Depression presents a serious occupational hazard, moving back and forth between the classroom and business, classroom and internet. When do administrators and legislators get serious about catching up education?
I’ll wager not a single classroom in the nation is ready to make this work. If you disagree, I’d love to hear about the class that can make use of it.
System requirements for Photosynth won’t tax the computers that most high school gamers use, but they are beyond most of the classroom computers I’ve seen in the last five years.
Probably more to the point, curriculum designers in public schools don’t even have Google Earth on their horizons. Photosynth? I’ll wager it’s not even on the radar screens of GIS users in the nation’s Council of Governments (COGS).
Geography is an exploding discipline. GIS and computerized map programs make cell phone companies go, not to mention oil and gas exploration, coal mining, air pollution monitoring (for building new power plants, for example), and road building. GPS helps drive express shipping, and all other shipping. RFI and GPS together are revolutionizing retail.
You must know how to read a map just to get a job delivering pizza.
But 9th grade geography classes? The exciting stuff is absent today.
At the Texas Education Agency (TEA), officials fret about how to stop science from being taught in science classes, for fear the facts will skew the religious beliefs of their children. They need to worry about their children not even getting hired by the pizza delivery company for being ignorant of nature and science, and the maps that show them. In a competitive, technologically savvy world, inaction, dithering and damaging action by the TEA mean our kids won’t even have a prayer.
The symposium is set for Saturday, April 12, 2008, at McCord Auditorium in SMU’s Dallas Hall, 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Teachers and community college professors may earn up to 7 hours CEU credits. Registration is available on-line. The $20.00 fee includes a luncheon; conference-only registration is an amazingly inexpensive $5.00.
Conference organizers are looking at a second wave of energy resource development in the Four Corners region, especially, following on earlier development of uranium ore extraction, and coal-fired power generation.
The symposium and the resulting book of essays will provide an historical context for energy development on Native American lands and put forth ideas that may guide future public policy formation. Collectively, the presentations will make the case that the American Southwest is particularly well-suited for exploring how people have transformed the region’s resources into fuel supplies for human consumption. Not only do Native Americans possess a large percentage of the region’s total acreage, but on their lands reside much of the nation’s oil, coal, and uranium resources. Regional weather patterns have also enabled native people to take advantage of solar and wind power as effective sources of energy. Although presentations will document histories of resource extraction and energy development as episodes of exploitation, paternalism, and dependency, others will show how energy development in particular has enabled many Indians to break from these patterns and facilitated their social, economic, and political empowerment.
My second job out of high school, and through much of my undergraduate days, took me to Farmington, New Mexico, and far around the area for the Air Pollution Laboratory at the University of Utah’s Engineering Experiment Station, to measure air quality and effects of air pollution resulting from the Four Corners Power Plant, as the San Juan Generating Station was under construction.
I’m planning to attend the symposium.
Especially after last Saturday’s sessions for history teachers at SMU (the Stanton Sharp Symposium), I highly recommend these programs for their ability to charge up high school teachers to better classroom work. This is history, and economics, at its best, looking to improve public policy and help people.
Planned presentations are listed below the fold, copying the information from the website for the symposium.
The Christian Science Monitor presented a series of eight different views of the world economy for 2008: 2008, a look ahead. Since the Monitor is one of the better newspapers on Earth, the series presents outstanding reporting with important insights into economics.
These are custom made for warm-ups and student projects:
Photo: “In high demand: A Chinese corn farmer in Guiyang. Maize prices rise as global demand goes up for its use as food – including such uses as corn syrup (soft drinks) – and fuel, such as ethanol.” Chinese Newsphoto/Reuters, via Christian Science Monitor
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
There’s a fun blog, Tugster: A Waterblog, that usually features photos of tugs that ply the waters around New York City. Good to wonderful photos; and I’ve been hoping for a reason to mention the blog.
Here’s one: What do you see peeking through the trees and wires?
After a relatively long sailing career, the ship has been retired as a museum ship at the South Street Seaport Museum (a great place to visit when you get to New York). It’s in dry dock right now, which is where these photos were taken.
The site offers a lot. E-mail updates on issues, cheap DVDs of the movie ($10.00 each for the first 10, $9.00 each for the next 10 . . . you may want to get a copy for each social studies classroom), background stories to the movie, story of Annie Leonard, background sheets, lists of organizations working on the issues and reading lists and more. I found no lesson plans, but you can surely cobble one together for an hour class, with 20 minutes taken up by the film. Plus you can download the movie, for free.
Go noodle around the site: There are lots of possibilities for student projects, student discussions, in-class exercises, homework, and fun.
This movie details, quickly and with good humor, the economics of recycling, the economics of waste disposal, and the economics of production. This provides a great gateway to talk about civics and government, and how to make things happen like garbage collection and recycling; a gateway to talk about economics, especially the various flows of money and goods; a gateway to talk about geography and how we have used our land and rivers to bury and carry waste; and how we use natural resources generally.
This would also be a good video for Boy Scout merit badge classes for the Citizenship in the Community and Citizenship in the Nation badges.
Contrasted with most of the industrial grade video I’ve seen for economics classes, this is fantastic. It’s better than any of the sometimes ambitious, but ultimately dull productions from the Federal Reserve Banks (are you listening, Richard Fisher? Hire Will Brehm’s group). (No offense, Osgood — yours is the best of that lot.)
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., probably has political objections to the movie, claiming it leans left, which indicates it’s in the mainstream. If you’re using any other supplemental material in your classes, this just balances it out.
Screen capture from the film, “Story of Stuff”
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Yeah, they exist — and it’s a booming area. Teachers miss these boats big time, I think, by not getting these professionals into the classroom to show what they do.
Think about it: Geography is a major concern for cellular telephone towers, which are still being constructed by the thousands across the nation. One of the best parts about work at PrimeCo PCS (which became part of Verizon Wireless) was the great sets of maps to work from. Visual data are much more powerful than print on a page; a great secret of PrimeCo’s success was massive use of maps, for the engineers to plan coverage, but also for site acquisition, sales, marketing, and everything else in between.
Consider the use of chips to track shipping palettes; consider the rise in GPS use. Geography is a key player in all transportation and development industries.
So, do your kids know that? Do they know they will be required to be geographically literate — and it can increase their income — when they get a job delivering pizza?
I digress. Here’s a guy, Scott McEachron, with a blog almost-offensively titled 3D – Paving the Way, which he aims to be a resource for users of Autocad 3D. (Oh, so we’re paving the way to using technology, and not laying down concrete and asphalt? Like I said, almost offensive).
These are pro resources. They don’t come neatly packaged with suggested lesson plans. You’re going to have to noodle around to see what’s usable in your class, and what is not.
(Dallas teachers? He’s a Dallas guy. Do I sense a guest speaker?)
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
When a director wants a movie to demonstrate the British government, we get shots of Whitehall and Big Ben. When it’s the U.S. government to be invoked, the U.S. Capitol appears. A quintessential Russia image is the Kremlin. The Eiffel Tower evokes France. High school geography, history and government students should be able to recognize these sorts of landmarks to identify the nation or area in question.What about new landmarks? Brussels probably least penetrates the U.S. psyche of all the major European capitals. It’s a beautiful city, though, and a fun city, in my brief experience. Tradition and modernity mix and intermingle. While I stayed in a modern hotel, I strolled through plazas hundreds of years old. The city is easy to navigate, especially since it seems smaller than London or Paris, and until recently, it was largely unmarked by very tall buildings.
What will the landmarks be of the next 40 or 50 years? Dallas’s skyline shines at night with green neon outlining the city’s tallest building. Several other buildings retrofitted lights in blue, red and white, partly to compete — and of course, there is the red neon Pegasus, the symbol of the old, Dallas-based Magnolia Petroleum Co., which was bought up by Mobil, now a part of Exxon-Mobil. Lights give interesting ways to make new landmarks at night.
Dallas-area economics, government and history teachers need to watch the deadline to register for the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank’s “Evening at the Fed,” scheduled for November 29, 2007.
Deadline to register is November 22.
Good dinner, continuing education credits (professional development), a few good ideas for your classroom. See my previous post, here.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Day in and day out, this cartoon of a poor African kid getting hit by a tsunami of drought is among the most popular posts on this blog, and one of the most popular cartoon images on the web. I think the cartoonist Alberto Sabat was trying to make a point, that kids in SubSaharan Africa were (are) being clobbered by a disaster as great as the great tsunami that hit the Indian Ocean after Christmas 2005.
In other words, there were other disasters, other victims, and we ignore them.
If Al Gore had a lot of media clout and enjoyed bias from media in his favor, you’d hear about a great storm ready to smash one of the poorest, lowest countries on the planet, where recent increases in povery-struck populations has put millions of people in a great river’s delta, in a most dangerous place to be in a cyclone. But you’re not hearing the story.
If our news media were biased to the liberal side, a story about such a pending disaster would be on the front page of every liberal newspaper, and leading every liberal television news broadcast.
If our private charity groups were groveling to the climate change Cassandras, they’d be begging for money to evacuate people from the path of a category 5 cyclone, now.
If Katrina’s aftermath alerted us to the dangers of powerful storms hitting areas of great poverty, we’d be glued to our television sets if there were another such drama unfolding anywhere on Earth.
If the Bush administration were concerned about preventing the growth of al Quaeda and similar movements, it would be doing what it could to help out a nominally friendly government of an Islamic nation in the path of a great storm.
Right?
The photos are spectacular. The news is . . . eerily quiet.
Do any high school geography, world history, government or economics courses still do current events? Here’s the raw material for a good, consciousness-raising warm-up. Prelude to a disaster, we hope not. The lack of news coverage is disturbing.
RTT News story: “In 1970, some half a million people died when a cyclone hit the impoverished country, while an estimated 138,000 people died as a result of a cyclonic tidal wave in 1991.”
Events in Congo trouble at so many levels. Reports in The New York Times and other places document unspeakable violence: 27,000 sexual assaults in South Kivu Province in 2006, just a fraction of the total number across the nation of 66 million people. The assaults are brutal. Women assaulted are often left so badly injured internally, they may never heal.
Map of Congo, highlighting province of Bukavu where violence against women is epidemic, from New York Times
Genocide you say? Many assaults appear to be spillover from the Hutu-Tutsi conflict in next-door Rwanda. But assaults by husbands on wives also are epidemic. Result of civil war? Then how to explain the “Rasta” gang, dreadlocked fugitives who live in the forest, wear tracksuits and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys, and who commit unspeakable crimes against women and children? What nation are they from, and against whom do they fight, if anyone — and for what?
The facts cry out for action:
Nightly rapes of women and girls. The violence appears to be a problem across the nation.
Huge chunks of Congo have no effective government to even contend against the violence.
Killers with experience in genocide in their native Rwanda moved into Congo; they live by kidnapping women for ransom. The women are assaulted while held captive. Sometimes husbands do not take back their wives.
The oldest rape victim recorded by one Congo physician is 75; the youngest, 3.
Surely intervention by an international group would help, no? However
Congo hosts the largest single peacekeeping mission of the United Nations right now, with 17,000 troops. Congo is a big nation, bordered by nine other nations. How many troops would it take to secure the entire nation, or the entire border? No one knows.
2006 saw an election that was supposed to remake history, end the violence and start Congo on the road to recovery; but was the $500 million it cost enough to change Congo’s history of a string of bad governments?
International attention focuses on other crises: Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan and Darfur, Iran, Korea, Chechnya, Turkey and the Kurds, Palestine and Israel. Congo, constantly roiling since the 1960s, is way down the list of world concerns, no matter how bad the violence.
Americans looking for a quick resolution to the situation in Iraq might do well to study Congo. At Congo’s independence in the 1960s, there was hope of prosperity and greater peace. Foreign intervention, including meddling from the U.S., regional civil wars, bad government and long international neglect, ate up the hope. Achieving what a nation could be is difficult, when so many forces align to prevent it from being anything other than a violent backwater. Pandora’s box resists attempts to shut it. Quick resolution is unlikely.
So the violence in Congo continues.In this world, when is the “never” in “never again?”
How many other such cases fall outside our textbooks, and off the state tests?
The service requires a free subscription to HotChalk through December. After that, a school subscription to HotChalk is necessary, starting in 2008.
Great resources, but I predict few teachers will have the connections to put these to work in the classroom. Comments are open, of course, for you to share your experience. Please comment on how useful you find these images, and how you use them.
Historic photo of woman on early cellular telephone, NBC News photo, from HotChalk.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Missed it? Well, it was at the dinner hour, 06:16:42 PM (CDT). You may have thought it was Bubba’s great sauce for the barbecue, or the raspberry in the iced tea.
In terms of destruction, the earthquake was hardly significant.
Emergency responders said they knew of only one report of damage: A teapot fell off of a woman’s stove.
In California, people probably wouldn’t have even noticed the tremor. But this earthquake happened in the Lone Star State and left Brazos Valley residents baffled.
“You just don’t expect your house to shake,” said Burleson County resident Karen Bolt. She was in her trailer home cleaning dishes when the temblor began.
35 km (20 miles) W of Bryan, Texas
65 km (40 miles) ENE of Taylor, Texas
110 km (70 miles) ENE of AUSTIN, Texas
170 km (105 miles) NW of Houston, Texas
In terms of magnitude and damage, this is the largest earthquake known to have occurred in Texas. The most severe damage was reported at Valentine, where all buildings except wood-frame houses were damaged severely and all brick chimneys toppled or were damaged. The schoolhouse, which consisted of one section of concrete blocks and another section of bricks, was damaged so badly that it had to be rebuilt. Small cracks formed in the schoolhouse yard. Some walls collapsed in adobe buildings, and ceilings and partitions were damaged in wood-frame structures. Some concrete and brick walls were cracked severely. One low wall, reinforced with concrete, was broken and thrown down. Tombstones in a local cemetery were rotated. Damage to property was reported from widely scattered points in Brewster, Jeff Davis, Culberson, and Presidio Counties. Landslides occurred in the Van Horn Mountaiins, southwest of Lobo; in the Chisos Mountains, in the area of Big Bend; and farther northwest, near Pilares and Porvenir. Landslides also occurred in the Guadalupe Mountains, near Carlsbad, New Mexico, and slides of rock and dirt were reported near Picacho, New Mexico. Well water and springs were muddied throughout the area. Also felt in parts of Oklahoma, New Mexico, and in Chihauhua and Coahuila, Mexico.
Texas history courses could make some use of these data, for map reading exercises, and for general geography about the state. Click on the map below, the isoseismal map of the 1931 Valentine, Texas quake, and geography teachers will begin to dream of warm-up exercises right away.
Few people know about the law. Since 1872, mineral extraction from the public lands of the United States has been governed by a law designed to make it easy for miners to get minerals out. The law is essentially unchanged, though some mining operations are now bound by other laws to protect the environment and other uses of public lands, such as grazing, tourism, scientific study, wood production, grazing, wildlife management and hunting.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Map of Congo, highlighting province of Bukavu where violence against women is epidemic, 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
