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Perspective and thoughts on the past and history education


  • Firewall of Memory: When the Past Speaks In Defense of Democracy
    When history is under assault, preserving voices from the past that speak to us now becomes an act of resistance.
  • Time Traveling Conversations Can Go Anywhere
    How would you explain a traffic light to Benjamin Franklin? How about carry out pizza? Learning about the past is a mind-altering experience that changes how we think about the present
  • Learning Opportunities in the Stories behind Geographic NamingĀ 
    Like them or not, there’s a lot of learning opportunities in the year’s worth of changes crammed into the last three weeks of Executive Orders
  • Faking It for the Holidays
    Hiring a decorating service to string up lights on your house for the holidays is like using AI to write – the product looks good, but it also looks a little fake – and you gain nothing from it.
  • What if I told you……
    The magnitude of change in the few years following 1858, 1938 and 1985 is barely comprehensible, let alone believe. Even though we can’t predict our future, we can get a better sense of scale of what we’re facing in comparison to other periods of massive change.
  • Concise Chronological Context
    Placing the topic event of a lesson in a contextual calendar that centers that event in the chronology of what happened just before and what happened just after helps understanding
  • A Better Reading Diet
    If you’ve had it with reading whatever’s coming out of corporate and social media’s chum machine, then reading Walter Lippman, Neil Postman, and Carl Sagan are better for your reading diet right now
  • Notebook LM’s Latest New Thing – Catch it before it’s old news
    If you’re a teacher who happens to stumble across this post and haven’t yet heard a AI generated podcast from Google NotebookLM, you can be the first in your school or district to impress your colleagues with the AI’s latest shiny thing.
  • The War of the Worlds and Fake News
    Prank your students with a Halloween history lesson framed around the story of a 23 year-old using new technology to prank thousands of people in 1938 and leave them a little more skeptical of what they hear and what they’re taught.