The language of recent Executive Orders targeting history education and institutionalized public memory provides strong material for students to analyze, while simultaneously presenting them with thought-provoking questions about what they’ve learned and what they think they should be learning.
When history is under assault, preserving voices from the past that speak to us now becomes an act of resistance.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.