This week’s work was undermined by a nasty stomach bug, but I’ve gotten the Preface into a decent shape and have been working the interlibrary loan people like my personal serfs.  Next up: some editing of early chapters and setting up some research trips.

Don’t want to call them resolutions; sounds too governmental.  Instead, I’m noting down—publically—some things I’d like to accomplish personally and professionally this year.  I’m going to attempt (sort of a meta-goal) to note my progress weekly for my own record-keeping, motivation, and accountability.

1. Read 150 new books (made it through 200, barely, this year.  Being more realistic).
2. Eat less meat, more vegetables; at least one meatless day per week.
3. No candy or sweets.
4. I will drink only beer that I’ve brewed myself, when at home.
5. Continue working on tech tools for my classes; learning some programming to accomplish this.
6. Write more, whether for public consumption or not.
7. Continue my current trend of not bringing work home with me in excessive amounts.
8. Do more with my family.
9. Acknowledge that I’ve hit my realistic workload ceiling.
10. Say “no” more (see above).

Some of these are going to be more difficult than others.  Stay tuned.

I’m one of a group of faculty taking part in a workshop at the beginning of the winter semester.  Part of our preparation for this is to come up with an example of a success and a challenge in our teaching.  I thought it would be useful to throw it out into the world and—possibly—get some feedback or ways to clarify.

A Success
One success I’ve had is encouraging students to have a hand in creating their assessment activities.  In my early world history class, I’ve put students into groups and asked them, for each chapter, to come up with 3 to 5 questions that would be good short answer exercises on an exam.  Then, as a class we discuss each question  discussing what makes that question a good or bad question

How do we determine a good versus bad question?

• Does the question address what they need to know about the material covered in that particular section of the course?
• Does the question make sense (grammatically, stylistically)?  Is it clear?
• Is it answerable given the information to which students have access (Have I talked about it in class? Is it discussed in the textbook?  Did we read a document that covers the information?)?
• Are potential answers concise enough for short answer questions or would it be more suited to a longer essay?

And rarely, but crucially:

• Is the question based on an utter misunderstanding of the material?  If so, how do we fix it?

The end result of this is that students then have a section of their exams that are crowdsourced, giving them some ownership and removing some avenues for complaining about the content of the exam.

A Challenge

I’m going to be honest.  I’ve never liked using the euphemism “challenge” when we often mean “problem” or “screw-up”.  Thus, I’m going to discuss–not challenges–but rather failures for which I repent and for which I have been attempting to atone.  There’s a whole truckload, revolving around student assessment.

• Assessments that build on previous ones–I would like to create a system of historical document analysis instruction that leads students to ask gradually more complex and nuanced questions of sources as we go further into the semester.  Failures result from poor planning, lack of time, and my failure to adjust projects to account for shifting class ability (a project that worked well in one section bombs in another and I, usually, don’t pick up on the warning signs until too late to adjust effectively).
• Exam essays should be the result of a series of practice essays written and critiqued.  Failures resulted from poor time management in the classroom which, in turn resulted from poor scheduling at the top of the semester.

I want to do two things in my classes (regardless of the time period or place covered):

1. Train students to think critically about the past.
2. Train students to communicate their conclusions about the past.

I’ve got notions of how to do this more effectively, but developing ways to operationalize these notions continues to be a critical failure point.

So…where are we?  Heading into the Cold War in my modern US classes and Rome/Han in World.  Early America is getting into the 1840s, so we’re well on our way to the Civil War. 

Most frustrating thing so far this semester is the constantly shifting due dates due to illness, confusion and other nonsense (nearly all my fault).  Strongly considering eliminated due dates per se, shifting to a system where essays are due at any time before the midterm and/or final.  Would provide more flexibility for students (which may lead to better results) and, of course, reduce huge piles of essays to grade.

Downside, of course, is losing track of how students are doing as a group.  Problems that I could address to the class will have to be addressed over and over to individual students.  Not a great solution.  Still, frustrating that after 7 years of doing this, I still misjudge schedules and workload.

In other news… signed a release for a thing I wrote, so that’s probably going to actually appear at some point (I think…it’s a chapter for an edited collection and I am so far out of the loop of how these things work that it’s just sad).  Project SMITH has passed phase one and is winging its way to people for feedback.  Really hope to be able to talk about SMITH at some point, but I strongly believe in the power of loose lips to jinx opportunities (plus, blabbing about potential cool things just makes me sound like a wannabe).

Must go now, watching the Star Wars Holiday Special and I’m missing the Jefferson Starship performance.

An incredible work, that almost makes me wish I had stayed an English major all those years ago. Although I have read Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, this book makes me want to work my way through the Silmarillion and the Book of Lost Tales–something I’ve been reluctant to do. Probably the best part of this book is not the extensive and detailed biography of Tolkien during the Great War years but the concluding essay which places Tolkien’s work in the context of other Great War writers (Owen, Sassoon, et al) and the modernists that followed the war. A worthwhile read for those interested in the Great War, Middle Earth, or the general effect of war on literature.

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Early World History: We’re through the human origins stuff and rapidly moving from archaeology to actual history.  River valley civilizations are up next and I’m excited about showing lots of pictures of Harappan ruins.  One new thing I’m trying in this class is a chapter-by-chapter opportunity for students to create their own exam questions.  They submit a question, and I shove it into a GoogleDoc and let them comment, forming a sort of interactive study guide.  We’ll see how this goes.

US to 1877: Behind already—rejigging this from the 6-hour a week spring session to a 3-hour a week system has, apparently, befuddled me.  Hitting New England witchcraft on Monday, which is always fun.

US since 1877: In the regular section, also a bit behind.  This section of the semester (gilded age to WW1) is my least favorite, with the notable exception of the Spanish-American war, which is awesome.  The honors section of this course is going well, I think.  The first dedicated discussion day was full of participation and student seem keen to come up with a topic for their “migration”-tinged research project.

Outside of the classroom, this week saw the unveiling of MCC’s 9/11 memorial, Constitution Day, a visit from some people representing the Aspen Institute and a couple of tech workshops.  In the end, I would be very surprised if there is a busier week than this the rest of the semester.

Ten years is not a very long time to develop any sort of analytical historical perspective.  We cannot know where the chain of events beginning with the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon will ultimately lead.  What we do know is that 8:46 AM, Eastern Time on September 11, 2001 was the opening moment in a signal event in the lives of Americans.  Like Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of Kennedy and King, and the destruction of the Challenger it will—for generations—be a “where were you when…?” moment.

Deadly terror-causing attacks were not new to Americans.  The twentieth century saw events such as the deadly Wall Street bombing of 1920, the 1993 World Trade Center plot, and the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.  But the attacks of September 11^th were different.  In terms of scale, casualties, and complexity, they dwarfed any previous terrorist act on American soil.  Despite the fact that for two generations, Americans had considered sudden, shocking devastation as something that may happen, that it would come at the hands of fanatical hijackers using airliners—not from a rival nation-state using intercontinental missiles—added a dimension of horror which shocked and terrified us.  That something as mundane as an airliner could cause so much death and destruction shattered our complacency and cast a pall of horror over the ordinary and every day.

And now, a decade out, I find the September 11^th attacks difficult to assess with the dispassionate, analytical eye of history.  I remember the unease with which I stared up at skyscrapers in the weeks afterward and the overwhelming power of the emotions—positive and negative—elicited by the attacks.  I can remember it, relate it, but I’m not sure I can study it.  What, then, is the historian to do?

We shift gears—we embrace memory and we hope for the future.

In dedicating a memorial to the thousands lost on that terrible day we move from history to heritage; from an understanding of events to an expression of collective memory.  How we commemorate the past—the tragedies as well as the triumphs—makes a statement about us.  It symbolizes how we, as Americans, see ourselves responding to the torrents and tides of fate.

In creating “a symbol of the enduring spirit and strength of our nation” we look to the resilience of Americans past.  We endeavor to place ourselves with those who forged a new nation yet struggled to live up to that nation’s ideals; we look to those who fought to preserve the nation in the midst of civil war and create a freer nation in the aftermath.  We hope to stand with those who risked life, limb, and property to fulfill the promise of that freedom, battling the entrenched attitudes that the war could not erase.  We recall the sacrifices of the men and women who fought under our flag throughout the years and the patriots of all varieties on the home front who—on occasion—debated the rightness or wrongness of our actions as a nation.  And on this day, we look to the heroes of 2001 who risked their lives to rescue those trapped in the rubble or those on United Flight 93 who resisted the fate the hijackers tried to impose on them, choosing their own destiny instead.

Our commemorations, as Americans, tend to not only express appreciation and memory of the past but also aspirations for the future.  Today, looking back ten years at the loss and sacrifice of that day, we hope that the spirit and strength of the United States will continue to endure, in peace or war, as we confront death or embrace life.

Nick Redfern’s survey of the Contactee phenomenon is certainly well-done, but I wonder if he should have avoided sacrificing depth for breadth. We’re given some tantalizing glimpses at the most colorful bunch of saucer devotees ever and I wish that we would have gotten more depth on them, particularly Contactees who are women. Redfern devotes a chapter to this, but misses some important figures such as the Mitchell sisters.

Of course, I’m biased, since I’m a huge Contactee fan to begin with. One thing that Refern does do very well is incorporate reams of FBI documentation which places the Contactees within the context of Cold War fears–similar to what I did in my thesis, back in grad school. This, more than anything, cements the book’s value.

Also of note is the chapter devoted to the ideas of the late Mac Tonnies, whose theories of "Cryptoterrestrials" mesh well with the stories told by Contactees. Redfern also delves into the issue of DMT use, along with other psychic theories of contact.

As well as Tonnies, Redfern uses interviews with luminaries such as Greg Bishop and James Moseley. Bishop is a noted expert on the subject while Moseley was there, in the 1950s, interviewing and investigating these experiencers. Redfern talks to the right people for this book.

Overall, this is a great read and the only thing really keeping it from being a five-star book is that it’s too short and easily could have gone into more depth on this fascinating and too-oft-overlooked topic.

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