January 28 will be the 40th anniversary of the capture of the U.S.S. Pueblo by gunboats from North Korea (or Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, DPRK), which led to some of the more interesting hoaxes of modern times.
Just watching the calendar in this 40th anniversary of 1968.
Leave a Comment » | 
1968, Cold War, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, History, Hoaxes, Korea, Patriotism | Tagged: 1968, Cold War, History, Hoaxes, USS Pueblo | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
. . . would still be a Texas town.
But Texas towns have some of the best names of towns in the U.S. Plus, there are a lot of Texas towns, plus 254 Texas counties.
Freckles Cassie at Political Teen Tidbits has a great list:
Need to be cheered up?
Happy, Texas 79042
Pep, Texas 79353
Smiley, Texas 78159
Paradise, Texas 76073
Rainbow, Texas 76077
Sweet Home, Texas 77987
Comfort, Texas 78013
Friendship, Texas 76530
- Click thumbnail map above for a larger map of Texas with many cities named, from Tripinfo.com.
Go see the entire list — and maybe add a few of your favorites in the comments. An ambitious geography teacher could make a couple of great exercises out of those lists. “What’s the shortest distance one would have to drive to visit Paris, Italy, Athens and Santa Fe? How many could you visit in the shortest time?”
4 Comments | Geography - Political, History, Maps, Place Names, Texas, Travel | Tagged: geography, History, Maps, Place Names, Texas, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
As long as we’re in Mali anyway, why not arrive a couple of days early for this other music festival? Michael Kessler writes about the Festival du Chameau in the Sydney Morning Herald, “The sound of the desert blues”:
A week ago, when the doctor was jabbing me with yellow fever, polio and hepatitis shots and supplying malaria tablets, I’d tried imagining what a camel festival would look like. The Festival du Chameau [in its third year in 2008] is the brainchild of Tinariwen, the international darlings of world music – a group of Touareg nomadic musicians, purveyors of the desert blues, whose political past combined with their hypnotic electric guitars make them local heroes in this, the Adrar des Iforas region of Mali.
Toronto Globe and Mail reporter Stephanie Nolen accompanied a group of Inuit musicians to Mali, documented in a blog for the newspaper, Trail to Timbuktu; from her reports, we know the festival is underway, music is on the dunes:
There’s no down-in-front with a camel, really.
The 8th Festival in the Desert began a couple of hours ago, with several thousand people sitting and standing in the cool, white sand at the edge of the oasis at Essekane. The sun set just as the event kicked off, silhouetting robed men, veiled women and camels on all the surrounding ridges. On the small, raised stage there were speeches by notables including the local governor and Mali’s Minister of Culture.
Then the music began, with the opening provided by Tamnana, a traditional ensemble of men and women from Essekane who drum, chant, clap and ululate. They’re a big hit with the locals, and it turns out that demonstrations of musical appreciation hereabouts take the form of camel tricks. When the spirit moves them, nomads on camelback suddenly charge down from the dunes to the front of the stage, where they coax their camels down to “walk” on their front knees – a much-admired feat. Or they dismount and launch sudden sword fights with phantom opponents, before swinging back up and charging the camel back and forth in front of the stage a few times. It’s the Tuareg version of the mosh pit, and it’s magical to watch, but it does tend to blot out the action on the stage.
Inuit performers from Canada, in the sands at the Essakane Festival, Mali, 2008; photo by Stephanie Nolen, Toronto Globe and Mail.
News still travels slowly out of Mali’s desert, though. Most of the news about the Mali Festival in the Desert comes in the form of festival veterans spreading the music, in other, far-flung venuues.
Influences of the Essakane Festival of the Desert reach Salina, Kansas, where the Salina Journal talks about the music of Toubab Crewe, a group of North Caronlians who have performed at the big Mali festival in the past.
Oregon feels it, too: MacArthur Foundation grant recipient Corey Harris, a veteran bluesman whose work was featured in the PBS series on the blues, especially his work in Mali with the late Ali Farka Toure, performs at the Rogue Valley Blues Festival in Ashland, Oregon, on January 18 (that’s the Southern Oregon Mail Tribune, not Mali Tribune).
Mali, and Africa, have much more than just these few festivals. Why should we concern ourselves with the Essakane festival at all? Africa. PopMatters carries a column by journalist Mark Reynolds, reviewing events and arts in Africa in 2007, with a look to 2008. It’s a survey of events and publications, but it’s a good backgrounder for a high school student in Africa concerns, an article that should suggest connections to be made in geography, history, government and economics courses.
Thanks to Ann at Peoples Geography for the correction — Sydney Morning Herald.
1 Comment | Africa, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, History, Lesson plans, Music, World history | Tagged: Africa, Entertainment, geography, Mali Essakane, Music, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
BBC’s internet services carried this slide and sound account of the 2007 Essakane festival in far off Mali; this is one music festival I would really like to attend. Snippets of songs crop up on NPR or PRI (especially The World), and on PBS, and in record stores with really savvy staff — or where Putumayo discs are on sale. Everything I have heard from these festivals is very, very good.
Robert Plant helped make it famous with his 2003 performance. But its fame is relative; it’s famous only among a select group of people — those who have heard the music.
[Alas, Vodpod died, and the video that I had captured via that service seems to appear nowhere else on the web. If you should find the piece by Paula Dear which the BBC broadcast in 2007, please note it in comments.]
Vodpod videos no longer available. from news.bbc.co.uk posted with vodpod
.
The festival is set for January 10-12 in 2008. Who is playing? Where are news stories? Where are the CDs? Here’s the official website.
Geography teachers, think of the possibilities this festival offers for fun in the classroom! Adam Fisher wrote about it for the New York Times a couple of years ago:
My real aim is Essakane, an obscure desert oasis a half-day’s drive beyond Timbuktu, and the site of what’s billed as the “most remote music festival in the world.” It’s a three-day Afro-pop powwow held by the Tuareg, the traditionally nomadic “blue people” of the Sahara.
It’s a tribe often feared for the banditry of its rebels and respected for the fact that it has never really been conquered. Historically its great power came from its role in the trans-Saharan trade in gold, slaves and salt. Even now, Tuareg caravans make the 15-day journey south from the northern salt mines to Timbuktu on the Niger River. They rest their camels during the day and use the stars to navigate at night. The skin tint of the nomads comes from the indigo dye they use for their turbans and robes, which leaves a permanent stain.
What more exciting stuff do you have in your classroom on the Tuareg? Does it resonate better with your teenagers than this story would?
2 Comments | Africa, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, Lesson plans, Maps, Music, Travel | Tagged: Africa, geography, Lesson plans, Mali, Music, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Well, this is fairly addictive: The Travel IQ Quiz from TravelPod
I’d love to have every kid in the class with a computer to take this thing, or pieces of it, to drill on it, and I’d love the ability to add new stuff to it.
How’d you do? What do you think — are there classroom possibilities here? (I’ve tried to make the widget work, below . . .)
13 Comments | Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, On-line education, On-line learning, Technology in the classroom, Travel | Tagged: Classroom technology, Education, geography, Technology, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
He’s obviously a bright kid. He’s got good grades. It’s honors U.S. history, which is supposed to be rigorous, to prepare the kid for college studies.
But we’re drawing blanks from the kid on basic stuff: What’s the significance of 1776? Jamestown is in what state? Who was the commanding general of the American Revolution, George Washington or Abraham Lincoln? During the Civil War, on which side did Robert E. Lee fight? Or was he that dude from the Revolutionary War? Was the 1849 Gold Rush in Texas or California?
During the practice tests, he’s got all the skills: Two-colored markers to analyze the reading passages, circles and arrows to show which parts are important to consider. He can break the test question and reading down into all the “proper” parts, it’s a testing procedure he’s been practicing since third grade. After 8 years, he knows it well.
But he’s not sure whether the British fought in the American Civil War.
It’s a composite picture, but not composite enough for any of us to breathe the relief sigh. Too many students I get in class do not have the basic facts down that they need to make sense of anything else in the history course — or economics or geography course — that they struggle in now.
Many of these students have good test scores, too. The test doesn’t phase them, but their performance is not what it ought to be. Instead of acing the annual state exam, they take a couple of hours and complain that it’s a stupid exam with stupid questions.
We’ve taught them “tricks” to analyze the test questions, but they don’t have the background in the subject that they should have in order to quickly answer basic questions. The tricks get them through an exam, but it’s a poor substitute for knowing the material.
How does this happen?
Many schools across the nation have shorted social studies. Confronting pressure to raise average school test scores, basic social studies has been cut back in elementary and middle grades (kids know that stuff anyway, right?). Social studies is crowded out of the curriculum in favor of testing skills, or instruction in science and math.
I suspect much of the instruction in science and math is similarly shallow. Students learn how to analyze the test question, but they don’t know how to do the math required.
We know that students learn more when they spend more time on the learning tasks. Learning time is reduced for testing skills instruction.
Social studies take the hit particularly hard. According to a commentary by Judith Pace of the University of San Francisco, in Education Week this week (subscription may be required):
Surveys have reported reduced instructional time in various states, and organizations such as the National Council for the Social Studies have responded with letters and statements to Congress. Social studies educators have begun to lobby their lawmakers. But the apparent mainstream acceptance of drastic reductions in the amount of time and attention given to one of elementary education’s core academic subjects is shocking. We are in danger of losing a generation of citizens schooled in the foundations of democracy—and of producing high school graduates who are not broadly educated human beings.
In my own state of California, where history/social studies is not tested until 8th grade, this trend began with the state’s Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999, and has accelerated with the No Child Left Behind law. The social studies squeeze occurs disproportionately in low-performing schools with large minority and low-income populations that are under intense pressure to raise scores. And this, too, has alarming implications for educational opportunity and civic participation.
(More of Light’s commentary below the fold.)
One of the old saws of the quality movement in industry (now sadly abandoned in too many places) is “You get what you measure.” We measure average achievement. Consequently, we stifle outstanding achievement, and we don’t give most of the children the background they need to be good citizens.
I see it in students who just don’t know the basics. We should not need to spend time teaching that Abraham Lincoln was not at the Constitutional Convention, but was president during the Civil War.
Improving test scores may be hurting students’ core knowledge in essential areas.
What do we do about it? Comments are open, of course.
Leave a Comment » | Curricula, Economics, Education assessment, Education quality, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, History, No Child Left Behind Act, Testing | Tagged: Economics, Education, geography, History, No Child Left Behind, Testing | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
A professional geographer?
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).
His blog has a side bar that shows tremendous, free resources for professional geographers. Can teachers get some use out of these things? Go see: Check the widget titled “Freely Distributed GIS Data.” (Most of the data are free, mostly.)
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?)
1 Comment | Classroom technology, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, Technology in the classroom | Tagged: Education, geography, Maps, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
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.
Brussels leaped into the bigtime with the recent opening of the Dexia Towers, a building that is lighted on the outside by a series of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) of various colors, at each window of the building. Will this become a hallmark of Brussels?
What other new structures will become common symbols in the next couple of decades?
Doesn’t this photo make you want to go see the thing? 150,000 LEDs can be programmed for elaborate displays. Go see other photos at Room at the Top.
Leave a Comment » | Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, Globalization, Landmarks, Travel | Tagged: Brussels, geography, landmark buildings | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Do your students ever ask why we bother to study geography? Consider these sources for a one-day exercise in geography, world history or U.S. history:
Geographic Travels with Catholicgauze alerts us to this interesting story of applied geography.
The map of Baghdad, above, was found in a raid on an al Quaeda house in the past year. It details the organization of al Quaeda, especially with regard to shipping guns, ammunition and explosives into Baghdad.
Armed with this knowledge, U.S. forces set about severing each of the cells from each other, separating the pieces of the snake to kill the beast.
Here is the New York Times story. (So much for wild claims that “mainstream media” do not cover such news.) Here is the Fox News story, with a link to a .pdf version of the map.
A map drawn by Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — who was killed last year by U.S. forces — turned up last December in an Al Qaeda safe house and essentially gave U.S. war planners insight into the terrorist group’s methods for moving explosives, fighters and money into Baghdad.
“The map essentially laid out how Al Qaeda controlled Baghdad. And they did it through four belts that surrounded the city, and these belts controlled access to the city for reinforcements and weapons and money,” said Maj. Gen. Bob Scales, a FOX News contributor who recently visited Iraq.
That’s what geographic knowledge can do. It can be the difference between peace and war, the difference between life and death.
2 Comments | Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, History, Iraq, War, War on Terrorism | Tagged: al Quaeda, Education, geography, History, Iraq, Terrorism | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
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.
This is Cyclone Sidr. It’s a category 5, and it keeps defying predictions that it will weaken as it moves north, oddly acting as if it has targeted the low river delta regions of Bengla Desh. Chris Mooney calls it “beautiful but deadly.” P. Z. Myers raises an alarm about our ignorance of the storm. More details from Mooney. Lamentations from Mooney’s co-blogger Kirshenbaum (are they playing the role of Jeremiah or Cassandra? Rather depends on your reaction, no?)
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.
Resources:
Horrible thought: Is the dearth of reaction partly because broadcasters don’t know how to pronounce the name of the storm?
5 Comments | Climate change, Disasters, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, History, Politics, Poverty | Tagged: Cyclone Sidr, natural disaster, political disaster, Politics, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
You won’t find this in your world history text.
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 TimesGenocide 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:
Surely intervention by an international group would help, no? However
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?
Resources:
2 Comments | Africa, Disasters, Economics, Genocide, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, History, Human Rights, Natural resources, Politics | Tagged: Africa, Congo, Genocide, Human Rights, Politics, World history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
It’s a toe in the water of internet-using instruction. Here’s a syllabus for a 7th grade Texas history class at Pin Oak Middle School in the Houston Independent School district.
Notice that this class, as many in Texas do, puts the geography unit up front, not quite isolated from the rest of the class. Regardless of how well geography is covered, I think we end up shorting the subject its due.
Kudos to Pin Oak MS, to Mr. Gomez, and I hope to see more.
(Surely there is a class in Texas that is farther along in integrating the internet into the Texas history curriculum — point them to us, Dear Readers?)
Leave a Comment » | Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, History, Teaching, Technology in the classroom, Texas history | Tagged: Technology in the classroom, Texas history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
The Neural Gourmet sends greetings:
Tangled Up In Blue Guy brings us the fortnight’s best grumpy liberal blogging for this 49th edition of Carnival of the Liberals. Join us October 24th for our
anger management seminarCarnival of the Liberals #50 at That Is So Queer.
Go see what people who actually claim to be liberal think and blog about. It’s one of those places where people actually discuss Myanmar/Burma as if it mattered, and as if they have hope for the future.
Who’d have thought such things concerned liberals? (Hey, if you didn’t think liberals worry about such things, you really need to take a look at COTL49.)
Leave a Comment » | Geography - Political, Politics, Weblogs | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Tehran 24 ran a photo of a huge clock somewhere in Tehran, under the headline of “The World’s Biggest Clock.”
But is it more than 37 feet across, like the flower clock in Las Colinas, Irving, Texas?*
What is the biggest clock in the world? Surely there are some bigger.
* This site says the Tehran clock is 15 meters across — bigger than Las Colinas. The clock faces accompanying the bell of Big Ben are 7 meters across. For a panoramic view of the belfry of Big Ben, see the Parliament website.
3 Comments | Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, Travel | Tagged: Big Ben, geography, Travel, World's biggest clock | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Go to the University of Florida Smathers Library site, and admire the beauty of these old maps of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. (While I think fair use would cover it, I’m holding back on posting an image until copyright permission comes through — you’re licensed to use them in the classroom, however.)
What else would you expect from a library named after Sen. George A. Smathers, who was part of that legendary 1950 Senate campaign in Florida?
The maps featured on the first page include Spanish, Dutch, English, Belgian, French and Italian maps of the early explorers, suitable certainly for Texas history courses, and also for Florida, Louisiana and U.S. history units on European exploration.
This site is quite Florida-centric, but it’s links also provide some interesting and valuable resources, such as the link to satellite imagery of the areas, like the NOAA map, below.
Tip of the old scrub brush to A Cracker Boy Looks at Florida
Leave a Comment » | DBQ sources, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, Historic documents, History, History and art, History images, Maps, Texas | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
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Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
