One Week to Go

So here we are in the latter half of August with September bearing down on us with all speed.  It's been lovely having the last few weeks off.  I've been able to visit family and friends in Chicago, do some sightseeing, a lot of cooking, cleaning, and spending time with the dog.  I've also been able to see friends in the area and read for pleasure.  Of course there have been wasted hours of watching dumb movies and playing games, but we're all human, right?

I made my triumphant return to Wrigley Field to see my Cubs beat the Reds, cheered heartily at the return of the NFL season and learned to run the dog ragged with a frisbee.  I haven't had too many good photo shoots, but some new software gave me the long awaited opportunity to turn a bunch of old shots into good panoramas.  If you'd like to see the results, I've added the album here.



But, as I mentioned at the start, September is just around the corner, and with it, the return of graduate coursework.  This fall I am enrolled in four classes: Pedagogy of History, Fundamentals of Teaching, American Legal History, and British Medieval History.  Although I am admittedly less than thrilled to be returning to homework, it will be good to be making forward process again.  In particular I am excited about the British course because I have not studied that period at all, neither formally nor independently.  I'm equally excited by the Pedagogy of History course, because, let's be honest, that's the primary skill set I hope to improve through this Master's program.

Before those courses even begin I embark on an even more exciting journey, the beginning of my student-teaching.  That's right, next week I begin heading down the street to the high school and observing the local history department.  Typically I will be spending two days a week in the high school observing, and likely helping out here and there, but next week I will be observing almost the whole week to get a good grasp on how the school year starts from a faculty perspective and start to establish my role with the students.

I am unbelievably excited for that to get underway.  Finally, after years of thinking about it, thinking about what I'll do and who I'll be, I will start acting.  It is worth reflecting that the point of this blog is to record my mistakes and the lessons learned through them.  That means that in just one week, I'll be in position to start filling it up.  Yep, one week til the mistakes inevitably start.  Let's all just hope and pray that the lessons are learned and acted on shortly thereafter.

Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Vacation Reading

Well, I've managed to once again not write here for long enough that I feel a bit guilty about it.  Job well done Greg...

For the last month and a half I have been positively swamped by my courses and am finally enjoying some time to breath upon their completion.  It was great to get a chance to spend five weeks meeting my colleagues, discussing, studying and debating concepts of education, and building the first tools for use in classrooms come this fall.  Still, I'm happy it is vacation time.

I am actually currently in Chicago with my wife visiting my old stomping grounds, friends, and even playing tourist in the city for a while.  It is wonderful to get back here and see so many friendly faces, not to mention all of the excellent food and fun.  Had lunch at Lou Malnati's yesterday, and I'm still experiencing that warm, happy, full feeling that only the best Chicago deep dish can provide.  Good times.

Perhaps the best part of all this free time, though, is the opportunity to read for my own pleasure.  Most recently I read David Egger's Zeitoun and am now making my way through David McCullough's extraordinary biography, John Adams.  For those of you who have not read either book, I strongly recommend them both.  Although they are both non-fiction, they are both written with a strong narrative voice and are eminently readable.  Just yesterday I was struck by a common thread in the two books.  Zeitoun follows the story of a Muslim American family in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina.  It is a phenomenal depiction of the possibilities inherent in America and the problems that arise in a crisis for which nobody has prepared.  Sadly, one of the main themes of the book is the overlap between America's post-9/11 institutionalized racial paranoia and the FEMA-organized response to maintaining law and order in the flooded city.

As a counterpoint to this story of panic and unchecked law "enforcement" I was struck by a quotation from John Adams during his famous defense of the British soldiers who had fired upon the crowd in Boston in the incident immortalized as the Boston Massacre.  Adams posited that, "it's of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished."  This statement rang true to me on every level and raises so many questions that I was immediately swept into a revery of how I could teach from it.

Of course, as I've alluded, my immediate tie was to the panic response in New Orleans that led to so many wrongful arrests.  But to draw out the string farther, Adams' quote can be seen as an argument against shadowy military tribunals in Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the reactionary policies in the Patriot Act and the historical Alien and Sedition Acts, and even debates over such topics as civil rights and the death penalty.  What a wonderful debate could be had over whether the prime goal of the judicial system is to punish the potentially guilty or protect the potentially innocent!  What lessons could be learned by considering the same question in the light of the court of public opinion, especially the junk media.

As is often the case when reading the writings of America's Founding Fathers, I am inspired by this one line, this one thought.  I hope that I can hold onto it and challenge my classes to consider its implications through history and their own lives.