I’m currently working on a project with eighth-graders who are learning about civil rights. The other day, we were talking about Rosa Parks. I told them that she wasn’t just some random bus passenger who was too tired to move, but rather (and more impressively) an experienced protester who allowed herself to get arrested on purpose. This surprised the students, who then wanted to know – if that was true – why all of their other teachers had told them otherwise. I said that their other teachers probably heard the story that way, as this is a well-circulated account of what happened.

As an example, I mentioned that it was a popular myth that Columbus proved the earth was round. This time, it was one of the other adults in the room who challenged me on this. I told the students that they didn’t have to believe anything was true, just because I said it was. They could put it on their Google List.

When I visit this class, the teachers asks me if the students should take notes. I encourage the students to keep a Google List. If we broach a topic we don’t have time to cover fully, you put it on the Google List. If there are questions I didn’t have time to answer, or didn’t know the answer, you put it on the Google List. If something I say doesn’t ring true, or contradicts what you already believe, you put it on the Google List. In the Information Age, there’s no reason that learning needs to be completely guided by the teacher, or that it needs to stop when the bell rings.

When I was in graduate school, I kept a “Library List” with me during my classes, so when a professor brought up a reference I didn’t know, I could go to the library and look it up. For me, that’s who these questions were addressed Before Google. What a difference the Internet has made! Today, I’m all over Google (and Wikipedia, actually), expanding my knowledge and filling in gaps on a daily basis. These are real 21st century skills. We should be encouraging our students to develop them.

I’d like to start a new weekly feature where I discuss the teaching of Shakespeare. I know – that’s the last thing you’d expect from this blog – but let’s give it a try and see how it goes. Over the next few months, I’m planning to teach The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Hamlet to different eighth-grade classes, plus I’ll be doing Macbeth and Shakespeare in general with my graduate students, so I should have a lot to share over the next few months.

This week, I began working with an eighth-grade class on The Merchant of Venice. These students will be creating a video (similar to the Cymbeline video the same teacher’s class created last year). I came in to give students an introduction to the play. I happen to be working with the same students in their Social Studies class on our Civil Rights unit, and I’m looking to make cross-curricular connections, so we began by looking at Shylock’s speech from Act I, Scene iii:

Signior Antonio, many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my moneys and my usances:
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,
For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spet upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.
Well then, it now appears you need my help:
Go to then; you come to me, and you say,
‘Shylock, we would have moneys:’ you say so;
You, that did void your rheum upon my beard,
And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold: moneys is your suit.
What should I say to you? Should I not say,
‘Hath a dog money? Is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats?’ or
Shall I bend low, and in a bondman’s key,
With bated breath, and whispering humbleness,
Say this:—
‘Fair sir, you spet on me on Wednesday last;
You spurn’d me such a day; another time
You call’d me dog; and for these courtesies
I’ll lend you thus much moneys?’

I asked the students to interpret the speech, and they seemed to have no trouble at all understanding what Shylock was saying. We went through the rest of the scene and the students understood the deal being made and the motivations behind it on both sides. When we got to the last lines of the scene…

Come on: in this there can be no dismay;
My ships come home a month before the day.

…the students understood that Antonio’s ships would not be coming in. The teacher made a nice connection to the current financial crisis that caught everyone by surprise. We also covered Portia’s father’s challenge by reading Morocco’s examination of the three caskets in the next scene. Before we looked at Morocco’s choice, the students predicted that the lead casket was the correct one, because it’s always the most unlikely one. One student (who “hates Shakespeare”) explained that Portia’s father didn’t want someone for his daughter who was selfish or greedy. I’m really going to enjoy working with this class.

We showed them the Cymbeline video and invited them to start thinking about what they might want to do with The Merchant of Venice. And now that the students’ interest is piqued, the teacher is going to go back and cover the characters and themes before the students start reading the play.

More next week!

Last month, I had been considering making the trip to D.C. to be at the inauguration. But as the event neared, I realized that the most important place for me to be today was in school with the children.

When I was in the 10th grade, the teachers allowed us to watch the Challenger shuttle launch. This was the first time a civilian was sent into space, and it was a school teacher at that. As most of us remember, the shuttle exploded, and history was made in a different way.

I think that seeing the event in school made it something special. We usually don’t watch television in school, so the event was given extra significance. When I discuss it with other people my age, they often have a similar memory. I remember some news events I watched at home, but not nearly as vividly.

I hope the students who watched the inauguration today felt inspired by it, and that having been allowed to watch it in school helps them preserve the memories. I watched the event with an auditorium filled with junior high school students whose claps and cheers will forever be a part of my memory of the event.

I can’t imagine how being at the event myself could have been any better than that.

Via One Little Fish comes a very funny, very timely video:

More information about the project here. The video has received over 1 million hits, spreading awareness about an important issue, and making a powerful statement about activism in the information age.

My organization just held an event today that had 7th grade students giving persuasive PowerPoint presentations on current events issues ranging from gun control to the death penalty. I served as emcee, and had a lot of fun riling up the students about speaking out on issues and taking an active part in their democracy.

Perhaps for the next round we should consider using video. I’m already planning a project with students to create Public Service Announcements about environmental issues. Creating current events PSAs in social studies class seems like the logical next step. I’ll keep you posted.

UPDATE: In the post, I said that the video has received over 1 million hits. Actually, the video topped 1 million views on its first day.

Have you been looking for a game that combines the fun geography challenge of Traveler IQ with the social responsibility of FreeRice? Look no further. A site called FreePoverty allows you to identify locations on a label-free map while generating ad revenue that donates water to people around the world who need it. Enjoy!

I was doing pretty well at first, but my ignorance of Australian geography turned out to be quite a detriment on the higher levels. Crikey!

It’s been a while since we’ve had a Question of the Week. Fans of the site may recall that the Question of the Week was originally inspired by the Edge Foundation’s annual question, asked to leading thinkers. This year, their question is “What have you changed your mind about? Why?”

For me, I’d have to go with Wikipedia. When I first heard about the open source encyclopedia, I scoffed. It was one thing for the Internet to allow anyone to post their opinions, but quite another to trust the general public to get encyclopedia-style facts right. Without authors putting their names on their work, the information would be worthless.

But as I started using Wikipedia, I found it to be an invaluable resource. I assured myself that I wasn’t really using it, only using it as a casual reference. But over time, I was surprised to find it a source I could rely on. Of course, it’s not always accurate, and I still couldn’t see myself actually citing it as a source in a publication, but it’s way more reliable than any of us would have had a right to expect.

The tipping point for me was reading Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen. I was expecting this to be a madcap trivia book of fun facts about American history that never made the textbook. Not so much, no. Instead, it was a detailed historiography of twelve American history textbooks and how they knowingly distort and obfuscate their subject matter. After that, I could no longer consider Wikipedia to be inferior to the textbooks we’ve been giving students all this time. I would actually trust a fact in Wikipedia over one in a textbook if they were in conflict.

But it’s not just facts; Wikipedia is also superior when it comes to point-of-view. I laughed at their value-neutral philosophy, because such a thing isn’t possible. At least, it’s not possible where there’s a single author. But in the negotiated definitions of Wikipedia, there is a natural balance of viewpoints that really gives the readers a sense of the range of opinions on a particular issue, often just as valuable (if not more so) than the dry facts. Even fake controversies seem to be quickly expunged from its pages.

I’ve changed my mind about Wikipedia. How about you?

What have you changed your mind about? Why?

It’s been a while since I’ve really written anything, but I’ve been busy with a number of things, mostly work related. I’ve also been working on a new resource for this website which should be available shortly. Watch this space!

Last weekend, I attended a social studies conference that I’ve been meaning to write about. One of the speakers was Phil Gersmehl, who discussed the latest research in spatial intelligence. It seems that there are now believed to be eight different types of spatial intelligence, each housed in a different section of the brain. He suggested that geography education, at an early age, could help to strengthen these abilities. I say, it’s never too late.

Via The Media Dude, here’s a geography game that will help you practice your map skills. His brother, The Boy Wonder, points us toward an old Nintendo game called Warehouse 18, which is less about dexterity and more about using spatial thinking to solve visual puzzles.

And yeah, I’ve been pretty busy with these, too.

Last night, inspired by a response to my deliberately vague Question of the Week, I picked up my old worn-out copy of Dune. I was assigned the book in high school twenty years ago, and still have the same copy, which means either they had given it to us, or more likely, I never got around to returning it.

Still tucked into the almost definitely stolen book is a bookmark that also must have been given to us in high school. It’s a “Cultural Literacy” bookmark, based on the book by E.D. Hirch that came out at about that time. My high school English teacher was a huge proponent of this book which literally listed pages and pages of references that a culturally literate person should know. Our teacher, who yet was cool enough to assign us Dune and Catch 22 (which I also somehow still have), would photocopy the pages of the book and assign us cultural references to look up and present to the class.

The bookmark has a very small sampling of these terms, which includes basal metabolism, taproot, intransitive verb, Tito, ombudsman, capital gains, and byte. If you can’t define all of those terms, this bookmark says you’re illiterate.

Hey, in 1987, byte was a toughie.

And that’s really the point here. This bookmark just screams the point: You can’t know what students will need to know in twenty years. The skills needed today are so much more complex than memorizing lists of references. In a constantly changing world, creativity and the ability to learn new skills are far more important than knowing offhand what a Eustachian tube is. If I did learn that in high school, it’s gone now, and I don’t seem to miss it.

And I do think kids need to learn facts. But facts need to be learned in context. If historical dates are important, it’s only because they allow us to understand how two or more events are connected to each other. Did we invade Iraq before or after 9/11? Knowing that can profoundly affect our understanding of both events.

If, in the future, both events were scattered among a list of “cultural literacy” items and students were required to look them up and present them to a class, that sense of context would be lost. Much better to give them authentic tasks that allow them to construct meaningful understandings. They’ll still learn the facts, and will remember them longer.

The Center on Education Policy released a disturbing new study this week, measuring the effects of No Child Left Behind:

The report finds that approximately 62% of school districts increased the amount of time spent in elementary schools on English language arts and or math, while 44% of districts cut time on science, social studies, art and music, physical education, lunch or recess.

Now, I’m pretty much appalled by all of the cutbacks, but I’ll leave the bulk of it to ScienceTeacher.com, SocialStudiesTeacher.com, and LunchTeacher.com. I’m ShakespeareTeacher.com, so I want to talk about arts education.

(And let’s make no mistake – the extra time being spent on ELA isn’t being spent on literature. It’s being spent on test prep, and more test prep.)

Arts education is absolutely essential for students preparing for the world that we’re currently living in. With the image continuing to gain dominance over the written word, people who can demonstrate artistic ability are highly marketable in today’s economy. From graphic designers to documentary filmmakers, those who can master today’s tools of communication are able to command a wider audience and expand their range of communication. In the connected world, this is real currency.

And even if all of that weren’t true, the arts teach us how to identify problems and solve them with creativity and discipline. Those skills help us in any endeavor.

I came across a website for an artist named Jen Stark, who creates sculptures from construction paper that won’t help anyone pass a reading test any time soon. But they bring beauty into the world, which is worth at least a link from my blog. Take a look at her work, and tell me she didn’t have to develop some pretty sophisticated math skills along the way.

Or take French artist Huber Duprat, who recruited caddis fly larvae, who typically create protective shells out of silk and their surrounding materials, and placed them in an environment of gold flakes and precious gems. The result is a combination of art and science that boggles the mind. Click the picture below to see the video.

Or take a look at the Universcale by Nikon, an application of the mathematics of scale to allow human comprehension of the natural universe, and tell me your appreciation of it isn’t primarily aesthetic.

I wonder what Leonardo DaVinci would have thought about eliminating arts education to teach math. What would Shakespeare have thought about eliminating arts education to teach literacy? What would Descartes say about eliminating science to teach math? What would Hemmingway think of eliminating social studies to teach literacy?

Reading and math are important skills. But even if an educational system were somehow able to acheive 100 percent literacy and numeracy, and nothing else, it would still be a failure.

At work, we’re preparing to roll out our new unit on Civil Rights, and I’ve been catching up on all of those things I should have learned in school but, for whatever reason, didn’t. Today, I learned something new about Emmett Till.

What I knew was that Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old African American child who was brutally murdered for the crime of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi in 1955. The two killers were acquitted by an all-white jury who either thought the killing was justified, or just couldn’t be bothered to care that it wasn’t.

What I learned today was that the two killers later gave a full confession to Look magazine, which published their account of the killing. The article is being used as a part of our Civil Rights unit, and is available on the PBS website.

I’m not going to quote from it; you really have to read the whole thing. Then, you have to click on the link at the top that says “Letters to the Editor” and read those, because they are even more chilling than the article, in terms of understanding what the times were like.

The cumulative effect of studying myriad injustices across several different civil rights movements in such a short period of time has been sobering. But the most staggering element of all of it is just how recently most of this happened. When you look at all of the injustices in the world today, it’s easy to forget how much progress we’ve actually made. So, it’s been both depressing and inspiring at the same time. I’m curious to see how the kids will take to it all.

By the way, the PBS website is the best website on the entire Internet. Just thought you’d like to know. For more on this story, you can visit their Emmett Till page. If you’re an educator, you’ll want to set aside a weekend to explore their Teacher Source. They also have a page for kids. And there’s much, much more worth checking out, whatever your particular interests may be.