I am certainly adding materials at a slower pace than I had intended. I think it is a perverted sens of senioritis: as the summer, and my freedom, slouch to an end, I am less inclined to work
This could cause problems.
But today I managed to put up four documents all in the routines, schedules etc., page. They include a Binder Check Rubric, a Classroom Incident Form for when students "express themselves" in class, a Global Recall worksheet for occasionally reflecting on what has been learned (muchos props to Senor Corburn) and Do Now/Aim Log in which student will record the text of each lesson's Do Now and Aim. --They will respond to the Do Now in their notes and each day's lesson (ideally) will include a written summary answering the Aim as I plan to require the use of the Cornell Notes note-taking format this year.
One innovation I will be trying this year is the incorporation of the Syllabus as a "living document". Most of the Binder Paperwork I am uploading here will be attached to the syllabus in the first section of each student's binder. Thus, when they log their Aims, highlight their participation or get themselves in trouble, they will alway refer back to the syllabus. We all know that, in general, teachers devote a lot of effort to organizing and writing their syllabi, but most students don't realize they have one after the first week. Honestly, for most teachers the syllabus is a device for organizing and visualizing the course for ourselves. Hopefully this approach I am taking this year will make what is normally an ignored and abused document an interactive element of the course and student learning.
For my non-pedagogical contribution today, I would like to offer an excellent editorial from the past week's New York Times that suggests the Cold War didn't end as neatly as some historians and political analysts would like to think. It could serve as an excellent supplementary reading when we tend to wrap things up at the end of the year--it provides some continuity between Tiananmen Square and the Olympic Rings, and the withdrawal from Eastern Europe and the invasion of Georgia.
--WJT.
Cold Friends, Wrapped in Mink and Medals
Writing in The Financial Times last week, Chrystia Freeland recalled Francis Fukuyama’s
1989 essay “The End of History?,” which trumpeted the definitive
triumph of liberal democracy. The great nightmare tyrannies of last
century — the Evil Empire, Red China — had been left behind by those inseparable twins, freedom and prosperity. Civilization had chosen, and it chose us.
So much for that thesis. Surveying the Russian military rout of neighboring Georgia
and the spectacle of China’s Olympics, Ms. Freeland, editor of The
Financial Times’s American edition and a journalist who started her
career covering Russia and Ukraine, proclaimed that a new Age of Authoritarianism was upon us.
If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for
autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the
like, but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash
heap in 1989.
The Chinese have made their Olympics an exultant display of
athletic prowess and global prestige without having to temper their
impulse to suppress and control. From the dazzling locksteps of that
opening ceremony, to the kowtowing international V.I.P.’s, to the
carefully policed absence of protest, this was an Olympics largely free
of democratic mess.
Individualism has been confined between lane markers. The
pre-Olympics promises that attention would be paid to international
norms of behavior went unredeemed. The New York Times’s Andrew Jacobs
followed one citizen who decided to take up the government’s Olympic
offer of designated protest zones for aggrieved parties who had filed
the proper paperwork. Zhang Wei applied for the requisite license and
was promptly arrested for “disturbing social order.” Take that, International Olympic Committee.
The striking thing about Russia’s subjugation of uppity Georgia was
not the ease or audacity but the swagger of it. This was not just about
a couple of obscure border enclaves, nor even, really, about Georgia.
This was existential payback.
It turns out that if 1989 was an end — the end of the Wall, the
beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, if not in fact the end of
history — it was also a beginning.
It gave birth to a bitter resentment in the humiliated soul of Russia, and no one nursed the grudge so fiercely as Vladimir V. Putin.
He watched the empire he had spied for disbanded. He endured the
belittling lectures of a rich and self-righteous West. He watched the
United States charm away his neighbors, invade his allies in Iraq, and,
in his view, play God with the political map of Europe.
Mr. Putin is, in this sense of grievance, a man of his people, as
visitors to the New York Times Web site can see in the sampling of
breast-beating commentary from Russian bloggers. It is safe to assume
that Mr. Putin’s already stratospheric popularity at home has grown to
Phelpsian proportions, not least among the long-suffering military.
In China, 1989 was the year that a spark of liberal aspiration
flickered on Tiananmen Square, and was decisively extinguished. That
was another beginning, or at least a renewal: of Chinese resolve. In
May of that year, in the midst of the Tiananmen euphoria, Mikhail S. Gorbachev visited Beijing, and two visions of a new communism stared each other in the face.
The protesters on the Chinese pavilion held banners welcoming Mr.
Gorbachev as a champion of the greater freedom they sought. Meanwhile,
the visiting Russian delegation marveled at the abundance in Chinese
stores, the bounty of a policy that chose economic liberalization
without political dissent.
The Chinese and Russians scorned each other’s neo-Communist models,
but in some ways they have evolved toward one another. Both countries
now tolerate a measure of entrepreneurship and social license, as long
as neither threatens the dominion of the state. Both countries have
calculated that you can buy a measure of domestic stability if you
combine a little opportunity with an appeal to national pride. (The
Chinese “street” felt no more sympathy for restive Tibetans than the
Russian blogosphere felt for Georgia.) And both have discovered that if
you are rich the world is less likely to get in your way.
President Bush was mocked from both sides for his seeming
impotence. Neoconservatives were appalled by photos of President Bush
sharing a laugh with Mr. Putin in Beijing while Russian armor gathered
at the Georgian border. For a president who has made the export of
democracy his signature doctrine, that looked to the stand-tough crowd
like a “Pet Goat” moment.
Others argued that this was a crisis Mr. Bush tacitly encouraged by talking up Georgia’s rambunctious president as a friend and NATO candidate. By midweek, possibly goaded by the wailing of neoconservatives and the aggressively anti-Putin rhetoric of Senator John McCain,
Mr. Bush had abruptly amped up his opprobrium and dispatched an
American airlift of humanitarian aid. And by the weekend there was a
cold war chill in the air.
But Mr. Bush’s predicament is not just his. The question of how to
deal with these reinvigorated autocracies bedevils the Europeans and
will surely rank high among the legacy issues that confound Mr. Bush’s
successor.
This time it is not — or not yet — the threat of nuclear apocalypse
that limits the West’s options toward our emboldened Eastern rivals.
The Chinese, in fact, are acting as if they have gotten past the
saber-rattling stage of emerging-power status; they lavish diplomacy on
Taiwan and Japan, and deploy the might of capital instead. The Russians
may be in a more adolescent, table-pounding stage of development, but
Mr. Putin, too, prefers to work the economic levers, bullying with
petroleum.
The United States, meanwhile, is mired in Iraq and Afghanistan,
estranged from much of the world, and bled by serial economic crises.
History, it seems, is back, and not so obviously on our side.
Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, covered the last years of the Soviet Union for the newspaper.
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