Away from my Desk

This essential question is inspired by the Intercepted Podcast episode "Legacy of Blood- The 55-year US War against Iraqis". Before I listened to it, I knew about the US's 1980s support for Saddam Hussein but I had no idea that he was one of the key movers in a CIA-backed coup in 1963, against Abdel Karim Kassem, a leader who promoted education and women's rights, but was definitely a dictator. This, on its own, was not a problem for the CIA, but he wasn't enough of a clear-cut anticommunist for the Kennedy administration, so they supported Saddam Hussein and his Baathist allies, who executed Kassem after a show trial broadcast on the radio, and then murdered thousands of suspected communist sympathizers, using lists provided to them by the CIA (The New York Times did a piece about this in 2003).

This all blew my mind, and it got me thinking that there is always a rich, fascinating, and usually disturbing history whenever the US has troops stationed in a foreign country. Hence the essential question, "Why does the US have troops in _____?"

(The seed for this question was really planted in October, when I read about the US soldiers killed in an ambush in Niger. My first question when I heard about it was "Why does the US have troops in Niger?")

Mystery Piece

This question lends itself to a "mystery piece", a component that has too-often been left out of my projects. I'm imagining doing a world cafe, gallery walk, or jigsaw, with print-outs of maps and charts, in order to generate observations and questions.

Some resources for the mystery piece:

• Map of all countries with a US military presence (which is to say, all countries)
• Some infographics, and a chart of countries with most troops, in order of number of troops stationed (Pew)
• Business Insider maps (not comprehensive, but divide by Army/Navy/Marines, which is interesting)

I'm anticipating that a lot of students will be shocked by how many countries we're in, and will feel aggrieved that we seem to be "the world's policeman". Some students will also have personal connections, either because they have family members deployed in some of the countries, or because they have family from those countries. And some students will be curious either because they hear about a country in the news a lot, or because they don't.

So I'm generally expecting consternation from across the political spectrum about the scale of US involvement in other countries. This will provide a launchpad for questions about moral responsibility, along the lines of "if this current situation is partly our fault, what is our responsibility now?", and these serious moral discussions will be enriched by in-depth study of the history that led to the present situation in each country. 

Why would a kid care about this question?

A fair number of kids will have a personal stake, because they have family members stationed overseas, and/or are thinking about joining the military themselves. Also, a lot of kids feel a basic frustration that the US invests so much money in fighting abroad, rather than investing domestically. This came up a lot when we studied the refugee crisis, so I assume it will come up here. There's also a bit of a "secret knowledge" element - finding out about covert cold war CIA stuff will allow them to laugh knowingly at relatively superficial TV news coverage, which is enjoyable. 

Content that kids could learn through this question

I'm planning for students to choose a single country to focus on, either on their own or in pairs. So if a pair chose to go in-depth on Germany, their question would be "Why does the US have troops in Germany"?

This question shows one of the dangers of this project, which is there are a whole lot of pieces to the puzzle, so that kids will face a cognitive load choice between a load that is way beyond their ability to carry, and one that is pretty much effortless. In other words, it will be hard to plot a course between the incredibly superficial ("Germany lost WWII so they weren't allowed to have an army. We're done, can play basketball for the next four weeks?") and the overwhelmingly messy and complicated ("Berlin was divided up between the allied powers after WWII, and also Germany split into two countries on either side of the Cold War. The US agreed to essentially provide West Germany with a military, plus Germany became the most clear-cut "front" of the cold war, so the US and Russia both packed their sides with troops. OK, so what happened after the Berlin wall fell? Why are there still so many troops?").

Ideally, kids will be able to explain the history of conflict in the country at least since the 1940s, identifying the different players, both colonial and postcolonial, and the way(s) that the country fits into regional and global power structures (which is to say, both political/military, and economic), focusing particularly on the role that the US has played in the country's history since the 1940s.

I think a constant pressure in this project will be kids trying to find a clear-cut answer to the question "how can we fix this country so we can get our troops back home?" which is a great question, but will tend to kids trying to find simple answers in order to get past the unease of living in doubt. 

What adults can be involved in this?

I'd love it if everyone interviewed one person who has been stationed in this country, one person with expertise on the country (an academic or an intelligence expert) and one person who comes from this country.

What could they make? Who would be the audience?

Parents and families strike me as the most powerful audience for this, because it should trigger (and enrich) lots of substantive discussions. 

A podcast is an obvious product, since I was inspired by listening to a podcast. The issue with a podcast is that it's hard to follow chronology, particularly if you're explaining shifting allegiances over time (the Intercepted episode works in part because it's focusing on the US's role (and, even more specifically, its misdeeds) in Iraq. If it was also explaining the interplay of relationships between the Iraqi government, the Kurds, Sunnis, Shias, Iran, the Yazidis, etc., it would be utterly baffling.

A Ted-Talk style lecture with graphics might work well, as would some kind of beautiful infographic. A Youtube video (again with graphics) might also work. 

A play along the lines of The Great Game could be really effective (a promenade piece would be especially cool) but in order for this to work, the team would need to choose a country, or maybe 2-4 countries as shorter pieces taht weave together, and making these choices tends to be a nightmare. 

When I taught theatre at the University of Sheffield, I taught students about the Bertholt Brecht's "Alienation" effect. "Alienation" is an unhelpful word for it, because it's got nothing to do with either Freud, or Marx's "alienation of labor". There was a better word that we used, but I've forgotten it. In any case, the basic concept is that it causes you to look at something with fresh eyes, casting aside your assumptions about it. 

"A Typical Day" by Zack Bornstein does this really well (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/26/a-typical-day). 

I'd love to use this as a model text for students. Here's how I think I'd do it: 

1. Divide up the text and give a section to a group of 3-4 students with no explanation. Let them puzzle out what it's describing.
2. Bring the full class back together to popcorn out ideas about what the text is describing
3. Go back to small groups to "translate" their section into more familiar language
4. [At this point, I think it would be good to call it a day]
5. The next day, start with groups reading out the full translation - possibly reading Bornstein's passage followed by the translation
6. Students start writing their own descriptions of their own lives

Stuff students can learn from this:

1. Decoding text, close reading
1. In order for this to work, there needs to be some kind of accountability for the quality of the translations. Possibly we could have the group verify that the translation is correct and adequate, but this will take a long time, so we might want to split up the performance of the original text and the translation.
1. Another possibility would be to have one person act out the scene, while another person narrates what's happening, and their inner monologue
1. Example: you could act out 8-8:05 by having a phone alarm go off, with the actor lying down, who jerks up and looks around. Meanwhile the other performer narrates their inner monologue: "wow, that was a crazy dream. What's that sound? Oh yeah, my alarm clock. I've gotta get up." Then the actor hits the phone, tells it to shut up, general stage business until the phone goes off. 
2. Specific descriptive writing (albeit in an eccentric form)
3. Looking at their own life and recognizing its absurdities - a key to both amusing writing, and self-knowledge ("the unexamined life is not worth living, and all that)
4. If students are able to go deeper, they can also notice how the apparently dispassionate description contains a lot of pathos, as well as social commentary (the products made by children, the misery of an office job).
1. I'm not great at teaching this, so I'm not quite sure how it would come out. Maybe by drawing attention to those moments and saying "why does the author include this?"
1. Students could write about their own lives in ways that makes a social commentary purely through observation and defamiliarization (Brecht would be proud).

The first time I heard the term "receipts" used to mean evidence (I think it was when we all found out that James Comey had been taking detailed notes on all his conversations with Donald Trump. (https://www.hercampus.com/news/james-comey-has-receipts-prove-trump-tried-stop-fbi-investigation-michael-flynn)), I was disheartened by it. And, as a person who wishes we didn't treat commercial transaction as our reference point for research, and more generally wishes being "consumers" wasn't so central to our identities, I still am. 

However, as a teacher, I'm kind of excited about it, because it's such a clear and familiar metaphor for research and evidence. 

You could start out by asking students for stories about when they've tried to return things, and what happened. Some students will have had infuriating experiences with inflexible clerks, some students will have returned things that they probably shouldn't have. Out of these stories, we'll tease out some important points:

1. If something doesn't look new, you probably can't return it (this is irrelevant to the discussion of research but it will come up)
2. Generally, you need to show evidence that you bought the item from the store - a receipt, or they may be able to find your credit card.
3. The more a store stands to lose, the higher the burden of proof they will put on you as a customer 

From here, we'd want to investigate something immediately compelling. I think it'd be nice to use a graphic organizer with actual "receipts" on it, where you cite your sources. I could see a few approaches to this:

• A counterintuitive claim about a book we are reading as a class (say, "Junior is actually the villain in ATDPTI") with quotes and page number citations (this is inspired by the classic "Johnny's the real hero of  Karate Kid" video (https://nerdist.com/is-johnny-the-real-hero-of-the-karate-kid/) but I don't think I'd bother showing that video in class, unless of course we'd already watched Karate Kid. 
• A shocking, true, historical claim ("George Washington wore dentures made out of human teeth")
• The problem with this one is that everyone will google it and find the same source. But if groups of 3-4 students all investigated different claims (and perhaps we had a few false ones thrown in too) they could "show their receipts"
• A "Document-based Question" (DBQ) - the old AP History standby. These seem ready-made for this kind of task, but possibly not instantly compelling
• An "Encyclopedia Brown" mystery

Students could then use their "receipts" graphic organizer to write up an argumentative essay, using the receipts to make either footnotes or parenthetical notation.

Start with the Dan Wise “sit by day of the month you were born” game

Everyone has an envelope taped to the bottom of their seat. Inside is a sentence from chapter one of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Each envelope also has instructions for the concentric circles.

For homework, an open ended write/draw/record yourself assignment to introduce themselves to me and the class the way Junior introduces himself.

I often get tripped up by the hero rejecting the call to adventure in the "official" hero's journey, since in so many of the examples I can think of, the hero is champing at the bit to start the adventure. 

I can illustrate this with the two films I'd like to show in class to introduce the hero's journey, and map it as a class: Stardust and Moana. Neither of the heroes of these stories refuses the call to adventure (on the contrary, they chase it with a zeal that encroaches on foolhardiness).

In Stardust, Tristan is so eager to get to the "extraordinary world" that he successfully gets past the man whose family has been guarding the gate for centuries. 

In Moana, Moana is so eager to start her adventure that she nearly gets killed attempting to sail past the reef early in the film (Maui refuses the call, and one point I'll want to draw out in Moana is that every story contains multiple heroes' journeys, and would be very different stories if different people were put in the center of it). 

As I'm typing, it occurs to me that Finding Nemo is a good example of a hero reluctant for adventure, but the "reluctant hero" definitely feels like a (mostly comic) subgenre.

So anyway, here's what just occurred to me: having an adventure is not the same thing as being a hero. Tristan is eager for adventure, but it takes him an incredibly long time to give up on kidnapping a star (making him actively villainous) and instead become a hero. Moana is thrilled to go on an adventure (and unlike Tristan she is morally driven from the start of the film) but when things get really tough she stops believing she CAN be a hero, and literally refuses the ocean's call to heroism. 

How I will teach this is to ask students at the start of class to write about a time they had an adventure, and a time they did something heroic, making it clear that they don't need to be the same incidents. Then we'll discuss the difference between "having an adventure" and "being a hero" and introduce that nuance to the hero's journey. 

How the Hell The Right Came to This

"How Half of America Lost Its F**king Mind" by David Wong (Cracked.com October 12, 2016) - the title is classic misleading clickbait. This was one of the most insightful pieces I read during the campaign. The fact that it was published on the online platform of a Mad Magazine ripoff boggles my mind.

"The Great Republican Revolt" by David Frum (The Atlantic, January/February 2016) - this was written over a year ago, and it was one of the first pieces I thought about after Trump won. Basically its about the difference between Washington conservatives and the Republican base. 

"Why Nobody Cares the President is Lying", by Charles Sykes (New York Times, February 4th 2017) - Charles Sykes is a former conservative radio host who saw the way conservative media was changing from the inside. 

"Donald Trump and the Rise of Tribal Epistemology" by David Roberts (Vox, May 19th 2017) - This is an analysis of why facts don't matter much at the moment.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter (The Atlantic, 1964) - this is over fifty years old, but Hofstadter nailed it.

How the Hell the Left Came to This

"How the Left Lost Its Mind" by McKay Coppins (The Atlantic July 2, 2017) - an account of the left's own hyperpartisan, conspiracy-obsessed media landscape. The writer makes it clear that it's dwarfed by its counterpart on the right, but it still exists and it's not good. Also the graphic (a tinfoil pussy hat) is pretty clever.

"Fairfax County, USA" by Matt Karp (Jacobin, November 28 2016) - an analysis of the Clinton campaign's unfortunate strategy of winning the presidency by appealing to wealthy, college-educated moderates

I demonstrated Turnitin.com to my students by submitting a draft chapter I was writing for a book about project-based learning. 

This wasn't a great move: the submission lit up like a Christmas tree with incidents of "plagiarism" - most of it was self-plagiarism, because I had copied chunks of previous work into the doc to use as guides. 

But a few lines all came from a South African education website, all from a post about project-based learning. The lines all looked familiar - I double-checked, and sure enough, they all appeared in the book I wrote in 2012, Work that Matters: The Teacher's Guide to Project-based Learning.

I did this sleuthing during class, while my students were posting their own papers on Turnitin, waiting for their results, and comparing scores. 

A few of my students were fascinated by my unfolding plagiarism drama. One student documented this sleuthing, and tweeted it:

It took a day before I wrote the "strongly worded email". Here's what I wrote:

Hi _________

I was looking at a post from Schoolnet SA, and I recognized some of the material in it from Work that Matters: The Teacher's Guide to Project-based Learning, which I wrote for the Innovation Unit in 2012 (for example, in the list of essential questions, and the information about check-ins).

Work that Matters is a free resource, and it's great to see it being used around the world. I also know it's been used in lots of other resources, not always with credit, so it's entirely possible that you've never seen it before! 

I'd be grateful if you could acknowledge as a source on the page.

All the best

Alec

Hi Alec

Thanks so much for writing and apologies for not replying sooner. 

Thanks for pointing out the resource Work that Matters: The Teacher's Guide to Project-based Learning. What a superb booklet - your writing ability is excellent. I don't recall seeing the booklet before but I wrote the post a few years back. I apologise profusely for not acknowledging your resource (or the resource where I took it from). How embarrassing! I have now acknowledged your resource, hopefully in the appropriate places. Thank you very much for pointing this out so pleasantly.

Warm regards

School subjects do harm to educators' power to reason. Here's what I mean by that: imagine a school stops teaching history. There's just no class called "history" anymore. Let me guess what you're thinking about this school: its students will be intellectually malnourished. Depending on your ideological predilection, here are a few worries you might have:"they'll grow up unmoored from their heritage", "they won't learn from the mistakes of the past (for example, how can you understand the potential implications of this political moment without knowing about Germany in the 1930s? And how can you understand Black Lives Matter if you don't know about the Civil Rights movement?)", "without turning a critical lens on the stories we tell ourselves about the past, students won't be able to understand the power structures that undergird all contemporary discourse." 

OK, I share all these concerns. But here's a thought experiment: let's say that in every school across the United States, all students took a class called Philosophy. In it, students learned about the fundamental principles of argument, and the various attempts across the millenia to create a coherent theory of justice, of judging right and wrong, and (more recently) of fundamental rights. They learned the mechanics of argument and logic. Now imagine that the schools decide to stop teaching philosophy, an replace it with history. Wouldn't that seem like a catastrophic loss to these fictional educators?

One explanation for our attachment to our current slate of school subjects is what behavior economists call the "endowment effect", by which people tend to overvalue what they own ("overvalue" in the sense that people tend to want more money for things they already own than other people are willing to pay). 

In the case of school subjects, we fear what we would lose by getting rid of a subject. But this fear implies something totally inaccurate: it implies that there is a really good reason that we teach the set of subjects that we teach. But if you consider the skills and knowledge that you need as an adult right now (let alone what we might need in the future) it's obvious that English, History, Pure Math, Physics, Biology, and Chemistry are an odd set of categories to build an education around. And I'm not making an instrumentalist "we should be educating people for the careers of today" argument here. Rather, I think this is a weird list of subjects for ANY POSSIBLE desired educational outcome. The only outcome it fulfills is "to become an educated person according to the current definition" and arguing for the current list of subjects on that basis is (as we'd all know if we'd taken philosophy in school) circular reasoning. 

Here's what I think: subjects are a weird way to organize school. If we were creating the concept of "school" now, there's no way we would use them as an organizing principle, because they aren't a good way to organize learning. They are, in fact, a "folder" system, and what we need is a "tag" system. 

The "folder" system was, until recently, the only way to organize information: when I was growing up, information was mostly stored on paper, and sorted in folders. Because organizational structures tend to outlive their usefulness (sound familiar?), most computers still use folders to organize information. 

This is not optimal - documents do not have only one characteristic and if I'm trying to file an interesting article that argues that you can learn a lot about the 2016 presidential election by studying the fight over Title Nine in universities, what folder should it go in? "Political Analysis?" "Current Events?" "Women's Rights?" "Sports?" "Higher Education?" "Argumentative Writing?" It depends on what I want to use it for - and what I want to use it for will vary from semester to semester. 

Because of this, computers increasingly (though not as quickly as I would like) organize files by tagging rather than by folders. That article about Title 9 can only go into one folder, but I can give it as many tags as I want. 

Education should have a tagging system. If students are learning through interdisciplinary projects, it's easy to identify what they are and aren't learning in each project - which means it would be easy to give it "tags". Over the course of the year, these tags would make it easy to see what skills and information a student had been taught, and what they hadn't (and if these tags connected to assessment - for example through portfolios and Presentations of Learning, you'd be able to see what the student had actually LEARNED which is a lot more important than what they've been "taught"). 

So let's ditch "subjects" as an organizing principle - they make us think in terms of what's taught rather than what's learned, and they reinforce the endowment effect in totally unhelpful ways. 

For more on "subjects", check out "Changing the Subject" by Larry Rosenstock and Rob Riordan, which Andrew Gloag turned into an animation narrated by Larry. 

Came up with these a couple of days ago.