For the Hiroshima Investigative Project, as part of their presentation, students will have to evaluate and explain why dropping the atomic bombs on Japan to end WWII was either the right or the wrong thing to do.
You might need an updated version of shockwave to see the following Sliderocket presentation:
The students are in an investigative project regarding the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force Imperial Japan to surrender at the end of WWII.
Imperial Japanese delegation at the Surrender Ceremony on V-J Day.
Currently we are in an informational phase where the students are reading and analyzing a large volume of primary and secondary sources, including letters and memoranda from Albert Einstein, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, President Truman, Col. Paul Tibbets, the Franck Committee, eyewitnesses to atomic explosions as well as others.
After Spring Break, students will have the opportunity to do some guided research, learn some analytical techniques used by historians and then collaborate on their choice of presentation format.
The students are deep into studying WWII at present, having read primary source documents about Pearl Harbor. Recently, military historian and biographer Carlo D’Este had an inspiring piece up at HNN l on Sir Winston Churchill, drawn from his book Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874-1945
“The Power of Oratory: Why Churchill is Still Relevant“
….From the time he became prime minister, until December 1941, when Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, Churchill’s strongest weapon was oratory. As a young army officer stationed in India in 1897 he wrote that: “Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory.”
His speeches of 1940 become legendary, not only for their magnetism but more importantly for their effect on public morale. To counter both the disastrous news in France and to put to rest any notion that Britain might capitulate, Churchill delivered one of his many patriotic speeches to Parliament on June 18 that was also broadcast by the BBC. He made no effort to sugarcoat the extent of the dire situation Britain faced. The struggle that lay ahead from the air and likely from invasion would be met with every means and would be rebuffed. Of Hitler and the nations now under the Nazi jackboot, he said, “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free . . . But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States . . . will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age … Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say, ‘This was their finest hour.’
Read the rest here (D’Este has written biographies on George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower among other published works).
Churchill was an inordinately creative military leader, deeply interested in all facets of warfare from intelligence to technological innovations in armaments ( famously a proponent of the development of the tank in WWI) to military tactics. The amphibious landing at Gallipoli was a disaster but Normandy a generation later, despite Churchill’s misgivings, was a providential success. When in political disgrace – mostly undeserved – as a result of Gallipoli, Churchill did not retire to the shadows but donned a uniform and went to the Western Front ! Moreover he demonstrated there exemplary bravery under fire.
Can anyone imagine a politician doing that today? Or the public expecting him to do so ?
In the Second World War, in 1940 -1941, Churchill was the indomitible rock upon which Western civilization rested. A lesser man as Prime Minister would have taken easy terms from Hitler and made Great Britain a satellite empire of the Greater German Reich, akin to the Phonecians’ relationship to ancient Persia. Few people alive today realize how dire the situation was in the Spring of 1941 and how close liberal democracy came to vanishing from history.
Thanks to Churchill and the bravery of the RAF, the West had a chance to catch it’s breath.
Lucas in the role of Abraham Lincoln
Students in February worked on a project called “Mind mapping Totalitarianism”.
Mindmap poster created by Dhara, Teodora, Cody, John and Claire
Recess is a historical staple of elementary education in America and it is still not uncommon to see children granted small amounts of time for “free play” or educational games in the primary grades. Unfortunately, this practice is under fire in recent years. Some critics of public education or politicians would prefer to see that time devoted to increased amounts of formal, skill-drill exercises; but aside from the fact that test-prep activities quickly hit the point of 
diminishing returns in terms raising a school district’s aggregate mean test scores ( a little is good, a lot is not) the so-called ” wasted free time”, is actually neurologically vital for the optimum cognitive development of children’s brains. It’s good for us older folks too but that’s a topic for another day.
A report from the excellent Eide Neurolearning Blog:
“Several recent articles remind us of the importance of play. From NPR, Old-fashioned play builds serious skills, and NYT, Taking Play Seriously.Also from the American Academy of Pediatrics (The Importance of Play for Health Child Development pdf : “Play allows children to use their creativity while developing their imagination, dexterity, and physical, cognitive, and emotional strength. Play is important to health brain development…Undirected play allows children to learn how to work in groups, to share, to negotiate, to resolve conflicts, an to learn self-advocacy skills.” An increased in hurried lifestyles and school-based academic performance may leave a child with little unstructured time. In one survey by the National Association of Elementary School Principals, 30% of kindergarten classes no longer had recess periods
….An additional point made in the NYT article, was the importance of play for the development of the cerebellum. For kids with sensory processing disorders, this is a big one. Sometimes the earliest indication that something isn’t “quite right” is when a child avoids the normal rough-and-tumble play on the playground. That’s why without intervention, a child may accumulate even fewer play experiences and fall even farther behind their classmates with time.”
Read the rest and find additional brain-learning resources here.
While older students do not have “recess”, time for creative, exploratory and imaginative learning activities should be a regular aspect of core academic classses! !!
The chance to “play” with concepts, solve puzzling scenarios, smash ideas up in a synthesis, articulate new or unorthodox solutions to old problems is a teaching strategy for students to arrive at a deeper understanding of the subject at hand. It trains them to create and evaluate analogies, test the logical soundness of each other’s ideas, debate and experiment. Less structured but goal-directed time is a valuable investment as independent thinking cannot be cultivated in a classroom where every moment is direct instruction and rigidly scripted. At some point, the training wheels have to come off if we are to discover which students can ride on their own and which ones need additional guided practice.
Furthermore, in relation to “play”, music, the arts, sports and drama play a critical role in brain growth and do not represent “frills” but a central modality for integration of concepts, application of learning and generation of insight. As subjects, they are the brain’s “Right” side exercises to the ” Left” side’s analytical-logical reasoning provided by mathematics instruction and science classes.
As a society, we have gone berserk on overscheduling children into formal activities, academic as well as extracurricular, to the point where some elementary age kids show signs of anxiety, burn-out and depession or have time with their families that is not devoted to some kind of structured, formal, event. I find that many students lack any real cognitive independence, normal childhood creativity or the ability to negotiate social interactions with peers without hands-on, adult, supervision. A kind of well-meaning, suburban, shelteredness that produces a vaguely “institutional” passivity in many children.
Our students need both structured learning as well as some degree of “space” or “freedom” in order to maximize their intellectual and emotional growth, not either-or.
ADDITIONAL LINKS on RECESS:
“Time out: Is recess in danger?” - Center for Public Education
“The Importance of Play… ” – American Association of Pediatrics
“Taking Play Seriously” - The New York Times
“Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills” – NPR
“Recess Makes Better Students” - The Washington Post
The Illinois Senate voted 59-0 Thursday to convict Governor Rod Blagojevich (D-IL) of abuse of power and having an exceedingly bad hairstyle and removed him from office. Blagojevich, a former Congressman who once entertained presidential aspirations, is also forever barred from holding public office in the State of Illinois. One unnamed legislator expressed relief to a reporter that ” the freak show” had come to an end. Amen.
I think the following video clip will say all that needs to be said regarding Mr. Blagojevich:
A number of students wanted anytime access to Animal Farm so I am posting each chapter here online ( currently we are on Chapter 7):
Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Chapter VIII Chapter IX Chapter X
This is a question I occasionally get from older children (and not a few childish adults). Despite the anti-intellectual motivation that is usually behind it, this is not an unreasonable question to ask. Basic questions are sometimes the best ones.
Diplomatic historian Walter A. McDougall has an answer that I can happily endorse:
The Three Reasons We Teach History
….The sterility of the current debate over history may be explained by the failure of combatants of all political stripes to acknowledge and grapple with the fact that the teaching of history serves three functions at once. One, obviously, is intellectual. History is the grandest vehicle for vicarious experience: it truly educates (“leads outward” in the Latin) provincial young minds and obliges them to reason, wonder, and brood about the vastness, richness, and tragedy of the human condition. If taught well, it trains young minds in the rules of evidence and logic, teaches them how to approximate truth through the patient exposure of falsehood, and gives them the mental trellis they need to place themselves in time and space and organize every other sort of knowledge they acquire in the humanities and sciences. To deny students history, therefore, is to alienate them from their community, nation, culture, and species.
The second pedagogical function of history is quite different, and often seems to conflict with the first. That is its civic function. From the ancient Israelites and Greeks to the medieval church to the modern nation-state, those charged with educating the next generation of leaders or citizens have used history to impart a reverence for the values and institutions of the creed or state. The post-modern critic may immediately charge that to do so amounts to a misuse of history and the brainwashing of young people: just think of the sectarian history taught in religious schools, the indoctrination imposed by totalitarian regimes, or the flag-waving history that hoodwinked young Americans into volunteering for the Vietnam War. But to cite such examples is to beg the question. The civic purpose of history cannot be abolished, since all history— traditional or subversive of tradition–has a civic effect. So the real questions are whether American schools ought to tilt toward extolling or denouncing our nation’s values and institutions, and how the civic function may be fulfilled without violence to the intellectual function of history.
Those questions are painfully hard to resolve, and are a matter of conscience as much as of reason—which brings us to the third, moral, function of history. If honestly taught, history is the only academic subject that inspires humility. Theology used to do that, but in our present era— and in public schools especially— history must do the work of theology. It is, for all practical purposes, the religion in the modern curriculum. Students whose history teachers discharge their intellectual and civic responsibilities will acquire a sense of the contingency of all human endeavor, the gaping disparity between motives and consequences in all human action, and how little control human beings have over their own lives and those of others. A course in history ought to teach wisdom— and if it doesn’t, then it is not history but something else.
The 1960’s unit is closing out with a look at Social history, specifically the Baby Boomers and how they differed from their parents, the WWII Generation.
Key Concepts:
Conformity Non-Conformity Permissive Parenting Juvenile Delinquency
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