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?

ProCon – Blue AND Red

Wouldn’t it be nice to go somewhere online that simply presented facts without all the nutty opinions? A place that isn’t Democrat or Republican or Fox News or MSNBC or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal or whatever blog is saying that Obama is the anti-Christ?

If you’re looking for something like that . . . well . . . okay, I got nothing. There is no site or paper or news outlet that is completely without bias. But there some that come pretty darn close.

ProCon is one of those places.

They are?

. . . an independent, nonpartisan, 501(c)(3) nonprofit public charity. We provide pros and cons on diverse controversial topics with facts and quotations from thousands of experts. Our sites are 100% free and contain no advertising.

Their mission?

“Promoting critical thinking, education, and informed citizenship by presenting controversial issues in a straightforward, nonpartisan primarily pro-con format.”

They start with 20 different topics ranging from immigration to Iraq to euthanasia. You can then dig down into an individual topic to find sub-topics and finally to specific questions. And for each major topic, you get a “1-Minute Overview,” the “Top 10 Pros and Cons” and a “Did You Know?” section.

And while we know facts by themselves seem to carry less weight in today’s world than people who spend their time yelling at each other on cable, it’s always nice to have a resource that simply lays out the basics.

Pretty handy site if you’re leading a student conversation and need some background or if your kids need a place to gather some basic data for research.

And it comes without all the yelling.

Are we missing something here?

I was in my first few weeks as a middle school social studies teacher and basically had no idea what I was doing. It was a struggle from one day to the next simply being able to put together some sort of lesson plan.

Throw coaching on top of that and I was just lost.

But what was really throwing me was the classroom management stuff. It’s difficult to explain the feeling of walking into a room with 30+ eighth graders and closing the door behind you. It truly has to be experienced first hand to be fully appreciated.

But, being a rookie, I figured that I could always count on parents to help out a bit. A quick phone call to the mother of a student should take care of the problem, right? A quiet conversation at parent-teacher conferences? A note home?

Of course, what I began to realize is that while there are some very involved parents out in the wild, there are also some who . . . well, using a baseball analogy – are batting .185 in single A. They just ain’t ever gonna make it in the majors.

And for quite some time I used the “Bad Parent” excuse. As in, “if only these parents would do their jobs, I could do mine.”

But what I’ve come to realize over time is that perhaps some parents literally don’t know how to do their jobs. That we’re expecting something that probably won’t ever happen without some sort of intervention on the part of schools and society in general.

And there are some attempts to work with parents and train them in the “how” of being mom and dad. But the current focus in schools is still too much on teachers and not enough on parents. We spend literally billions on finding ways to increase test scores and tiered interventions and programs and MAP assessments but yet find it difficult to find money or time for improving the skills of parents who need it most.

A recent Newsweek article by Anna Quindlen provides some insight into how powerful it can be when the focus shifts to include parents. The article describes research showing how appropriate and useful parenting can lower stress chemical levels in students, improving both behavior and learning. She does a much better job of describing the project so you won’t hurt my feelings if you head over there for the full story.

But a couple of things caught my eye. After working with parents,

. . . their kids’ cortisol levels changed. Or, as the study itself says in science-speak, “family-based intervention affects the stress response in preschoolers at high risk.” By the time those same kids were 11, both boys and girls were less aggressive, and the girls less obese, than the kids in a control group. Having their parents learn the basics of good child rearing had actually shifted the biology of these kids, so that it became similar to that of “normally developing, low-risk children.”

Connect the dots here, and the picture you have is mind-boggling-even in tough neighborhoods, with boys and girls whose background and circumstances would argue for a negative future, a little parent training can go a long, long way.

We often assume that parenting is just something that comes naturally – that simply fathering a child or giving birth magically transforms us into Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver. It doesn’t happen this way but educators often want to act as if it does. It seems like common sense to me that we need to be spending as much of our time and effort outside the classroom as we do in them.

. . . here’s how it turns out: there are markedly lower rates of aggression among kindergartners whose parents have been in ParentCorps than among a control group of students at similar schools. The kids also score higher on standardized achievement tests.

And let’s be very clear here . . .

. . . it would be a mistake to think that (parental) instruction and support are required only among the needy.

We need parental training across the entire range of economic and cultural neighborhoods.

And we need it today.

100 Most Inspiring and Innovative Blogs for Educators

Teaching is not an easy job. It’s even harder when we try to do it alone! State assessments, kids, parents, designing units, integrating technology – wouldn’t it be easier if we had someone to hold our hand?

Reading blogs and web sites can help. But which blogs? Check out University Reviews. They have published their version of a quick and easy list of the best 100 educational blogs.

By visiting the 100 blogs listed, (teachers) will find answers to all their questions, as well as valuable teaching resources.

History Tech . . . alas, did not make the cut.

Sigh.

Remodeled Social Studies Central

I started the first Social Studies Central web site about eight years ago with a few crude pages created with Microsoft FrontPage. It was basically a couple of links to some of my favorite history web sites.

It has changed a bit over time but it’s still basically an attempt to help Social Studies teachers do their jobs better. Information about learning opportunities, teaching materials, links to resources, ideas about best practices – the kind of stuff that I hope is useful for classroom teachers.

But the site has also become a bit dated over time. So . . . it’s got a new look and few new features.

The goal is to make Social Studies Central a bit easier to use and easier to look at. And over the next few weeks, I plan to add more photos, insert some video examples of classroom best practices and generally create a more interactive feel. Part of the plan is to also connect the two sites – Social Studies Central and History Tech – a bit closer together. So you’ll see similar banners and more links between the two.

I hope you like it. Head on over and let me know what you think!

Tip of the Week – End of the Year

I know that many of you are hanging on by your fingernails right now, trying to survive the last few days or weeks of school. So don’t feel like you have to hang around too long but just want to make you aware of a few “end of the year” resources that you might find useful.

• End of the Year Activities and Lesson Plans
• End of School Year
• End of School Teacher Resources
• More Learning Activities for the “Winding Down” Days
• Five Lessons for End of Year Learning
• End of Year Activities
• End of the Year Resources
• End of the School Year Activities for All Grades

Good luck and have fun!