also something that is very different for these young people than it was for us.  I didn't have to rely very much on books here, because Hannah and I could be the primary sources.  We sat down and told them what it was like to read and contribute to Usenet groups, or to look for information using Gopher, or how hard it was to filter out the irrelevant junk before Google revolutionized the search engine.  

Anyway, I ran the "Internet safety" lesson as a sort of discussion group.  I thought I'd provide the outline here.

+ + +

Part I:  The part that fits neatly into an American History context

A.  Definition of social media:  "Places" on the internet where people can virtually meet and communicate with each other.

B.   How do people communicate using social media?  

     1) By sending files to each other 

            --files can be messages (long or short), documents, photographs, audio files, video files

      2) Or by storing such files where they can be accessed by others

      3)  Or by playing games with each other which they access through various websites

      4)  Or by real-time chat or videoconference

 

C.  Imagine a metaphor of a big room with lots of bulletin boards where messages may be left behind for all to see.  I used this to emphasize the lack of real privacy.

D.   Discussion question:  How does the advent of easy, cheap social media change American culture?

     (Looking for concepts like:  people can make friends they've never met in person; people can form associations based on common interest regardless of geographical location; more international interaction; people may be more connected to "strangers" than to their own families; changes family culture; people can get addicted to being on line; business models change; people expect to connect to the internet everywhere so free time changes; advertisers have new ways to reach people; it's much easier to find information; etc.)

Extension:   Watch the 90-minute PBS documentary Frontline: Digital Nation (available streaming through Netflix or here for free).

+ + +

Part II.  New risks to be aware of because of social media.

Kinds of risks, ranked from the most dangerous to the most benign (in my opinion).

1)  The risk of being physically harmed  in "real life."  Someone who wants to harm you for fun -- an online predator -- might try to use the computer to find kids like you, to trick you into telling him where you can be found, or to trick you into meeting him in person.

Discussion questions: 

• What kind of information can be used to find out that you are a young boy or a young lady -- the sort of person the predator wants to harm?
• What kind of information can be used to find out where you are and when your parents won't be supervising you?
• What kind of lies could a predator tell to trick a young person into revealing where she could be found?
• What are some danger signs of online predators?

 

(2) Harming you non-physically via computer communication.  Another kind of online predator might try to harm you, for fun, even without actually meeting you in person. A person can do this by sending you harmful messages or videos, or just putting it where you'll see it.  

• What kind of messages, pictures, or videos can harm you if you read, see, possess, or watch them?  
  •  lies; 
  • cruel speech about yourself or others; 
  • obscene material; 
  • material that encourages you to do things that are wrong or illegal; 
  • material that is illegal to possess, like sexually explicit pictures of minors; 
  • frightening or disturbing material

• What are ways that you can avoid receiving harmful files?
• What can you do if you realize that a message, chat, picture, or video is dangerous?

 

(2a) Some things may be harmful to you even though the person who made them available did not intend to hurt anyone.  What kinds of things are these?  (material that's meant for adults but not appropriate for children; incorrect facts)

 

(3)  Stealing your identity or your parents' identity. If a thief can successfully pretend to be me, she could gain access to a lot of my stuff.  What kinds of things could such a person gain access to?

• money in my bank account
• charge things to my credit card
• use my membership to get into organizations I belong to

Could such a person also break the law and get me in trouble for it? (yes)

Could they borrow money and then I would have to pay it back? (yes)

Could they send nasty messages that look like they came from me and then I might get in trouble or lose my reputation? (yes)

Discuss:  What kind of information can be used to steal your identity or your parents' identity?

 

(4)  Spreading things that you wanted to keep secret or private.  Suppose you had a secret that you wanted to share with one close friend and nobody else.  You told the secret to your friend and made her swear that she would never tell anyone.  But suppose that this friend wasn't as trustworthy as you thought she was.  She told your secret to one other person.  And then that friend told another person.  And before you know it, everyone you know knows your secret.  How would you feel?  Could some secrets even put you or your family in danger?

There is nothing new about this.  Secrets have gotten out for as long as people have been keeping secrets from each other.  But secrets that are passed around by computer can be a problem  in a new and particularly dangerous way.  Do you know why? 

• you might accidentally reveal the secret to many people instead of one; 
• they can be passed very fast to many people at once all over the world; 
• exact copies can be made of them, even if the "secret" is a photograph or a video; 
• they can be altered to make them look or sound even more embarrassing or incriminating than they really are; 
• copies may be stored on other people's computers for a very long time and so the secret may come out when you least expect it

Discussion question:  How can you protect yourself against online spreading of secrets or secret pictures or secret videos?  

• don't send secrets by email or in any other electronic form; 
• tell secrets only in person; 
• assume that any message you send over the internet can be read by anyone

(5)  Harming your computer.    Computer viruses can infect your computer.   Any file that you download from the internet may contain a virus or a piece of malware.  How can you protect your parents' computer against unwanted programs?   

(6) Selling you stuff you don't want.  There are many advertisements on websites.  You need to be cautious about the things that advertisements on the internet say, just as you need to be cautious about claims made on TV.   Some of it is there to trick you into spending your money.

(7) Gathering information about you so they can figure out what stuff to try to sell you.  You know that when you type words and numbers into a form on a website, or when you send an email, some information leaves your computer and goes out into the world where someone can get it.  On many websites, information can be gathered just from a mouse-click. Some companies gather information about what you like to read or look at, and they use this information to send you advertisements that they think you will respond to.  

 

General Discussion and Assessment: 

What risks are there in each of these places?  What precautions should you take?

• Chat room
• Online gaming
• Social media like Facebook where you reveal information to a group of people you select
• Social media like Twitter where your information is revealed to anyone who wants to see it
• Photo sharing site like Flickr 
• Browsing for interesting videos on YouTube
• Searching for information for a school report
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Homeschooling history.

I taught a fun 20th-century U.S. History session to the 10-, 11-, and 12-year-olds today:  the legal history of homeschooling.

We just finished a unit on civil rights movements of the 20th century, a unit that encompassed the school segregation cases, the larger civil rights movements, women's suffrage, and the disability rights movement.  A lot of our emphasis had been on the particular legal means by which various forms of institutional discrimination were ended or mitigated. So, for example, we watched  the TV miniseries Separate but Equal, which is like a courtroom drama centered on Brown v. Board of Education.  We talked about the passage of the constitutional amendment that enshrined women's right to vote.  We talked about how the Americans with Disabilities Act -- a piece of congressional legislation -- was fought for and passed, and how its interpretation continues to be refined by the courts.  

Having spent a fair amount of time on constitutional law, I was looking for a sort of a "capstone" lesson that would talk about one issue that's concrete to them as kids.  I found that a number of children's and teens' books about government and civics cover the "students' rights" cases, presumably because adolescents in public schools are interested in their own free speech and privacy rights with respect to the government entity that's most closely intertwined with their lives -- the government school itself.

But since our kids aren't in a government school, or an institutional school of any kind, I didn't think that would be quite so interesting to them.  So instead I decided to teach them about the legal status of homeschooling, and how that right was won in the twentieth century.  It took me a couple of hours of Internet research, and skimming through one or two books, to find the information I needed to lead the discussion.  I hardly counted the cost, because it was interesting to me personally anyway.

I began by writing on a white board a series of dates that the kids have memorized, keyed to particular events we've studied:

• 1492
• 1776
• 1860
• 1865
• 1900
• 1918
• 1929
• 1941
• 1945
• 1989 (fall of the Berlin Wall, in case you're wondering) 
• 2001

 I asked them to tell me about where on the timeline the first public school in America was founded.  They correctly guessed, "Between 1492 and 1776" (for the record, it was Boston Latin School, and it was founded in 1635).  Then I asked, "About when did it become common for most kids in the U. S. to attend some kind of an 'away school?'"  (I accepted "around the turn of the century.")  We talked about when compulsory education laws became commonplace (a little bit later than that) and then when enforcement became stricter (still later, possibly not till the forties, and not uniform across states).  And then I asked, "So when were parents educating their own children at home?"  Correct answer:  all along, although for a period of time -- between maybe 1900 and 1980 -- they would be breaking the law in some set of states. 

(In retrospect I should have stuck to Minnesota for the timeline of compulsory education laws, because I did a lot of hand-waving and talking about "most states" and "many states" and the like.  Every state has its own timeline here and the overlap is not neat and tidy.  If you adapt this lesson, I think it's probably a good idea to stick to your own state.)

 So then I gave a short explanation of three landmark U. S. Supreme Court cases that set important precedents:

Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), which established that there are limits on the state's power to regulate how children are educated.  (Specifically, it struck down a xenophobic -- mainly German-phobic -- Nebraska law banning foreign language education.)

Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), which established that a state cannot require that all children attend government-run schools; the right of private schools to operate, and of parents to fulfill compulsory-education obligations by sending children to private schools, was established.

Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), the most significant "Amish school case," which established that certain applications of a state's power to compel attendance at schools may impermissibly violate parents' right to direct the religious upbringing of their children.  (After I finished reading The Yoder Case by Peters -- to myself, not to the kids --  I decided that Yoder is actually pretty complicated to grasp.  I tried to keep it simple for the kids, and get the point across that there's a tension between compulsory education laws and religious freedom, and in this case the Court came down on the side of religious freedom.)

The children enjoyed discussing the legal principles of the cases, so we spent some time just talking about the details.  For example, they were utterly amazed that a state would decide it was dangerous to teach children a foreign language.  (Direct quote from the Nebraska decision that upheld Meyer's conviction before it went to the U. S. Supreme Court:  "Other citizens, in their selection of studies, except perhaps in rare instances, have never deemed it of importance to teach their children foreign languages before such children have reached the eighth grade.")   As for Yoder, I would have really loved to delve into the personal stories of the people behind the case; I wish there was a children's book about the Yoder case.  It would make a really great picture book.  Seriously.

I wanted to make it clear that homeschooling still comes under legal attack from time to time, so I shared with them two 2008 articles from Time magazine's archives: "Criminalizing Homeschoolers" and  "A Homeschooling Win in California."  

 Then I explained how the Minnesota compulsory education law used to go.  This is from Esbeck, Journal of Law and Religion, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1986), pp. 211-240:

The Minnesota compulsory education statute required students not attending public schools to be taught by "teachers whose qualifications are essentially equivalent to the minimum standards for public school teachers of the same grades or subjects."

I read that quote to the children and explained, "If the parent didn't have the right qualifications, the superintendent could tell them they had to send their kids to a school or at least to a teacher who did.  If the parent refused, they could be charged with a crime."  I let that sink in and then asked, "Okay, so how could a parent become qualified to teach her children at home?"

They made me read it again and then guessed... "They have to be a teacher."  "They have to have gone to college."  "If they're teaching, say, the second grade, then they have to at least have done second grade."  

"It isn't obvious, is it?"  And then I went on to explain about Minnesota v. Newstrom, the 1985 case that struck down the existing compulsory education law as "impermissibly vague" and overturned homeschooler Jeanne Newstrom's criminal conviction.  After that, the Minnesota legislature crafted clear guidelines outlining how an ordinary person could fulfill Minnesota's compulsory education law through home education.  (Those guidelines survive today with minimal changes in MN Statute 120A.22.)

 Then they wanted to know how we qualified to be teachers, so we gave them a quick summary of the rules, including the list of subjects we have to teach and our reporting requirements.  After that I asked them some questions:  

• Do you think the government should require us to teach you a certain number of days per year?  
• How about a minimum number of hours per day?
• Should they tell parents exactly which subjects they have to teach?
• Should homeschooled students be allowed to get a job for money during the hours when most kids are in school?
• Should homeschooled students be allowed to join the public school band or football team?

Interestingly enough, the kids all seemed to be supportive of heavy regulation!  I think this is because at the ages of 10-12, kids are far more concerned with fairness than they are with freedom, and they think it is only fair that our homeschools should be held to the same standards as kids in institutional schools.  

Also, they've never really had to deal with paperwork.  It's easy to support heavy regulation when you don't have a grasp of the cost of enforcement.

When they were discussing how "qualified" a teacher should be to teach a subject, I asked these kids, whom I also instruct in Latin:  "So how much Latin do you think I learned in school?"  That trap didn't work, since they already knew that the answer was "zero."  But I pressed them:  "I don't have any qualifications in Latin. But I'm not doing a bad job, right?  How is it that I'm able to teach you adequately without any qualifications?"

My 10-year-old:  "Duh!  You have a teacher's manual."

I like to think that it takes more than that, but it made both Hannah and me smile.