Results of Ruminations

This article shocked me. I know that is click bait on my part, but you should go back and look at it. Can you conceive of an American war* in which over 2 million soldiers' lives were lost? Can you then imagine them not being remembered? A memorial to commemorate the names of the fallen would be, were it to be modeled after the Vietnam War memorial, over eight and a half miles long.  This memorial is about a quarter of a mile long. Picture source . I finished my annual rereading of All Quiet on the Western Front . It's always a difficult read, and the last fifty pages are particularly grim, if only because of the hopelessness that permeates it. The pity of war is rendered so starkly there that I feel my teaching of the topic is in some ways superfluous. Nevertheless, I feel I have an obligation to teach about the First World War with as much sympathy and detail as I can muster, if only because it is so often misremembered by America--and almost forgotten by German...

When I was a kid, I watched a massive amount of television. I remember watching TV even when I didn't want to watch what was on. Sitcoms were bittersweet: I liked a couple of them, but it also meant that cartoons were over for the day. I watched Mr. Belvedere and Charles in Charge . I spent time with Family Matters and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I liked Full House  (and totally crushed on Stephanie) and even tuned in to Home Improvement. Okay, so by saying "a couple of them", they obviously made a difference in my mind. Thinking back, the melange of TV shows I used to watch is essentially the feverdream fodder for " Too Many Cooks " , isn't it? Growing up with sitcom families, I did what (I think) most people do with shows and movies they love: They assume that there's a parallel between the lives on screen with reality. For example, I was always shocked and a little discomfited when one of the TV adults drank coffee. As a card-carrying Mormon family...

I happened upon this article from The New Yorker  by floating around Twitter today. It really shook me up, though not necessarily because of what it described, but the process that I've been (inadvertently) a part of. I teach history, but I focus on European civilization more than anything else. I fold in some additional aspects of world history--a sprinkling of Africa, Meso-America, and Asia creep in, but mostly as they intersected with European movements. This is a traditional approach to history; its biggest shortcoming, I fear, is that it's assumed as being the  history of the world, rather than a  history of the world. That is, I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with having a Eurocentric version of history, provided that it's understood that it's one of many, equally valid ways of appreciating the past. In the course of teaching history this way, I know that there are gaps and assumptions. This is the nature of teaching: Anything I teach ...

11 January 2017--Sachsenhausen concentration camp As the bus trundled through the sleepy German village, snow fell in whispering piles, collecting on the steep peaks of the colorful houses. Gayle slept on my shoulder as we drove through an Advent calendar. On the German radio, American music played. The British band Depeche Mode came on, singing softly. "People are people so why should it be / You and I should get along so awfully?"  We were headed toward Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp about an hour outside of Berlin. The snow made navigating the narrow roads stressful, so I tried to pay attention to my window, rather than the front of the coach. The students dozed or chatted softly, playing with their phones or thinking their thoughts. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for the future prisoners of the camp, who also arrived in cold and snow, but without the comfort of a warm bus, a recent lunch, or even a coat. We disembarked, the snow slicing between ...