Fiction, poetry, and teaching history

I watch the wagon
until I see nothing on the open plain.
For the first time ever,
I am alone.

May B

I am a huge believer in having kids read and write as much as possible while in history class. And one of the best ways to engage kids is to have them read fiction, especially poetry and verse.

One of the best examples of historical fiction in a poetry format is Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse. Out of the Dust is an incredible story that sucks in middle school readers as it describes the life of 14-year -old Billie Jo in Dust Bowl Oklahoma.

If you’re a bit unsure about how to incorporate this poetry book into your class, use supporting materials such as Literature Guide: Out of the Dust or A Guide for Using Out of the Dust in the Classroom. Another great way to integrate Out of the Dust is to have kids compare and contrast the historical fiction content with a non-fiction book such as Children of the Dust Bowl: The True Story of the School at Weedpatch Camp.

But Out of the Dust is not alone anymore.

A recent book by Caroline Starr Rose titled May B also does an excellent job of capturing the emotions of history students. While Out of the Dust spends its time in the 1930s, May B focuses on the late 1800s Kansas prairie and helps provide a rich context to the Western movement.

May is helping out on a neighbor’s homestead—just until Christmas, her pa promises. But a terrible turn of events leaves her all alone and she must try to find food and fuel—and courage—to make it through the approaching winter.

It seemed like a great book for any class studying regions, Kansas History, and US History. But I needed an expert. So I asked my wife, an experienced elementary/middle level teacher, for her opinion.

I loved May B. The writing is vivid and beautiful. It captures the severe and sometimes terrible beauty of the Kansas prairies but also beautifully portrays a girl struggling to embrace who she is. This middle level book shares what life was like during this period in Kansas history and is captivating to the end. It would be perfect for reading aloud in class, perfect for grades 4-8, and perfect for a family to enjoy together.

The author has created a handy teacher’s guide helpful for integrating the book and its content into your class.

I’m curious. What other poetry and verse historical fiction are we missing? What do you use?

Howard Zinn 1922-2010

Howard Zinn 1922-2010

Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States published in 1980, passed away several weeks ago. And while I’ve had the chance to hear him speak several times, it’s not like we were that close.

But it’s still a bit of a shock.

Zinn, like him or not, changed the way we do history, how we think about and write about history. And the world is worse off because he’s gone.

Zinn was an author, professor at Boston University and Spelman College in Atlanta, civil rights activist, historian and a World War II Army Air Force bombardier.

He wrote many things including You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train but it was A People’s History for which he is most well-known. With only a 5,000 print first run, A People’s History probably seemed odd at first. It wasn’t the normal sort of book for 1980.

In a 2008 interview with BigThink, Zinn said that he wanted to

be remembered as somebody who gave people a feeling of hope and power that they didn’t have before.

Traditional histories of the time focused on “dead, white guys” with a top-down, political and military perspective. Zinn’s approach was bit different. He chose not to write about treaty signings, political debates and Founding Fathers. Instead, Zinn wrote about poor and hungry farmers, unionists, women, those who resisted slavery and folks who struggled against both big business and big government.

As a senior attending a western Kansas high school at the time, I . . . um . . . didn’t get to the book till later. Much later. (There are probably some in western Kansas who still haven’t heard of it. And if they have, refuse to read it. If you’re from western Kansas, I say this with love.)

But I did eventually get to it, as did many others. A People’s History has sold over two million copies. And it wasn’t that Zinn was necessarily the first to write from a social, “underdog” perspective that made his books intriguing to so many. It was the manner in which Zinn used that perspective to create a narrative tying major events together that made A People’s History popular.

“What Zinn did was bring history writing out of the academy, and he undid much of the frankly biased and prejudiced views that came before it,” said Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton University. “But he’s a popularizer, and his view of history is topsy-turvy, turning old villains into heroes, and after a while the glow gets unreal.”

That criticism barely raised a hair on Mr. Zinn’s neck. “It’s not an unbiased account; so what?” he said in the Times interview. “If you look at history from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated, it’s a different story.”

New York Times

Zinn’s work has encouraged others to continue thinking about and writing history from a variety of perspectives. A People’s History is

an example of how coming at a familiar set of historical facts from a different angle can completely change what we know about them. And today, historians of all stripes are applying that lesson in new and fascinating ways. These scholars are not the heirs of Zinn, politically or intellectually, but their work shares his conviction that we can and should see the past anew.

Boston Globe

It’s this legacy of “seeing the past anew” that Zinn leaves behind.

Tip of the Week – Summer reading list

I know many of you are looking forward to summer and a more relaxed schedule.

Aren’t we all?

I always look forward to summer because it usually means more time to read stuff I didn’t get to during the winter. So my summer reading list is all planned out and ready to go!

But it got me thinking . . . what books should social studies teachers read?

So . . . today, two lists. First, the books I plan to read this summer and, second, my very short, very biased list of books that I think every social studies teacher will enjoy. (Don’t like what’s on the list? Find just about anything by Stephen Ambrose, Sarah Vowell, Tony Horowitz, Steven Johnson or David McCullough.)

Your homework? Pick at least one to read and discuss with another history buff.

What I Plan to Read This Summer:

• The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story
  A true story—as powerful as Schindler’s List—in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands.
• The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
  At the height of WWI, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide.
• The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War
  The cast of characters includes Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering, Gertrude Stein and Marc Chagall–not to mention works by artists from da Vinci to Picasso.
• The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
  The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since.
• Salt: A World History
  The only rock we eat, salt has shaped civilization from the very beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of humankind.
• Assassination Vacation
  A road trip like no other — a journey to the pit stops of American political murder and through the myriad ways they have been used for fun and profit, for political and cultural advantage.
• Calendar: Humanity’s Epic Struggle To Determine A True And Accurate Year
  The adventure spans the world from Stonehenge to astronomically aligned pyramids at Giza, from Mayan observatories at Chichen Itza to the atomic clock in Washington, the world’s official timekeeper since the 1960s.

(And, no, I probably won’t get to all of them. But it’s fun to dream!)

Some of my favorites in no particular order:

• Brain Rules
  Most of us have no idea what’s really going on inside our heads. Yet brain scientists have uncovered details every business leader, parent, and teacher should know.
• Mind Wide Open
  Steven Johnson subjects his own brain to a battery of tests to find out what’s really going on inside.
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Die & Others Survive
  Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas–business people, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others–struggle to make their ideas “stick.”
• Battle Cry of Freedom
  The definitive one-volume history of the Civil War.
• Charlie Wilson’s War
  The story of Texas congressman Charlie Wilson and his work to assist Afghan “freedom fighters” fighting Soviet invaders during the 1980s.
• Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War
  An adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance.
• The Things They Carried
  Is it a novel or a collection of short stories? It’s both – a collection of short pieces which reads with the dramatic force and tension of a novel that depicts a small group of men who fought in Vietnam.
• A History of the World in Six Glasses
  From beer to Coca-Cola, the six drinks that have helped shape human history.
• The Partly Cloudy Patriot
  In this insightful and funny collection of personal stories, Sarah Vowell travels through the American past and, in doing so, investigates the dusty, bumpy roads of her own life.
• Citizen Soldiers: The U. S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany
  Historian Stephen Ambrose continues where he left off in his bestseller D-Day.
• 1776
  The intensely human story of those who marched with General George Washington in the year of the Declaration of Independence.
• Practicing History
  A splendid body of work by Barbara Tuchman, the story of a lifetime spent “practicing history.”
• To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian
  A very personal look at our nation’s history through the eyes of one of the twentieth century’s most influential historians.
• Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
  Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a brilliant work answering the question of why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading other continents and conquering or displacing their peoples.
• Why Black People Tend to Shout: Cold Facts and Wry Views from a Black Man’s World
  A collection of essays on popular culture as it relates to African Americans includes discussions of Spike Lee, Jackie Robinson, Bernhard Goetz, Marion Barry, “What Black People Don’t Like,” and “The Natural Superiority of Black Athletes.”
• White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son
  Racial privilege shapes the lives of white Americans in every facet of life, from employment and education to housing and criminal justice. Using stories from his own life, Tim Wise shows that racism not only burdens people of color, but also benefits those who are “white like him” — whether or not they’re actively racist.
• Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past
  This book demolishes the conventional notion that there is one true history and one best way to teach it.
• Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
  Americans have lost touch with their history, and in this thought-provoking book, Professor James Loewen shows why. After surveying twelve leading high school American history texts, he has concluded that not one does a decent job of making history interesting or memorable.

Additions? Subtractions?

The Invention of Air

It’s a good day!

My copy of The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson just arrived and I am pumped. Just had the chance to quickly read through it and am already hooked. And, of course, this means I’ll be up late to tonight getting through it in detail.

I have been a fan of Johnson’s ever since I worked my way through Mind Wide Open several years ago. Spending time with Everything Bad is God for You, The Ghost Map and Emergence followed.

I enjoy the way he is able to encourage thinking on broad subjects by focusing on a specific topic or person. In The Invention of Air, Johnson introduces the reader to Joseph Priestley, a remarkable thinker of the American Revolutionary period who until this book I had never known.

Priestley’s impact on early American politics and science can be measured by a reading of the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams during their last 13 years. The two wrote 165 letters during that period and mentioned Benjamin Franklin five times, George Washington three times and Priestley 52 times.

Johnson broad topic?

If there is an overarching moral to this story, it is that vital fields of intellectual achievement cannot be cordoned off from one another and relegated to the specialists, that politics can and should be usefully informed by the insights of science.

It’s a bold approach but one that seems to work.

Johnson starts his book by quoting one-time 2008 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who when asked whether he believed in the theory of evolution said:

It’s interesting that that question would even be asked of someone running for president. I’m not planning on writing the curriculum for an eighth grade science textbook. I’m asking for the opportunity to be president of the United States.

Based on his interpretation of how Priestley, Franklin, Jefferson and Adams saw politics, science, religion and philosophy flowing together, Johnson suggests that perhaps we can learn something from Huckabee’s comment:

It was anti-intellectual, to be sure, but it was something even more incendiary in the context of a presidential race. It was positively un-American.

As one of the Founding Fathers you’ve never heard of, Johnson claims that Priestley represents the true America. Priestley was “a . . . progressive” who thought the world (and America) was heading toward an “increase in liberty and understanding.” But progress implies change and an undermining of

the institutions and belief systems of the past.

Johnson suggests that Priestley represents the type of thinking that is needed in the America of 2009: positive in outlook, confident in the abilities of people and trust in the ability of science to guide thinking without ignoring the impact of faith.

And, of course, broad subject aside, you can read Air as an intriguing story of a man instrumental in the creation of the United States. Either way, you’ll walk away knowing it was a good day!

Daniel Pink – “There was no self-storage industry during the Great Depression”

I first read Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind several years ago and loved it. He has some incredibly interesting things to say about how schools can begin to get past the limitations of NCLB.

He starts off his keynote for the TIES conference by suggesting that there are three basic principles of a good speech:

• brevity
• levity
• repetition

I like that. (Both from a participant and presenter viewpoint!)

One of my favorites quotes?

We need to prepare kids for their future, not our past.

The rest of the hour was Pink basically going over the stuff from his book. And it’s good stuff. I especially like his idea that education needs to focus more on the right side of the brain.

Quick overview?

In the past, there were very specific pathways to “success” and to the American middle class dream. He suggests that traditional skills and career choices such as lawyer, accountant and engineer led down this path. And the system developed to encourage those abilities.

His argument is that this system is designed for our past but NOT for the future of our kids.

We know more today about how our brains function. We are starting to understand how very complex the brain is and what it can do. Both the left and right sides of the brain are working all the time but, at a broad level, the two sides are also very task specific. Neither is better or worse, just different – content vs context, specific vs. abstract, linear vs. nonlinear.

Pink says these tasks and skills specific to the left brain are essential but are no longer the only thing that is needed. In fact, skills like basic facts and quantitative skills are becoming secondary, they matter less. in the present, and certainly in the future of our kids, we need to focus more on the skills residing in right side of the brain.

He suggests that there are three reasons why this is:

Asia - Obvious Flat World kinds of stuff here / cheap white collar labor is available overseas / His example ? A small percentage of a large number is . . . another large number. So when a small percentage of the large number of people living in Asia start doing the same kinds of jobs that US people are doing . . . a large number of people are able to do the same thing as what we do. Which probably isn’t a good thing

Automation – Software is replacing the left side of our brains but not the artistic, creative side. He used the example of law and how the process of needing a lawyer is changing – specifically how easy it is to complete divorce proceedings and taxes using automated, online tools.

Abundance - The economy is scary now but the broad, overall trend is towards greater abundance. Today’s trends lines, specifically those of technology tools, are almost vertical. I love this – “there was no self storage industry during the 1930s.” Today’s self storage market is bigger than the movie industry, basically we have a lot of stuff.

Basically what he’s saying is the world is different and to have an impact, to survive, we need to use our right brain abilities more. We need to ask three simple questions:

• Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
• Can a computer do it faster?
• Is what you are delivering in demand in an age of abundance?

He didn’t have a lot of time at the end but also suggests that the following six abilities are what matter most. These are the things that are hard to outsource and hard to automate. And so become more valuable in the 21st century world. Interesting stuff!

• design not just function
• story not just argument
• empathy not just logic
• play not just seriousness
• meaning not just accumulation
• symphony not just focus