2010
Foreign Language Competency in the U.S.
Francisco Marmolejo's "Deficiency in Foreign Language Competency: What Is Wrong with the U.S. Educational System?," which appeared on The Chronicle's website yesterday, is worth reading. I won't summarize it here, but I do wonder if the attitudes he describes have anything to do with a comment I sometimes hear when I ask a student if he or she knows another language or plans to learn one: "I'm no good at languages." I thought the same thing of myself thirty years ago. Fortunately, life circumstances and patient teachers later taught me that motivation and practice mattered more than mere aptitude.
Learning to Synthesize History
Hist 314: History of Germany (Fall 2010)
I have started a blog for my fall course, Hist 314, History of Germany in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. It is not much to look at yet, but I wanted to let students know who were looking for information on the course. Before I can do more, though, I shall have to finish teaching my current summer course.
Hist 388-B02, Approaches to European Military History (GMU)
Here’s my syllabus for the summer course. It is different than most I have done, because the class will help plan the content of more than half the sessions. Such collaboration is desirable, I feel, because it will help drive home some key lessons about the methodological and thematic diversity of the field.
U.S. History as a Political Football?
History is one of those subjects that politicians and the general public are never going to leave to historians alone. I’ve got no problem with that, if those doing it follow basic rules of evidence and have a decent sense of what historical thinking is. I wish those proclaiming what they take to be the truth of history were more interested in discovering that truth than reshaping history to illustrate their own political beliefs. Such a phenomenon is not new, but the current trend among some conservatives to rewrite American history to fit their image of America today is irksome at best, downright troubling at worst, especially if such “history” enters the classroom.
For a taste of this phenomenon, read Steven Thomma, “Not satisfied with U.S. history, some conservatives are rewriting it” (McClatchy Newspapers). You might want to view the video on that page too. It would be interesting to find a longer piece in a venue that permitted footnotes to lead to further reading, but I suspect most academic historians do not take these rewritings of history seriously enough to address them. Such battles over history will be fought in the media instead, the standard of truth frequently being ideological purity. Let the buyer beware.
The Politics of Identity and How We Learn History
There is an interesting article in yesterday's New York Times about how Texas is changing the content of its American high school history textbooks. Instead of taking potshots at its clear abuses of history, however, the author locates it in a broader context of history curricula and identity politics over the past few decades. See Sam Tanehaus, "In Texas Curriculum Fight, Identity Politics Leans Right."
Kevin Levin of the blog Civil War Memory thinks that the focus on textbooks in this newest episode of America's culture wars misses the point, however. He points out that much history teaching is no longer focused on textbooks. He has a point. Even those of us who still sometimes use textbooks and do not rely as heavily on the internet see history education in terms very different than those of the Texas Board. See "Texas, Textbooks, and the Battle For Our Children’s Souls" and "If I Should Teach American Exceptionalism . . ."
When History Collides with Commercial Interests
Jon Wiener has published an interesting piece in The Nation about the way that the tobacco industry is using and abusing not only history, but also historians in its quest to fend off liability claims. See “Big Tobacco and the Historians” (February 25, 2010).
History without Reading
History 100 Again
I have been pretty happy lately with my [[thematic]] approach to George Mason University's required History 100 (Western Civilization); however, chronological confusion in many exams last semester made me long to try a textbook again. I might live to regret the attempt, since the course is only one semester long, but I have decided to try the abridged version of Mark Kishlansky et. al., Civilization in the West (Penguin Academics). Trying to squeeze everything into the syllabus was much harder this way, even after skipping the first 200 pages of the text, but I am hoping the textbook will assist me in conveying a better sense of the chronological terrain. I have never been against textbooks in principal. I just have not found them to be practical for a one-semester course of this kind. Will this book fit the bill? Ideally, of course, someone would write a shorter book specifically for this kind of class. Abridged histories are usually still too long. Nonetheless, I am hoping that this halfway affordable text will prove to be an exception.
There are two other reasons I am changing things. First, doing so might help to minimize chances of plagiarism, since there will not be a similar set of assignments already in circulation on campus. Second, change keeps my teaching fresh.
Plagiarism Again
I had no plagiarism cases this fall. Maybe it is because I had an unusually ethical group of students, but it probably also had something to do with analysis they did based on short documents instead of books commonly discussed on the internet. With few exceptions, there were no answers to be found on the internet, though I took some chances with the inclusion of A Doll’s House in some questions. Even then, I did not let students focus on Ibsen’s play, but instead forced them to relate it to short documents that I made available on Blackboard. I have made similar attempts in the past, but usually by asking big synthetic questions based on two or three books instead of narrower interpretive questions based mainly on two or three specific documents.
Another variable was length. These source analysis exercises were only two pages, if that, which might have been short enough to prevent the kind of panic that leads to some plagiarism cases. Of course, two pages is less than ideal, but I had more than 150 students this past fall. Even with a grader to help me 10 hours per week, there was an enormous amount of assessment to do, especially since there were three of these exercises.
On a related note, in the coming semester I am going over to the dark side with some quizzes and parts of my exams. By that I mean I will be integrating some multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank elements. As much as I prefer to have students actively produce knowledge in exams, there is a limit to how much grading I can and should do, a limit I far exceeded last semester. Moreover, I will still be having them do analysis. Unfortunately, multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions can raise the specter of copying in overcrowded classrooms. It is with this issue in mind that I plan to use multiple versions of quizzes and exams. I am just not sure if I will have to create these by hand or if there is an easy and free technological solution.