January 10, 2008
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?
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Africa, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, Lesson plans, Maps, Music, Travel | Tagged: Africa, geography, Lesson plans, Mali, Music, Travel | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
December 12, 2007
Our friends and benefactors at the Bill of Rights Institute put up a great branch of their site, Founders Online. A grant from the Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation made the project possible.
Check it out:
John Adams | Samuel Adams | Alexander Hamilton | Patrick Henry
Thomas Jefferson | James Madison | GeorgeMason | Gouverneur Morris
James Otis | Thomas Paine | George Washington | John Witherspoon
This page should be a first stop for your students doing biographies on any of these people, and it should be a test review feature for your classes that they can do on the internet at home, or in class if you’re lucky enough to have access in your classroom.
Good on-line sources are still too rare. This is stuff you can trust to be accurate and appropriate for your students. Send a note of thanks to the Bill of Rights Institute, and send your students to the site.
Just in time for Bill of Rights Day, December 15 . . .
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Leave a Comment » | 1787, 1789, Accuracy, Ben Franklin, Civil Rights, Classroom technology, Declaration of Independence, Education, Famous quotes, Freedom - Economic, Freedom - Political, George Washington, Heroes, Historic documents, History, James Madison, John Adams, On-line education, On-line learning, Student projects, Technology in the classroom, Thomas Jefferson, U.S. Constitution | Tagged: Bill of Rights, Constitution, Education, founders, History, Lesson plans, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
December 6, 2007
Ignoble Gases nicely describes the mashup between on-line mapping services and digital photography, with a bit of blogging thrown in.
Mapping services now have the capacity to link photographs of a site with its exact latitude and longitude, or exact address. Maps of cities can feature links to photos of the site (other than satellite or aerial photos) submitted by readers, and other descriptive material.
So, geography teachers: Have your kids mapped out your town and put it on the web to encourage tourism? Great discussion topics: What are the advantages of such technologies, and what are the parent-scaring disadvantages, or dangers of them?
I really cannot do justice to the concepts here — read the article at Ignoble Gases.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
December 2, 2007
I’m not sure exactly why, but my post on ocean foam in Australia continues to be one of the most popular.
Now you can make ocean foam in your classroom! I suppose this was planned for a science class, but why not use it in geography or world history?
Instructions here: What Molecules are in Ocean Foam? (repeated below the fold). This is one of several easy-to-do science experiments promoted at the Pfizer Foundation Discovery Lab at the New York Hall of Science.
Also see this explanation from New Scientist about how foam forms on ocean waves in the first place.
Go ahead. Cover the entire school with it.
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3 Comments | Bell Ringers, Geography - Physical, Lesson plans, Natural history, Science, Warm-up exercises | Tagged: classroom activities, Lesson plans, ocean foam | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
November 4, 2007
Yellowstone National Park is just a cool place. If you’re not using it for anything in your geography and U.S. history courses, you’re missing out.
Here’s a ten-minute video that the producers hope you’ll show far and wide to encourage television stations to pick up the series. It’s a ten-minute pilot for “Travelers’ Tales,” featuring outdoor writer Tim Cahill, a founder of Outside magazine, and photographer Tom Murphy.
Here are some of the points you might use in class:
- Yellowstone in winter, especially the wildlife, like bison, elk and coyotes (all shown), and wolves (not shown)
- Volcanic geology — Yellowstone is the world’s largest caldera, after all
- Diversity of landforms in the U.S., or in the world. More than half the hot water features on the planet are in Yellowstone
- Travel and adventure
- What makes good writing (travel writing in this case)
- Western geography
- Development of the west, especially after the Lewis and Clark Expedition
The video features a lot of snow, elk, bison and coyotes, hot springs flowing into a river making swimming in January feasible, Mammoth Hot Springs and the travertine pools, and the cold northern desert of sagebrush and juniper.
Questions you might consider to turn this into a warm-up exercise (bell ringer):
Geography, not answered in the video (map or internet exercise):
- Yellowstone National Park covers parts of which three states?
- Yellowstone National Park is mostly located in which state?
- What is the most famous feature of Yellowstone National Park?
- Ashfall Beds State Park features ancient mammals killed by an eruption in the Yellowstone Caldera. Where is Ashfall Beds State Park?
- Thomas Moran played a key role in getting Congress to designate Yellowstone as a park. What did he do to help convince Congress to act?
Geography, answered in the video:
- What year was Yellowstone designated a National Park by Congress?
- What sort of volcanic feature is the entire Yellowstone area?
- The Yellowstone Caldera explodes catastrophically about every 600,000 years, according to some geologists. How long has it been since the last such catastrophic explosion?
- The wags say there are two seasons in Yellowstone, ______ and winter.
- What is a “hot pot?”
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2 Comments | Adventure, Bell Ringers, Geography - Physical, geology, Natural history, Natural resources, Travel, Warm-up exercises | Tagged: geography, geology, Lesson plans, Tim Cahill, Travel, video, Yellowstone | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
October 16, 2007
From this lead paragraph in a BusinessWeek story could come a heck of a semester of high school economics:
Leonid Hurwicz was born in Moscow in 1917, the year that Vladimir Lenin led the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. Ninety years later—on Oct. 15, 2007—Hurwicz was awarded a Nobel prize in economics, in part for explaining the fundamental flaw in the central planning that Lenin imposed in the Soviet Union.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
September 30, 2007
Trial simulations put students into the middle of tough topics in government, economics and history — or can do, depending on how well the simulations work. In the middle of the fight is a great place to learn.
Scholastic.com features a series of lesson plans suitable for government and civics. Looking for Constitution Day lesson plans I stumbled into a trial-by-jury simulation, with the mock trial script all prepared for you, for grades 5 through 8.
It looks to me to be a good way to study the jury system (see Amendments 6 and 7 of the Constitution). The lesson plans and materials were designed, and their dissemination supported by the American Board of Trial Advocates. Yes, that’s a group with a view; no, the bias doesn’t show up in the classroom materials, really.
Here’s a graphic on amending the Constitution, from the same site. This could be reproduced for student journals, printed for small posters, or, check with your high school drafting classes to see whether they won’t print this out for you in a poster size, in color. Scholastic.com features nine graphic pages like that one.
Trial by jury provides the foundation for some of our greatest drama: On television with Perry Mason, Matlock, Law & Order, Boston Legal, or L.A. Law; on the stage with Inherit the Wind and Ayn Rand’s The Night of January 16th; in opera with Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury (okay, in operetta). This is the sort of thing students enjoy, and probably will remember.
How and why to show up for jury duty is one of the most important understandings our students can take away.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
July 29, 2007
Leo Rosten writes clearly, concisely, and often with great humor. Consequently, his essays make good fodder for classroom use.
Rosten is probably most famous for the introduction he once gave to the comedian W. C. Fields, a spur-of-the-moment bon mots that so exactly described Fields comedian persona that it is often listed as a line Fields himself wrote: “Any man who hates dogs and children can’t be all bad.”
That story also tells us that Rosten looks at Adam Smith coolly, through no rose-colored glass.
The Adam Smith Institute carries Rosten’s essay on Smith in its entirety. Go read it:
It is a clumsy, sprawling, elephantine book. The facts are suffocating, the digressions interminable, the pace as maddening as the title is uninviting: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. But it is one of the towering achievements of the human mind: a masterwork of observation and analysis, of ingenious correlations, inspired theorizings, and the most persistent and powerful cerebration. Delightful ironies break through its stodgy surface:
“The late resolution of the Quakers [to free] their Negro slaves may satisfy us that their number cannot be very great …”
“The chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches.”
“To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising customers [is] unfit for a nation of shopkeepers, but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.”
So comprehensive is its range, so perceptive its probings, that it can dance, within one conceptual scheme, from the diamond mines of Golconda to the price of Chinese silver in Peru; from the fisheries of Holland to the plight of Irish prostitutes in London. It links a thousand apparently unrelated oddities into unexpected chains of consequence. And the brilliance of its intelligence “lights up the mosaic of detail,” says Schumpeter, “heating the facts until they glow.” Sometimes.
Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776 – not as a textbook, but as a polemical cannon aimed at governments that were subsidizing and protecting their merchants, their farmers, their manufacturers, against “unfair” competition, at home or from imports. Smith set out to demolish the mercantilist theory from which those politics flowed. He challenged the powerful interests who were profiting from unfree markets, collusive prices, tariffs and subsidies, and obsolete ways of producing things.
[More at the site of the Adam Smith Institute, including the continuation of this essay.]
Leo Rosten
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1 Comment | 1776, Adam Smith, DBQ sources, Economics, Education, Free market economics, Freedom - Economic, Freedom - Political, Historic documents, History, Quotes, Reason | Tagged: Adam Smith, Economics, Leo Rosten, Lesson plans | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
July 10, 2007
The merry bands of hoaxsters at “JunkScience.com” and the Competitive Enterprise Institute hope you think DDT is a well-targeted, perfect solution to get rid of malaria. They ignore the devastating effects DDT has on birds, bats and other mammals (including humans), beneficial insects and fish. They don’t care about the difficulties in treating malaria in hospitals, which would continue or grow worse were DDT to be sprayed willy-nilly across the malaria-endemic world.
Plus, CEI is well-funded and has been hammering away on spreading the hoaxes for several years. You may have to dig hard to find the facts, such as the fact that the inventors of DDT as insecticide warned against over-use exactly as did Rachel Carson, (see the Dove Docs archives), or that the death of beneficial insects and beneficial animals can cause disasters, too — or did CEI tell you that DDT can cause your roof to cave in, in Borneo, and that they had to parachute cats in to prevent an epidemic of typhus, caused by DDT?
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9 Comments | DDT, Geography - Economic, Hoaxes, Junk science, Lesson plans, Rachel Carson, Science, Voodoo science, War on Science | Tagged: Borneo Cats, DDT, geography, Hoaxes, Junk science, Lesson plans, Rachel Carson, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
March 14, 2007
The DVD release of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s latest cinema episode is probably driving the traffic to the post I did a while ago noting that the movies are not based on any Texas incidents (see “Based on a true story, except . . .). The original movie, in 1974, was billed as “based on a true story.” “The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths, in particular Sally Hardesty and her invalid brother, Franklin,” the Narrator says opening the film.
The latest enfilmations apparently carry the same claim (I say apparently because I have never seen any of them through, and only a few snippets on television of any of them — I go by what I hear and see from others).
We have the testimony of the author of the original screenplay that it is fiction, loosely based on a famous case in Wisconsin which was also, very loosely, the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and the later, more horrifying Silence of the Lambs. Other internet sites say it’s fiction, such as Snopes.com (a favorite and very good hoax and error debunking site).
Still, the kids ask.
Why not turn this into a geography and/or history exercise? Read the rest of this entry »
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34 Comments | 100 Milestone Documents of U.S. History, Accuracy, Bogus history, Geography - Physical, History, Lesson plans, Movies, Texas | Tagged: Accuracy, Bogus history, geography, Hewitt Texas, Hoaxes, Lesson plans, Movies, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Thomas Hewitt | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
October 7, 2006
During one of my phase-shift transitions between universities and public schools yesterday, I caught a snippet of a commentary that I thought was on Richard Nixon’s 1952 speech that kept him on the ticket with Dwight Eisenhower. Public reaction was reported to be overwhelmingly warm, the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket won the 1952 election, won again in 1956, and Nixon eventually took the presidency for his own in 1968.
Shouldn’t that speech be considered one of the greater presentations of the 20th century, at least? It probably should, especially when we consider what history might have looked like had Nixon left the ticket — no Nixon nomination in 1960 against John Kennedy, no later Nixon presidency, Nixon continuing in the Senate . . . gee, which path is more gloomy?
The Checkers speech does not wear well, I think. Reading it today, I see the origins of smear campaign tactics and diversionary tactics that mar so much of today’s election campaigns and policy discussions.
This all comes up because the transcripts of the famous 1977 interview series newsman/comedian David Frost did with Nixon is the basis for a new play in London, “Frost/Nixon” by Peter Morgan, with Frank Langella playing Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost — a play that is already being made into a movie for Universal Pictures by Academy Award winning director Ron Howard, but after a Broadway run in 2007.
Nixon’s mea culpa answer to Frost on the entirety of the Watergate scandal — “I made so many mistakes” — in the NPR piece voiced by Langella, sounded exactly like Nixon. I mistakenly thought it a recording of the Checkers speech, hearing just a snippet. The Frost/Nixon interviews would probably never have been necessary, had the Checkers speech not been a success. Surely there is a direct line from the Checkers speech to Nixon’s attempt to revive his reputation in the Frost interviews.
Watergate on Broadway, with a movie in the works, should offer good opportunities especially for high school history teachers to bring Watergate to a new generation. Too many people today fail to understand the depth of the damage done to Constitutional institutions in that crisis, and how lucky our nation was to have survived it. There are many lessons there for us in our current Constitutional crisis.
A lesson awaits, also, in the career of David Frost, who crossed from news to comedy and back. Many kids today use comedians as their chief source of political news. We should not be surprised — but let us hope that today’s comedians have as much a sense of public duty as David Frost did in 1977, even while using his public service interview to revive his own career.
Sometimes free markets work spectacularly, don’t they?
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4 Comments | Ethics, Famous quotes, History, Lesson plans, Movies, Presentations, Presidents, Quotes, Turning Points, Watergate scandal | Tagged: Ethics, Famous quotes, History, Lesson plans, Movies, Presentations, Presidents, Quotes, Richard M. Nixon, Watergate scandal | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
