Civil War and Primary Sources and Google Maps

Last year, the historian-parent of one of my students assembled thirty portfolios of documents on thirty Civil War soldiers from Connecticut — photocopies of letters and diaries and newspaper articles, links to Google ebooks, links to PDFs and websites, addresses and phone numbers for archives and historical societies in Connecticut which had the original papers, and so on.  Quite the undertaking, and I’m incredibly grateful to her for the work she did.

Now this project is in its second year.  The kids this year have the materials assembled by this historian-parent, and they have the materials assembled by last year’s seventh graders.  And they’re already making discoveries quite different from the kids who worked through this material last year.

Working with one kid yesterday, and with the help of Google Maps, we located where one such Connecticut soldier was when he wrote his last letter to his wife before marching out toward an unknown destination.  By tracing the information in his letter, we were able to identify the location of his campsite (within about a mile) the previous night.  Using Wikipedia, we were able to find his commanding general, and using various historical atlases we were able to trace the route of his march.

The march that brought him to Antietam battlefield.

Based on the assigned positions of his commanding officers, we were able to get a rough idea of where he was standing during the morning of the battle, and where he was firing from.  We were able to guess from his letter after the battle, roughly where he was wounded.

And we were able to ascertain where his friends carried him, to lay him down among a pile of other wounded men.  Where, after being ignored for a day or two, he picked himself up from, and walked eight miles toward the nearest hospital.

Which we were able to roughly locate, using Google Maps and the man’s own letters, and the letters of his friends.

And where he died.

Officially not one of the wounded of Antietam, but nonetheless killed by it. A man who marched twenty-odd miles to be wounded in the neck by a passing bullet, and then marched another ten miles, many of them alone and leaking copious amounts of blood, to die in a hospital bed from lack of medical care and sepsis.

And from this I had a vision of what American education could be.  Not an endless round of tests and preparation for tests, but a chance for the discovery and the digitization of the historical lives of thousands or millions of people — pioneers and homesteaders and explorers and scientists and immigrants and all sorts of writers and painters and workers from all sorts of walks of life, where they were and what they were doing while great and terrible events unfolded around them.  And it’s extraordinary that I could go to Maryland and Virginia, and walk the roads that this man walked, or see those roads in satellite photographs, and actually live out the short, extraordinary military life of one man in the Civil War — Enlisted August 7, 1862, Died September 25, 1862 — and see where and how he lived and fought and died — in the space of an hour’s class.

Do we not live in extraordinary times?

Follow-Up on Teaching Sonnets

I wrote both of these sonnets using the methods I advocated in this post, namely,

1. Choose the rhyming words first,
2. then count syllables to fit, and
3. wait for the iambic pentameter to emerge on future efforts.

My kids today wanted more practice, so they gave me these words:

Fly
So
Guy
Dough
Real
Cheek
Appeal
Weak
Ran
Bumpy
Can
Lumpy
Fat
Cat.

And here’s the resulting 15-minute sonnet:

I had a dream once where I was a Fly
with six small legs and wings angled just So
and in this dream I landed on a Guy.
he worked in kitchens all covered in Dough
He hit me. I survived. Was this dream Real
I bit him when I landed on his Cheek
I tast of his flesh had such sweet Appeal
but the blow from his hand made me feel Weak
I buzzed around his head and off he Ran
This dream I had was crazy and Bumpy
He tried to catch me in a small tin Can
the old man’s cheek was hairy and Lumpy
I bit him again and then I got Fat
Suddenly I was eaten by a Cat.

And if you read this poem out loud, it will become immediately obvious which lines are definitely NOT in iambic pentameter.  It’s also clear that there’s a story that sort of emerges, but that story is compromised (I think) by the fact that the words were chosen first, before the subject of the poem was chosen.

Here’s the second set of rhyming words I was given:  doors, walls, floors, calls, pencil, two, smencil (a kind of scented pencil, apparently), blue, horses, monk, forces, funk, cheese, please.

And here’s the 15-minute poem that resulted:

I dreamed that I could walk through maple doors,
dark portals piercing through sweating stone walls.
My feet do not echo on pale pine floors.
But off in the distance I hear the calls
of laughing students writing in pencil,
counting syllables out loud, two by tow.
Strawberry scent — someone has a smencil,
and new colors also, yellow and blue.
From through a window, grass-smell and horses;
from up the stairs, the chanting of a monk,
and all these symbols represent forces
of my mind alone. Students in a funk
expect great sonnets; but first write the cheese—
for the form must be learned, ere it can please.

And this is one of the core concepts of the form, really — one must start with the rules of the form, and work backwards to a completed poem a few times, even if the poem doesn’t make ANY SENSE AT ALL , before the capacities of one’s brain readjusts to writing poetry that makes sense.  It takes time.  It did for me, and it did for anyone else that’s ever learned to write a sonnet — the first few are terrible, and then suddenly the brain adjusts.  It says, “Oh, is this what you were trying to do?”  And then it does it.

It’s magic.

Papercraft: The Boxes

The Boxes

Originally uploaded by anselm23

I’m teaching a class on paper-craft and in particular pop-up books during summer school this year, and I wanted to start working on my skills so that I can teach my students some new skills when it comes time. There’s a colleague of mine, as well, who’d like to teach her students some pop-up structures, for making cards and mini-books about Native American peoples they’ve studied this year.

I figured, it was time to teach myself some skills. So, I brought home Carol Barton’s book, and I made the first six of her designs: a straight box (purple and yellow in the upper left of the photo), a stepped box (purple, white and yellow in the center back left), a freestanding box-support (back right), a weird “carved box” shape (lower left), a modified box (the shield shape in lower center), a heart, (right hand side, in red), and a scallop shell (center, and hard to see).

About two hours of work. Taught me a lot about following directions, about learning to see possibilities and potentials. I’ve already decided that I want to make a mini book for someone, detailing the Five Elements, the Seven Planets, and the signs of the Zodiac. Call it a mini-kavad in book form. Not sure when I’ll get to it. It’s clear that knowing the structures is one thing — having a clear sense of the book you might produce with such a thing is another. The technology and the vision are separate from one another; learning the methods will not help you come up with creative ideas of how to use the construction techniques. You need the mysteries, or access to the imaginal realm, or the ability to travel astrally, to get access to those sorts of things.

Via Flickr:
Carol Barton’s “boxes” from her book The Pocket Paper Engineer: Vol. 1.Am I getting ideas for the kavad? Of course. Are all of them practical? Of course not.

This is about two hours of work. I learned a great deal in the process about design and structure of pop-ups, and how challenging its going to be to teach some of this in a class this summer. Knives and rulers and protractors and pencils oh my!

One of my aphorisms for design is my friend Mark’s saying, Tools dictate solutions. If all we give students is lined paper, graph paper, three ring binders and pencils and pens… All of their solutions start to look like that. Even the addition of a knife or a pair of scissors is something.

I look forward to tackling triangles soon.

Teaching to Minimum Yields Results

I’ve been teaching to the test, and teaching my history students how to study for a test with minimal preparation time. The results so far are instructive. Half of the class made massive improvements in their grades just by developing chapter outlines. By taking 3 minutes from their nightly homework prep time to do an outline of the chapter headers and sub-headers, and then filling in that outline as they read, about half of my seventh graders moved from doing ok but not amazingly on a chapter test set for grade level or a little below, to doing honors-level work on a test calibrated to above grade level.

The other half … Well, it’s hard to say. The rule for this test was that kids didn’t have to turn in their test if they were unhappy with the results. That was my strategy for getting them to give up their old methods long enough to try this. Yet, about half the students didn’t turn in the test. So I’ve been investigating one-on-one like a detective, trying to absorb what’s going on. And from what I can tell, about two-thirds were disappointed with the result. They didn’t do badly; most of them got in the 70s to high 80s, actually! They just didn’t do as well as they wanted. Ambition and expectations are in the way of their success, I think. Something to teach and reteach in the new year.

The last group did worse, relative to their over-prepared but haphazard study method they were using before. They were spending four hours studying for tests and getting better grades — but trying to know everything. What’s the real point of quality control if you study for hours, but in an unsystematic way that doesn’t guarantee results?

In any case, the data supports three ideas:

• studying not at all gives poor results
• overstudying (for too much time) gives good but inconsistent results.
• studying with a plan in mind conveys a solid B+: better than the average grade, C.

and the plan we’ve been working on is this:

• study for no more than the allotted time (here, about 25 minutes)
• begin studying a chapter with the chapter test in mind
• collect and retain all chapter-related materials in an organized way — quizzes, in-class notes, homework, reading outlines, etc.
• work during homework time to a plan:
  • create a “major themes” outline of the reading in 3 minutes
  • leave room for extra details
  • read for 10-15 minutes; as you read the text, fill in details in your outline
  • answer assigned questions by referencing first the outline, then the textbook
  • take no more than 10 minutes to answer questions.
• before the test:
  • study the section outlines and questions for 10-15 minutes each
  • re-tell the chapter narrative to yourself as you review materials
  • get a good night’s sleep beforehand

The results showed that the methodology mostly worked for 50% of the students, still needs some tweaks for 30% more, and 20% may need a much different system. I need to close that gap at the end, and find some ways to tweak both the method, and my teaching methods.

The Teacher Power

I had an unexpected bonus conversation with my friend C.T. today, which revolved around some of my favorite topics: magic and the ability to change consciousness; the passion for creating art; the mysteries of saints; and the power of teachers.  During this last part of the conversation, we segued to a discussion of the challenge that some teachers put forward — which is that, in an effort to advance their own work and career and power, they wind up trampling on the capacities and capabilities of their students. Indeed, the teachers reap the rewards of the students’ labor, and the students take on the negative consequences of the teacher’s own bad work.

This rocked me back on my heels for a bit.  I’m still thinking about it.  We were talking about it in a magical/spiritual context. We’d both read a book recently in which a magical society’s inner circle of adepts was teaching rituals to their outer members which made the members feel powerful, but was in fact transferring power to the adepts… and shifting a lack-of-power onto the the students… not merely lack-of-power, but in fact negative-power.  A learned helplessness.

Which really rocked me back on my heels.

I mean, the nominal goal of teaching is to make our students more powerful than they already are.  Ideally, at the end of a year of teaching, when students go on to their next class, I want them to feel empowered and capable of doing work at a higher level than I am.  I mean, ideally, after a year or two in my classroom, they should never need me again, except maybe as a voice speaking to them out of their memories, “what would Mr. Watt do or say about this problem?”  If that voice ever comes up in their heads, though, I want that voice to be giving good advice, rather than bad advice.  I want them to feel empowered by memories of me, rather than disempowered.

This issue has been coming up a lot lately, actually.  Commenting on a friend’s Facebook wall earlier today, I noted that I hadn’t realized that he (much younger than me) had gone to a school where one of my college classmates taught.  This younger friend acknowledged that the college friend of mine had been a great teacher, because he taught critical thinking — but at the same time, this friend also acknowledged that the critical thinking he learned was a byproduct of my college-friend’s rants on a subject other than his official classroom subjects.  My young friend heard my old friend’s rants, and had to think about them: is this really true?  And the answer was often”yes, it is,” as often as it was “some yes, some no” and just as often as it could be “no”.

This is a serious complication in the work of teaching.  I mean, if I teach students what they need to know about history, simply in terms of facts, and fact-finding, great.  But what it means is just as important.  What are the overall themes of history? Are there patterns?  Is there some Hari Seldon-esque wisdom to be found in Nate Silver’s prognostications about the last election?  Are we empowering students by sharing resources with them, and making them fill out worksheets and take quizzes? Or are we disempowering them by doing the same?

C.T. and I spoke specifically about two magical teachers whose material we’ve worked with recently.  One of the things that magical teachers do (which exoteric/ordinary teachers like myself and many of my readers do not do) is give their students rituals to perform for their empowerment and spiritual growth.  C.T. had attended a workshop in which one of the presenters pointed out that some of these rituals do what they say they do — they empower the performers of the rituals so that they experience spiritual growth.  But, C.T. said that the presenter also warned about the opposite — rituals that disempower those who perform them, such that they think they’ve made spiritual progress, but in fact they have actually inflated their egos and empowered the teacher who has given them nothing of real value.  Meanwhile, the teacher gains power from the ritual performed — they get a toehold in the mental and emotional framework of the student, and the student is more inclined to treat further ‘empowerments’ as worthwhile and valuable, even as they are disempowered to seek further growth elsewhere.  Insidious.

And even as I think about it, I realize that this is something that many of us as exoteric teachers — in the everyday world of seventh grade classrooms and fifth grade math worksheets — have just as much temptation to do as teachers of esoteric systems of learning like Western Occultism or Tibetan Buddhism or Shaolin K’ung Fu. It’s easy to make students need us.  It’s easy to make students rely on us for the answers, or to make meaning of history or mathematics. Who among us has watched a student come back to our school, time and again, to seek advice from an old teacher or an old coach… the person that helped make sense in their lives when nothing else did.  I’ve had a few students continually return, until they saw through my veils and saw me as a human being; I know other students who continue to return to the same mentors, over and over again.  Which are stronger — the students who left us behind, and need us no longer? Or the students who keep returning to the same well, to drink of the same lessons?

I like to think that it’s the students who no longer need me that I’ve helped the most — after all, they can stand on their own two feet without me to carry them along any more.  And the ones who keep coming back, well… I help them, too, in my own way, and retailor my lessons to fit what they seem to need right now.  But part of me also wonders…

I’ve taught something like 75 students a year, directly, in my classes since I started teaching 16 years ago.  So I’ve had well over a thousand students (something closer to 1400 once I start calculating more precisely how many kids I taught in each year).  Yet I’d have to say that there are a fewer than a dozen who maintain any sort of regular contact with me. And I have to wonder — did I made them stronger?  Or did they recognize that I made them weaker in some way, and drop me as soon as they could?

It’s one of those deep imponderables that can really roil the soul of a teacher and make them question the validity of their career.

The Five Platonic Solids

The Five Platonic Solids

Originally uploaded by anselm23

Via Flickr:
So here they are. They’re built. In Ancient Greek elemental theory, the cube represented Earth; the tetrahedron represented Fire. The dodecagon was Universe. The icosahedron was Water. The octahedron was Air.

Mathematically, a cube has six sides (the Doctor says "seven — including the INSide"). The tetrahedron has 4 (five, says Doctor Who). The dodecagon has 12 (13!). The icosahedron has 20 (21! Why must I keep saying this??), and the octahedron has eight ("nine! Nine sides muhahahahahaha… Oh, wait… Wrong tv personality.")

Hot geometry in planar solids.

Maker’s Grimoire: Visual Journaling

This exercise came from my encounter with Javier at Michael’s Arts and Crafts, and was inspired in part by this post from @tieandjeans (Andrew Carle), who sent me this photo from MakerFaire on September 30, 2012:

@andrewbwatt did you see the co-lab tent yesterday?Felt like a response to many of yesterday’s questions @collabnyc twitter.com/tieandjeans/st…

— Andrew Carle (@tieandjeans) September 30, 2012

The link leads to a Picture that says, “Drawing is Thinking.” There’s more text than just that, but it’s a reminder of Dave Gray’s Forms, Fields and Flows (which if you haven’t learned it yet, please do.  It’s critical to any sort of design process to learn to draw.)

Anyway, the exercise:

---

Visual Journaling:

You need:

• A Notebook
• A small collection of pens or pencils (pens are better)

This exercise will help you:

• Become a better artist
• Become a better thinker
• Develop a stronger memory
• Improve your own personal discipline and self-control
• Give you tools for communicating with other people visually
• Help you think through problems in three and four dimensions

How often to do it:

• Daily
• 15-20 minutes

Procedure:

• Take a page in your notebook.  
• Date the page, and the time.
• Draw a frame on it, somewhere. It must be at least one-quarter of the page, but no more than three-quarters of the page.
• Draw something that fills the frame:

1. An abstract design
2. A picture of something near you
3. A picture from a reference photograph
4. Some event that happened in your day
5. Something from the Drawing List
6. A copy of a picture you like.

• Fill the remaining page with a written description of your day:

1. What you drew
2. Where you were when you drew it
3. Why you drew this object
4. What you were feeling or thinking when you drew it.

• Do for thirty days.

The Drawing List

If you don’t know what to draw, you can select a thing from this drawing list.  The drawing list is composed of sixty items in two columns: Sunlight and Shadow. (if it’s daylight, draw from the Sunlight column. If it’s after sunset or before dawn, draw from the Shadow list.) In your drawing journal, go to one of the last pages and draw a frame for the list.  Then write out the list in it.

Shadow

1. Bread, or pastry
2. Your dinner
3. A clock, stopwatch or watch
4. A stairway
5. A jumble of pens and pencils
6. Inside a medicine cabinet
7. What’s in your pocket?
8. A person you admire (a hero)
9. A person you hate (personal villain)
10. Something with a sharp edge
11. Some thing, and the mirror reflecting it.
12. The lines in the palm of your hand.
13. A picture in a frame
14. A young man
15. A middle-aged woman with a child
16. Something in the refrigerator
17. A man pushing a baby carriage
18. A piece of fruit
19. What you wore today
20. An angry animal
21. A tree 
22. A young woman
23. A wide open place, and what’s on the edges
24. A person on a skateboard or bicycle
25. An old man with a cane
26. A blue-collar worker
27. Someone crazy
28. A single leaf
29. A flower
30. A piece of machinery
31. Three’s a crowd

Sunlight

1.  A shoe
2.  A woman
3.  A bag or purse
4. A pet
5. An article of clothing
6. A chair and table
7. A scientific or technological object
8. An object made of glass
9. A place with water
10. A building
11. A wall or a fence or a boundary
12. A wild animal
13. A walkway, path, trail or road
14. A meeting between two people
15. A solitary person thinking
16. An accident
17. All or part of a musical instrument
18. A really fast car
19. A costume you’d like to wear someday 
20. A superhero
21. A party
22. A protest
23. A solider
24. A game in progress
25. A white-collar worker
26. A blue-collar worker
27. Something dangerous
28. A horse
29. A box, a trunk, a shelf, or a cabinet
30. A book, a DVD or CD case, or a magazine
31. A couple in love

Class idea: current events

I want to talk about current events class. You may have a current events class in your class right now. Maybe it works something like this you tell every student to bring in an article, that deals with some current subject in the news, and then you spend — or more likely waste — an entire class, talking about the various articles. Does that sound familiar?

Try something different. Ask each kid to bring in an article, but set it up a little bit beforehand. Create a box. In the box put a number of slips of paper, each of which has a region of the world or a region of the news to report on. Make sure that none of the categories are something silly, like movies or sports. Sports news is interesting, but it doesn’t shape the world nearly as much as economics or politics — things that our kids generally avoid. And although sometimes major sports events shape public policy, it’s much better for kids to become invested in political and economic news. Unfortunately many kids are not particularly interested in this kind of news…

How to get them involved?

This is what I’ve decided to do with my own class. I have such a box. In the box are about 20 slips of paper, each of which has the name of a major region of the world written on it. The categories include subjects like: the Middle East, South America, North America, Africa, European Union, Great Britain, Asia, Australia, India, Russia, and China. There are also bits of American domestic news included in the box: things like economics, business, technology, science, culture, plus the Northeast, the South, the midwest and northwest….

Every week on Thursday I assign each group of students to a “desk”. The desk is not actually a physical desk in the classroom, but an area of concern. They get an entire week to find two or three important headlines from that region of the world or that area of American domestic news. The following Thursday, a week after getting the assignment, our class comes together. One of my American history sections plays the role of the United States department of defense. The other section gets to be the US department of state. And yes, they ask each other questions – and yes, they are allowed to lie.

After every story, I asked the students what their department should do about it. Sometimes they decide to ask for more information from the other class. This involves sending a memo to the relevant department — either state to defense, or defense to state. The result is that the two classes are asking questions to one another about the business of the nation.

The second thing that they got to do, is make a “recommendation to the president.” Recommendations to the president get posted on index cards on that narrow strip of bulletin board above the whiteboard in my classroom… you have one too; I’m sure it’s useless. Except its going to fill up with advice to the president…

Someone in class today asked me, “Mr. Watt, who gets to play the president? You?”

I replied, “well, Mr. Obama is the president. “And then I explain, that Mr. Obama gets to be the president. (Maybe Romney will replace him, but it doesn’t seem likely) Meeting, that the president actually has to make decisions, and those decisions are based on the real news. And the president has to make decisions based on the recommendations of the Department of Defense, and the Department of State.

Do you see where this is going? By posting our recommendations to the president, our classes get to see exactly what it is that the president does and what advice he must have gotten from the people that report to him, and advise him. So, my students also get to see how decisions are actually made in the real world, and compare their own results with a public decision-maker’s actions. They get ro be part of a decision tree, not all of ir.

Presidents receive information from subordinates, in the same way that CEOs get advice from their subordinates, as school principals get advice from their teachers and subordinate administrators. In other words, my students as they’re learning current events, have to role-play out the decisions that other people are doing this work for real in the government, amd get to see what results actually happened in the real world. Call it fantasy Department of State instead of fantasy football.

Kids live in a highly complex world. For most of their lives, kids today have been instructed or enabled to live in fantasy worlds.. Some but not all of them are video games; some of them are imaginary ideas about wealth and power that they have picked up from television and from the Internet. But such fantasy realms can only offer preprogrammed responses, not genuine decision-making. Fantasy sports league are at least rooted in the statistics of real players…

So current events classes can be gameified. Presidential decisions are actually involving thousands of people making small decisions based on the news that they have available and sending data up the chain of command. By helping them role-play out a part of that decision-making process, I hope to teach my students to be better decision-makers as adults. In other words, the play is the thing in which we catch or at least learn the conscience of our kings.

N.B.: today’s blog entry was assembled using Dragon dictation for the first time. I am planning to post this directly as I am traveling today, but I hope that the ideas here will be somewhat obvious, even before I’ve had a chance to clean up the text. Have a lovely weekend.

Video: Setting Up a Latin notebook

I’ll be teaching Latin to sixth graders this year; here’s my video advising them on setting up their notebooks and desks to succeed in my class this year:

Comments Week

Some of the folks I know from Twitter have declared this coming week to be “comment on blogs” week. In an effort to get folks to break out of their Twitter twibulation mode of “retweet but don’t comment”, people this week should make an effort to tweet only after commenting, and then retweet the specific link with the hash tag #icommented

Good luck with that. I just realized that after Wednesday I’ll be off in the woods, and I’ll be missing out on all this lovely commenting, assuming it happens. So if you were going to comment here, better do it before Wednesday. Otherwise, your comment will sit in the queue for a while, waiting for my return.