Letter to APUSH Teachers

Dear Teachers,

I hope this message finds you healthy and as relatively happy as can be.

I miss my students and I make sure I tell them as much as possible.  I’m asking them to communicate with me if they are having trouble with connecting and working online.  I have their cell numbers and they have mine and we are connecting through group chats and one to one texts.  

I’m also asking them to have some kind of fun but that they need to be safe and stay home.  My son is playing more online games with his friends than he ever has but he and I are working on his summary/outlines and analyses.  Then he and his classmates and I are getting together for formal and informal Zoom meetings.

Finally, I want them to use this time to learn about handling adversity and moving forward.  As you know some of our students have dealt with adversity throughout their lives and some have not.  Either way, we can learn how to make the most of a unfortunate situation.  

At the same time, I want them to see history unfolding before them.  I want them to think about how this compares to other times of adversity.  During World War II, I tell them, 140 million people lived in the US while only 16 million served in the military and about one million saw combat.  About 90% were not in the military and only one in 140 were in battle.  I ask them, what did "the rest of us" do?  What do we do now?  We need to do our part I tell them and that’s to be great students and do what can keep ourselves and our families healthy and safe...

We’re “teaching” from Zoom meetings and I’ve been continuing to use my blogs.  Here is my APUSH BLOG.

We are about four weeks away from our APUSH test (on May 15 at 11:00 AM Pacific Time) and I wanted to make sure you were able to move forward.

First off, I wanted to make sure you were aware of the bottom line regarding the test and then I wanted to share resources I have built for my students.

For those of us on the West Coast, the test is on May 15 at 11:00 AM.  The test is 45 minutes long and consists of ONE DBQ.   The students then have 5 minutes to upload their answer.  The DBQ is shorter as it is only five documents of which one is a type of visual document.  Students can take the test on any device and can handwrite the answer and take a photo of it to upload it and turn it in.  

The test is also OPEN NOTES, which as many of you can imagine is a good/bad thing.  Here is the UPDATED RUBRIC.  As you can see, the rubric is now 10 points with the students being graded normally on the thesis and the context but the differences and added points are focused on the way the students use the documents and outside information and how many documents and what is considered outside information.

Regardless, I am asking my students to review as we have in the past because we NEED TO KNOW THE CONTENT and we need to be able to CLEARLY EXPRESS WHAT WE KNOW.  Our DBQ PROCESS is only slightly altered for the fewer documents.

In the end, good luck with teaching all of this!  As I ask my students, please take care of yourselves and take care of your families BEFORE you take care of school.

As always, if you have questions please let me know.  At the same time if you have your own good resources and processes or have found helpful resources and processes, PLEASE SHARE THEM!

Thank you and good luck,

Bob

Resources

Coronavirus Overview

Overall Test Schedule and Information

Taking the Exam Information

FAQ’s

Tips for Taking Open Note Tests

YouTube Review Videos

Gilder Lehrman Resources

My DBQ’s and Schedule

My Review Schedule

April 17—Time Period 3— The Changing Ideals of American Womanhood, 1770-1865

April 24--Time Period 4—TBD (I will share and email as I make them)

May 1— Time Period 5— TBD

May 8— Time Period 6— TBD

May 15—Time Period 7— TBD

April 8, 2020 In the Fog

We are in the fog, literally.  The sunny morning has been replaced by a cloud that has nestled itself around our home in the Sierra Nevada foothills.  The normally expansive vistas are blanketed by grey.  I know they're there, but I can't see them.  I know the snow covered peaks and ridges and the green hillsides are out there because I have seen them.  I saw them this morning. 
However, I don't know when the shroud will lift but I do know that it will lift.  I have experienced this before and I know the sun will shine.  It could be a matter of minutes or hours or it might be tomorrow morning before we see the panoply of color that usually greets our gaze.  It won't be never.
Fitting.
This morning's fog showed me ironically how clearly we had been enveloped by a cloud for the last few months.  We've been living in a fog.  The upheaval of the coronavirus has removed clarity from our lives.  I live for clarity.  If I can't see it, I can imagine it.  I can't see the mountains but I can imagine them.  I know they're there. 
I thought I knew the future.  I am a teacher.  I teach high school history.  I teach seniors who were on their way to graduating.  I teach juniors who were supposed to go to Angel Island this Spring.  I teach sophomores who were supposed to go to Yosemite for their field trip.  I thought I was good at predicting the future that I knew was out there for them.
From time to time I would tell them that the future was not preordained.  I used George HW Bush as an example.  He was a senior in high school when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.  His life course was completely diverted.  Instead of going to Yale and studying economics and sociology when he graduated with his classmates, he went to the Navy and became a dive bomber pilot.  His plane got shot down and he was the lone survivor of a raid on a Japanese base.  His future was completely different from what he had planned...
Our present is different from what we had planned.  Tell me something I don't know.
Well, that's the future...
Back to the fog.
This morning I realized as I looked out at the fog that the grey and lack of color and lack of detail completely fit my lack of certainty.
When are we going back to normal?  When are we going to back to school?  When will we get our lives back?
No one knows.  No one.
People can speculate and they do all the time.  The president said it'll be Easter.  Some say 18 months.
When will the fog lift?  When will I see the mountains?  When will I see the future?  When?

Happy New Year! The Emancipation Proclamation

The Emancipation Proclamation is always fun to learn about at any time of the year, but I always come back to it at the New Year as it officially went into affect on New Year's Day of 1863 after having been proclaimed on September 22, 1862 after the Battle of Antietam.
There are a number of levels at which to teach the Emancipation Proclamation with the most straight forward level revolving around the question, "Did Lincoln free the slaves?"  The Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), which is aimed at helping K-12 teachers and students learn about historical literacy, has a STRONG, QUICK LESSON PLAN that focuses on answering the above question through background, the Proclamation itself, and the opinion of Frederick Douglass, all with guiding questions and a helpful graphic organizer.  SHEG requires a free registration but has a ton of great lessons that will make the registration worth your while.

The other end of the spectrum takes us to the HOUSE DIVIDED and LINCOLN'S WRITINGS resources from Dickinson College, which are built and maintained by Professor Matthew Pinsker and his students.  These resources are also specifically aimed at K-12 teachers and students and helping them understand history and its questions.
In the House Divided, Pinsker has an EMANCIPATION DIGITAL CLASSROOM, which has a slew of resources and links upon links.  Beware, there are so many links that you might find yourself losing hours (In a good way!) before you realize it!  There are timelines and tons of visuals and even a teacher's guide to Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" as well as a DBQ on the Emancipation Proclamation itself.

From Lincoln's Writings, Pinsker has ranked the 150 most teachable Lincoln documents, Numbers 17 and 2 are the first and final drafts of the Emancipation Proclamation.  For both the FIRST DRAFT and the FINAL DRAFT annotated transcripts can be found here, FIRST and here, FINAL, along with audio files, visuals, and close reading videos of the text, context, and subtext of the two documents, here is the video for the FIRST DRAFT and here is the video for the FINAL DRAFT.

Between these two sources are tons of ways of teaching the Emancipation Proclamation at different levels.
Have fun and let me know what you think as Learning is My Business!

How can we understand the legacy of slavery, the Civil War, and what happened in Charlottesville, VA?

Last week was our first week of school and our students wanted to know what had happened in Charlottesville, VA the previous weekend.  As a US history teacher, I helped my students discuss what had happened.  However, over the weekend, when things calmed down, I put together a Google Presentation with a wide ranging bibliography to give a clearer view of what happened.
As most everyone has heard by now, last weekend a protest and a counter protest were held in Charlottesville, VA near the campus of the University of Virginia and a protester was killed while a couple of Virginia State Troopers were killed in a helicopter crash while responding to the clash of the different groups.
Why did all of this happen?

The bottom line is slavery and the Civil War and the culture of the former Confederacy in the years since the Civil War.  If our students can understand these issues, we can help them understand what happened last week.
In order to get a fuller picture, I put together a bibliography with a number of different perspectives regarding slavery, the Lost Cause, and Jim Crow to give my students a better understanding of why people were protesting the potential removal of an old statue.
I got started with an article by Matthew Green of KQED's The Lowdown, which gave a clear overview of the issues and from which I got some of the visuals for my presentation.  There is also a link to a solid overview on the events of Friday night, August 11 and Saturday morning, August 12 from NPR.
From there I found a list of slaveowning presidents in US history to give some background as to the pervasiveness of slavery among the nation's founding leaders and to also put Robert E. Lee and other Confederate leaders in context.

However, the presentation begins with a YouTube video of a clip from the Simpsons, where the character Apu is taking his citizenship test and comes up against the final question on the cause of the Civil War.  The clip allows us to realize that the bottom line of the Civil War was slavery and from there it gets complicated, but without slavery, there would never have been such a horrible conflagration let alone secession.

This is key as one of the main tenets of the argument for Confederate symbols and monuments is that these icons do not celebrate slavery but more celebrate the honor of the soldiers who fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy.  The best evidence to give lie to this line of thinking is the declarations that the seceding states used to leave the Union.  Slavery was fundamental to their motivations to break up the United States.  We will use the Mississippi declaration.

In order to understand how these ideas gained some currency, we need to help our students understand the Lost Cause and Jim Crow.  I try to get my students to understand why former Confederates were motivated to justify their roles in the Civil War and then they have to understand the rise and prevalence of Jim Crow.
From there I need my California students to understand that these ideas were not solely confined to the South and we take a look at some examples of Confederate monuments in the Central Valley and Los Angeles.
The last two slides are on President Trump's response to Charlottesville and the presence of Nazi flags to shine light on some of the other issues that have cropped up after and during the protests themselves.  The Trump slide gives us an opportunity to discuss what are the major issues involved in how we look at history and allows us to contrast Confederate leaders and the early presidents of the United States.  Should we view the slaveowning presidents in the same light as the Confederate leaders?  If so, why?  If not, why not?  From there we can discuss how and why Confederate leaders played a role in secession and contrast that against the role that the slaveowning presidents played in building the Union.

How do we discuss the presence of swastikas at a rally that purportedly was designed to celebrate Southern culture and honor?  From my perspective as a US history teacher as well as a student of modern European history, I can say that the protesters who allowed swastikas among them lost any moral standing and the rally could not have been for Southern honor and culture with the presence of an unquestionably White Supremacist symbol.

Finally, I have included a list of 10 questions to help my students focus on the main issues from the presentation and provides us a number of places to stop and discuss what happened.
If we can help our students understand these issues, we will understand much better how these issues have grown and will continue to plague our country if we don't deal with them clearly and stop letting them fester and grow in strength.
Learning is my business.  What do you think?

Was Dr. Seuss Racist?!? Fake News or a Teachable Moment?

Dr. Seuss is an American icon.  My own children have celebrated his birthday every year since kindergarten at their school.  We have read many of his books at home and I have used The Cat in the Hat in my psychology classes to illustrate children's development of consciousness and morality.

This spring I was confronted by a couple of conflicting images from his past:

 

Who was Dr. Seuss?  Was he the artist who was criticizing the American isolationist group, "America First" and their inability to question Hitler's xenophobic attitudes in Germany or was he the propagandist who used racial slurs and Asian stereotypes to depict Japanese-Americans at the time of Japanese internment?  Was he both?  Or was there more to the story?

In my classes, we have two catch phrases, "How do you know what you know?" and "I love history" and they combine to help us ferret out the answers to these questions, while also helping us understand how to see what's fake news and what's not.

 

Most people have no idea of the Dr. Seuss from before The Cat in the Hat, but he drew propaganda cartoons for the US government during World War II.  How do we get that story?

I had my students read the blog post that brought the anti-Japanese cartoon to my attention.  The blog was called "The Angry Asian Man," which told the story of two elementary kids, a brother and sister, who brought flyers about Dr. Seuss' racist past to school to show their classmates that there was more to their favorite author's backstory.  The backstory included his cartoons which had used racist stereotypes to characterize Japanese-Americans at the beginning of World War II.  The kids' great grandparents had been interned, which made their ancestors the targets of Seuss' propaganda.  The kids wanted their classmates to know the rest of Seuss' story and made flyers to educate them.  However, both of their teachers objected to them handing out the information in school and emailed their mother and father explaining what had happened.

The kids' father explained that he and the kids' mother had taught the siblings about Dr. Seuss's propaganda past even though they had read the stories at home.  He also hoped that schools were havens for critical thought, but also pointed out that Seuss had made a change later in life and that he and the kids' mother would have added that part of Seuss' story to the flyer.  In the end he thanked the teacher and moved on.

So, was Dr. Seuss racist?

We added the America First cartoon.

So, was Dr. Seuss racist?

How do we use the blog post and the cartoon to decide that question?  We have to analyze both.  We start with the big questions:

Text--What is being directly and overtly communicated in the document?  What is it saying?  Summary.

Context--What is the historical context for the document?  Where does it fit in history and why is that important?

Subtext--What is not being directly communicated in the document but is being implied or is being communicated between the lines and how do we know that?

If we can discover the answer to these questions, we can use the document to help us understand our answer to the bigger question, in this case, Was Dr. Seuss racist?

In order to get to the core of these big questions, we use the basic question words to get to the bottom of the document and how it answers our question:

Who?

What?

Where?

When?

How?

Why?

However, those words themselves need to be stretched to get to us to the core of text, context, and subtext.

How about this?

We take the blog post and the America First cartoon and analyze them using the question words to get us to understand what is the text, context, and subtext.

We use what we know to answer the question, Was Dr. Seuss racist?

However, can the students explain whether or not Dr. Seuss was racist in detail?

Not yet.

From there we add a few other documents to the mix.

First, there is a collection of cartoons that Dr. Seuss created before and during World War II, "Dr. Seuss Went to War" then there is an article, "When Dr. Seuss Took On Adolf Hitler," which gives some background (context?) to what Dr. Seuss did during the war.

After working our way through those documents, we analyze three more documents before we make our final judgement, "Can We Forgive Dr. Seuss?" "10 Facts About Horton Hears a Who," and 

"Kids Use ‘Dr. Seuss Week To Teach Classmates About His Racist Cartoons."  After analyzing them, we ask ourselves, are they all equally important to our understanding of Dr. Seuss and can they help us answer our question?

By breaking down Dr. Seuss and his work, we can gain a much better understanding of the "text," in his case, the point of his cartoons, while also gathering the historical context of his work.  After all the docs, we can clearly glean the subtext to what he was saying about the enemy, which illustrated the prevailing mood in the United States during World War II.  We can also clearly use examples to explain how we know what we think and know about Dr. Seuss.

We have been able to gather evidence to explain how we know what we know about Dr. Seuss.

In the end, my students said that Dr. Seuss was neither a racist nor was he not a racist.  They said his work and his life are much more complicated than that.  They did unequivocally say his anti-Japanese cartoons were definitely racist, but that he had a change of heart after visiting Japan after the war.  They also said his children's books are not racist and have been great aids in helping them understand the world.  They also said that all of this was legitimate information, but that some documents were more valid and trustworthy than others.  In other words, the allegation that Dr. Seuss was a racist was not "fake news" but something much more complicated that needed analysis to gain a fuller understanding.  For our class this year, it was definitely a teachable moment and yet another great reason for me to exclaim, "I love history!"

So, what do you think, was Dr. Seuss racist?  Analyze the documents and let me know what you think.

Learning is My Business!

Links from the post:

1. He Was Not Who You Think
2. Dr. Seuss goes to War
3. When Dr. Seuss took on Adolf Hitler
4. Can We Forgive Dr. Seuss?
5. 10 Facts About Horton Hears a Who
6. Kids Use ‘Dr. Seuss Week’ To Teach Classmates About His Racist Cartoons
7. Analyzing Primary Documents Presentation

Moving Forward

How do we move forward?  We have a new president who is unlike any before him.  Whether we support him or not, we do not know what he is going to do and how he is going to do it.

We need to have a plan for judging how the new administration moves forward and how to voice our support or dissent.  In order to do this effectively, we need to decide what's important to us, how to judge whether the government is moving in the right direction, and then how to move forward with what we know.

Why should we decide what's important to us?  As I tell my students, I am a history and government teacher who gets paid to watch this stuff and I still can't keep up with it all.  The Representatives and Senators all have staffs with specific areas of focus to keep an eye on all the different issues and concerns.  We private citizens need to focus on what's most important to us and go from there because it's much more manageable and we'll be much more effective.
How do we decide what's important?  We used this KQED resource in my classes to help the students decide.  It has the general Democratic and Republican stances as well as how the American people feel about nine different issues.  If you're still not sure what's most important to you, try I Side With to gain some depth on the issues.

Regarding the issues, how many should be important?  I stress to my students that 1-3 is ideal as one issue is probably too few and will over-focus us on just one issue and more than three issues will stretch us to the point of not being able to really focus our time and energy and allow us to understand what's happening with these issues.

So, now how do we find out if the government is doing what we want it to do on the issues that are most important to us?  We need to follow a range of news sources that give us a fully formed understanding of what and how the government is doing what it's doing.  Let's start with this graphic by Vanessa Otero (@vlotero--she also gives us an excellent rationale behind the chart HERE ):

As you can see, the graphic has a vertical axis which rates the journalistic quality and a horizontal axis which rates the partisan bias.  Ideally, we'd all have the time and inclination to read ALL the sources in the top two, middle groups to have both excellent daily news sources and in-depth sources on the longer term issues.  However, as we don't really have the time to focus on more three issues, how are we going to read ALL the BEST news sources?  Short answer, we're not.  We don't have the time!

How do we follow our news sources?  I use Twitter and have used Facebook.  In short, I suggest social media.  Twitter is my chosen source as it's organized by the latest sources first and I can always go to a source's individual feed and see if there's anything I missed.  I can also use the excellent search features by hashtags and by keywords.  

Which ones should we follow?  Well, what do you like?  I like to read, but I also like visuals and interactives as I'm a teacher and I'm often looking for current events for my students, so I lean toward print media first and then I go from there.  The New York Times, Washington Post, PBS, and NPR are my first sources for national news.  I also go to the San Francisco Chronicle, the LA Times for a California perspective on big stories and of course California stories.  From there, I follow the Fresno Bee for local news as well as the Modesto Bee and Sacramento Bee for Central Valley news and California state news.

Those are my starting points.  What you need to do is make sure you understand how you like to consume your news.  Do you like to read?  Do you like visuals?  Do you like interactives?  Do you like video?  Check out the different sources from the graphic or from the list above and find out what medium is your favorite and go from there.

Another emerging helpful source for news is YouTube.  You can find daily videos from the major national news sources on YouTube, but the locals are a little less reliable and often are more off beat and human interest.  The national and international news sources are good and getting better but the locals are hit and miss.  Here's a list of what I've found of the best, The New York Times, Washington Post, PBS Newshour, NPR, The Economist, Reuters, and the Associated Press.

Now we have our issues and we've found news sources to keep an eye on how the government does or doesn't do what we want.  How do we do something with what we know?

As political scientists say, there are conventional and unconventional forms of political participation and having our voices heard.  For today's post, we'll deal with the conventional forms of communication.  We have the most basic, voting, and then we go from there to calling and writing our representatives.  The best source for finding the contact information for our elected state and federal representatives is Common Cause.  The three best ways to let your elected representatives know how you feel is to either make a phone call to their district or state office or to send them a snail mail letter or a personal email to their district or state office.  The local offices get much less traffic and your phone call will be answered by a human and your letter will be read and will get a response. The visual below from the Philadelphia Inquirer illustrates these ideas.

What should we do, call or write?  From what I've heard from Congressional staffers, the representatives and aides respond to those types of communication that show more effort and thought.  They definitely don't pay much attention to online petitions, Tweets, and Facebook as much as those forms of communication are much more easily sent and often sent in the heat of the moment without much thought.

The next post will cover the next two aspects of this political conversation, when should we communicate our ideas and attitudes and what to do beyond calling or writing our representatives.

Thank you for reading and please let me know what you think.  As always, Learning is My Business...

Check these sources for more on how to contact our representatives:

Want to get Members of Congress to listen to you?  Here's what to do

A political insider's viral advice on how to make your Congress member listen

Colin Kaepernick and the National Anthem

Colin Kaepernick and the National Anthem

As a US history and government teacher, my students pledge allegiance every morning, but at the start of the year, I implore them to think about what they are saying and why they are saying it. Throughout the year, we revisit the meaning of the pledge and I ask my students to revisit their understanding of the pledge and how it has changed as they have learned more about the United States. Now that Colin Kaepernick has sat down during the National Anthem, we have a new opportunity to examine what we are doing and why we are doing it on top of the issues of the relations between African-Americans and the police.

Warm Up Discussion Questions

1. What does the national anthem and the pledge of allegiance mean to you?
2. Why do we sing the national anthem and stand for the pledge of allegiance?
3. What does it mean to you to be patriotic?
4. What does it mean to you to protest?
5. How does the first amendment protect protest?  How/why?
6. Is protest patriotic?

NPR Story--Athlete Activists Aren't New. Kaepernick Is Just The Latest

7. Who is Colin Kaepernick and why are we talking about him?
8. Who are Tommie Smith and how is he connected to Colin Kaepernick?
9. Who is Toni Smith-Thompson and how is she connected to Colin Kaepernick?

ESPN Video/Story--Steelers LT Alejandro Villanueva: Colin Kaepernick needs to look at 'big picture'

1. Why have many people gotten angry over Kaepernick’s protest?
2. How did the speaker in the video feel about Kaepernick’s protest?
3. Who is Alejandro Villanueva and why are we reading about his opinion?
4. How does he feel about Kaepernick’s issue and his forum?
5. Why would he “hold hands” with Kaepernick but caution him at the same time?

USA Today Story--Jackie Robinson wrote in his autobiography: 'I cannot stand and sing the anthem'

1. Who was Jackie Robinson and why is he important?
2. How did he feel about the flag and the national anthem?  Why?

San Francisco Chronicle--Harry Edwards, I support Kap’s decision to sit during the national anthem

1. Who is Harry Edwards and why are we reading his opinion?
2. How does he feel about Kaepernick?
3. Why does Kaepernick have a right to do what he did?
4. How does he feel about other NFL players and their opinions?
5. What would he like to see and why?
6. How does he feel veterans have been treated in the US?
7. According to Edwards, why is the Star Spangled Banner played before baseball and football games?
8. Why does he say, “what is right is not always appropriate; that what is appropriate is not always best?”
9. How does he feel Kaepernick’s protest fits in the presidential campaign?
10. How does he feel about “the conversation” black families and families of police officers are having?
11. Why does he have “no problem” with Kaepernick’s protest?
12. How do you feel about this whole issue?  Why?
13. What issues in the US do you feel we should not stay silent on?  Why?

More Resources

The Nation--Toni Smith-Thompson

PBS Newshour--Tommie Smith and John Carlos

The Washington Post--Kareem Abdul-Jabbar