The Office View

Here's a partial view of what I see if I look out the window of my office. The windows from my window belong to the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston, where I work.

Shades stay down most of the time, as they are in this picture; though even when they're up, you can't really see into the windows unless someone turns a light on.

It's not exactly a stimulating view, but it's useful in that it lets you alone, which is a good thing when you're trying to work.

Employment Rates

The Washington Post (and other news outlets) reported today that the job growth rate for the month of June was not as high as analysts had predicted it would be, only 112,000 new jobs instead of the 240,000 that had been estimated.

But what gets me is this tidbit at the end of the article: "June's Labor Department report showed that average hourly wages rose by a 2 cents to $15.65, a 0.1 percent increase, less than the 0.3 percent expected. The average workweek fell by two tenths of an hour to 33.6 hours. Total hours worked in the economy dropped 0.6 percent."

$15.65 x 33.6 hours x 50 weeks = $26,292.00

That's not a good wage in today's economy, with housing, heating, and food costs being what they are. It's certainly not a wage one would want to support a family on.

And I would venture to guess that many people who are in these new jobs are making less pay than they did in their old jobs. I would also assume that while they were out of work, that they may have chewed up savings and/or increased debt. Coming back to work for less under those stressed circumstances is better than not working at all, but it's hardly cause for celebration.

And at 33.6 hours, what kind of benefits are these people getting, if any? Are they jobs in places where you need to work a full forty hours a week to get health insurance?

The economy may be on the mend, on paper, and by all economic theory, but going back to work for only $26,292 isn't the kind of thing that would make me at all excited about endorsing Bush's economic policies.

Meanwhile, businesses are being encouraged to offshore more jobs to survive. Again, according to the Washington Post: "In blunt terms, the report by the Boston Consulting Group warns American firms that they risk extinction if they hesitate in shifting facilities to countries with low costs. That is partly because the potential savings are so vast, but the report also cites a view among U.S. executives that the quality of American workers is deteriorating."

So the good paying jobs get outsourced more cheaply and what new jobs American workers can get offers fewer hours and less pay. These same workers who have increased productivity dramatically over the past decade or so are now deemed inferior.

And Bush and Cheney are bragging about this? They're proud of what's happening to working families and they think this is a good economic outcome?

I wonder if they will say what percentage of the tax cuts they love so much go to companies outsourcing jobs?

Follow Up: Blogs and Teaching

1. From BLOG THREE HUNDRED NINETY-ONE:
A less obvious answer lies in getting teachers open to change, to examining carefully all their practices to ensure that the writing they ask students to do is grounded in interest, choice, value, and authenticity.

2. See also BLOG THREE HUNDRED EIGHTY-EIGHT, A Guided Tour To Blogging.

Blogs and Teaching

I've been puzzling over how to think about blogs in a writing course. Well not puzzling over whether I might use them were I teaching a course at the moment -- I would in heartbeat, but how.

As a teacher, the technology behind a service like Blogger is too good not to experiment with and in; it's a really a good pedagogical playground. I could use a Blog as simple course interface -- a place to post a syllabi. I could ask students to keep blogs, assigning them different prompts or activities to post.

They might keep a blog for research projects. Or as shared and public reading journals. Or really, anything else we can think of to write on that's course related. With any luck, some would come out of the experience with a newly discovered writing voice, along the lines/along the way Austin Lingerfelt describes in "(this) space", an essay on blogging and writing.

Though at this point, my thinking is that blog use in the course would be better used as a way to simply introduce students, if they're not already blogging in some form, to the technology and possibility offered. It would be optional to make the blogs public, though for some that's half the fun -- being read. And like any kind of writing tried in a writing course, the goal would be to find enough ways to prompt students to write interestingly, or rather to find an interest in what they're writing despite the fact that it grew out of a required course (as first year writing courses, the kind I most like to teach, are).

Much would depend upon where I taught, the context for the course I was offering, and what I was contracted to do by the program as an instructor of that course. But choosing to experiment wouldn't be an easy choice to make.

The harder question for me, and frankly the more interesting question, is what's the future of blogs as pedagogical tool. Not among the trailblazers, like Jeff Rice and the folks he links to in his "TechRhet" entry (an entry that comments on a techrhet email list discussion about the role of blogs, a discussion I took part in and that forms the basis of this rumination). Trailblazers and people who jump and make use of a new, or relatively new technology and do cool things are interesting to study and learn from. And a lot of them are in fact asking questions about blogs and teaching.

But I'm always more interested in what to say to instructors who are not pioneers.

I ask this because I spend a good part of my job for Bedford/St. Martin's traveling to campuses, often giving workshops on teaching with technology. And not just technology we offer as a college publisher, but very often on helping people use the technology at hand, whether that's word processing software in a networked computer lab, a course management system they have on campus, or an amalgamation of freeware, including blogs.

The thing I find is that there needs to be a compelling reason for teachers to change what they're doing and the technologies they're using. Sometimes teachers are self-compelled. They might stumble across an essay like Austin's (linked above), and be moved to try blogs. They might hear a good teaching story at a conference. (I heard several at Computers and Writing 2004.) They might be motivated by a technology grant or teaching and technology program on their campus.

Unfortunately too, many teachers are compelled by circumstances not of their choosing. The department might be feeling pressure to do more with technology in way or another. And so instructors might all be given course WWW sites and asked to use them in some way. Or they might be under pressure from students to do more online.

And there are the vast majority of teachers who simply see no reason to switch what they're doing; they remain uncompelled, or unmoved by arguments others find compelling. And often for good reason: what they're doing is working for them. How they teach writing fits into their course loads, their lives, the way they manage their time, how they respond to students, when and where they do work, and so on.

So for these teachers, what advantages do computer-based, and more significantly, blogs, however you want to define them, offer? Why use a blog, why add a new technology layer onto what one is doing? How can we make clear the advantages? How do we help teachers learn how to shift the way they work? How do we keep learning curves gentle rises and not rock-face climbs?

Those are the questions that I think matter not only with Blogs, but with any new technology. They were the questions that mattered 20 years ago and 10 years. They mattered with email lists and file sharing and MOO's and chatrooms; they matter now with Blogs and they'll matter in the future with whatever new technology or innovation changes the way students and teachers write and teach and learn writing.

The Press at a Presidential Press Conference

Well, you can see why George Bush rarely does press conferences (only 12 so far), let alone in prime time (the one on April 13th was only his third). He can't -- or won't -- go off message, and the longer the conference goes on, the more dim the President seems because he's reduced to repeating himself over and over.

He never looks good after the first few questions. So resoluteness becomes stubbornness; conviction becomes cement; concern becomes cynicism. He converts his assets, as time goes on, into negatives. As a critic of Bush's policies, I think this process reveals a truth -- he lacks imagination. He's intellectually lazy and dishonest. He doesn't question a decision once it's been made, even when the actions taken need adjustment.

He rushed to war on March 19, 2003. He made the war primarily about Saddam's WMD and argued we could no longer wait for him to disarm and that we were in immediate danger from those WMD's. Even though, given the lack of WMD's to date, Saddam had apparently disarmed. Bush could have taken more time -- the summer, another year, to let more inspections play out, and used that time to build a coalition with U.N. imprimatur (not control, but just backing) that would have made the post invasion safer and more likely to succeed. But he didn't.

If the war is about democracy and freedom and America's role as a country which needs to foster that --a laudable goal-- then Bush should have taken the lead up and planning for war far more seriously than he has. But he rushed into war and bungled the postwar planning. The war was the easy part; our military shredded a paper tiger. But winning the war and winning the peace and securing democracy are markedly different. And Bush has so far failed miserably in planning for peace and democracy.

Bush has failed as a President not so much for going to war, but for making the public argument for war predominantly about WMD because that was the scariest scenario, for politicizing the war very early on via Karl Rove's strategies, for not revealing --and not looking to see-- the true cost of such an effort in terms of lives, monies, resources. He's failed not in boldness, but in honesty on what the war would cost. He also failed to truly trust the American people; he duped them into the war by linking Saddam to September 11.

Bush didn't have the patience to make the case that this war was needed to spread democracy and to bring a tyrant to his knees. He didn't have the courage to tell the people and congress what this war would cost in people and money. And he didn't have the foresight to see how difficult and continually dangerous the post war occupation would be.

In September of 2002, USA Today ran a cover story about Bush's war preparations which reported that analysts were being told not to prepare any reports or estimates that considered the complications and possible negative outcomes of invading Iraq. That is, in part of the propaganda effort, there was a deliberate --and unconscionable-- decision made to not consider the true costs, the true effort, the true sacrifices this war would require.

But that is not surprising. Bush failed to put into his budget an 87 million dollar funding for post Afghanistan war efforts. Embarrassed republicans in congress had to remember that and add it into the budget. Bush is negligent and dangerous because he doesn't attend to the details.

And that's why the press did so poorly at the press conference -- they never pressed on the details, but instead on the symbolic and the trivial. The reporters turned their brief question period not into a moment to learn new information or to ask questions that pressed on the details of Bush's actions in calling for the war, in starting it, and in carrying out the aftermath. No, they focused on cheap --and stupid-- gotcha questions. How many times was he asked to admit mistakes? How many times was he asked to apologize? And how many times did Bush deflect those questions and repeat his speech?

Why not ask questions about policy details? Why not ask questions strategy? When those were asked -- who will we be turning sovereignty over to? -- Bush didn't have good answers, but at least he tried to answer those, and in the trying, we got some measure of his thinking and planning and learned how abysmal they've been.

But no. For the most part, the press focused on issues or aspects of issues made them like jackals, hoping Bush would slip. So as bad as Bush came across, the press came across as worse.

Andrew Sullivan as Witness

TIME.com: Why The M Word Matters To Me -- Feb. 16, 2004

In this eloquent Time Magazine essay, Andrew Sullivan, who also has been writing wonderfully about this at his Daily Dish blog, gives witness to the argument I made below about "civil unions" being a shabby "separate but equal" approach. He talks about what it means --emotionally, developmentally, logically, personally, and socially-- that he grew up, and continues to live, in a country where gay marriage is forbidden.

Gay Marriage in Massachusetts

Text of the amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution limiting civil marriage to a man and woman.

The amendment is dishonest. It pretends that marriage is sacred and must be reserved only for heterosexual couples for some reason. But marriage isn't necessarily sacred, especially in the eyes of the state. In the eyes of the state, a marriage occurs when a couple gets a marriage license and has the license signed by someone the state designates that power to, whether it be a Justice of the Peace or a member of the clergy. No ceremony is required. All that the state demands for granting a couple the status and benefits of marriage are a few signatures.

So when the ammendment says, "The people also wish to establish civil unions to provide to same-sex couples all the benefits, protections, rights and responsibilities under state law as are granted to spouses in a marriage. . ." and "Two persons of the same sex shall have the right to form a civil union if they meet the requirements set forth by law for marriage between a man and a woman." all the state is saying is that you can get married, but you can't call it marriage. You get the benefits and responsibilities, but a second level, compromise term -- "civil union." In order to unite civilly, you need to meet the same requirements (such as they are) man and a woman who want to marry. So to civilly unite, you have to meet the requirements of marriage, only the state won't say you're married.

So again the question is, what's so special about the word "marriage" that only heterosexuals may legally have it describe their state sanctioned unions? Well, according to the amendment, nothing much. What does it marriage really mean? Ultimately, what it means depends upon the couple who marry and where they get married and how they approach their marriage. A marriage is only sacred if a couple believes their love to be sacred. It's only religious if the couple marries in accordance with the tenets of their faith, both in word and spirit. The Supreme Court decision doesn't force any church to perform same sex marriage ceremonies. The decision doesn't undermine the rights of people of faith to marry in accordance with their moral and religious beliefs.

Further, the decision doesn't undermine the meaning of marriage or dilute its value. In fact, it strengthens marriage by extending it, by making it possible for more people to marry. The decision, at its heart, says there can be no such thing as separate but equal. The court recognizes that gay and lesbian couples exist, and that many of them are committed to one another with as much love as any heterosexual couple, and that they have been discriminated against by the state for no good reason. This discrimination didn't help heterosexual marriages. It only stigmatizes those who are gay and their families, especially the children of those couples.

Defining marriage as only the union of a man and woman is something a church might do, but not something the state should do. The amendment's own language makes it clear how wrong the designation "civil union" is. It's a second-class, second-rate designation; gays and lesbian are not second-class, second-rate citizens. To treat them that way is wrong, said the Massachusetts Supreme Court. And the Court is right.

IPL

Internet Public Library at http://www.ipl.org is an excellent beginning place for students who will use the WWW for research. As the name implies, it uses library standards to sort and organize sites and resources.

Robert McCloskey, 88, of 'Make Way for Ducklings,' Is Dead
This headline and link to the obituary by Eleanor Bau in the New York Times Online sucked the wind out of me for a moment. Just last Friday, my wife, daughter, and I met for lunch in Boston and then we wandered over to the Public Gardens, where McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings is set.

We saw the bronze sculpture of Mrs. Mallard and her ducklings honoring McCloskey and his book, and noticed, as we did, a family with toddlers, sitting on the bench across from the sculpture, a new copy of Make Way for Ducklings in Hand, reading from the book, and comparing the illustrations to the sculpture.

We also took a ride around the Public Garden Pond in the Swan paddle boats; as it curved around a small island in the pond, we watched this season's ducklings teeter-waddle about, slipping among rocks, hectically dropping into and out of the pond. And even as we left, a an ice-cream truck was parked on the corner of Boyleston and Arlington Streets, the back of which featured the famed image from the book, of the police officer with a hand held up and whistle blown, stopping traffic so Mrs. Mallard and her ducklings could cross the street and enter the Public Gardens.

So the news comes when thoughts of McCloskey are still fresh because his work was literally alive for us just days ago.

I think maybe we'll head to Maine for some blueberries soon.

summer at the pool over the phone

Summer at the Pool
I called home late yesterday afternoon, and got no answer. So then I tried my wife's cell phone. I wanted to give her some news about an appointment we've been trying to arrange. When she answered, I could hear in the background: kids laughing and talking, parents calling out, a life guard whistle, the sound of feet walking in short, fast steps through the shallow puddles that form at the edge of the pool, the sort of twangy hard thump of the diving board, followed by a splash, my daughter and her friend rustling in the beach bag that was very likely hooked over the back of the chair my wife was sitting on as we talked.

Yesterday was hot and a little bit humind in the Boston area, and the town pool was the place to be. As we talked, I could almost smell the chlorine.

New Blog: Teaching Writing in an Online World
I began a new blog, Teaching Writing in an Online World that I started a few days ago as a way to experiment with using a blog in TechNotes. TechNotes is a newsletter with tips on teaching writing, focusing mostly on technology.

I first created TWOW because this blog, Odds and Ends, has drifted into being a place for me just to post short essays on, well, odds and ends. TWOW will be predominately about issues that in some way connect teaching writing in a time when networked computers are increasingly the default writing technology.

Odorless Supermarkets


Tuesday night I went with my wife and two daughters to the supermarket. We were in the neighborhood and decided on a whim to get some ice-cream to make sundaes, and a few other odds and ends. We entered the store and diverged in teams of two. I trailed along behind my 12 year old, who made a beeline for the bread section; she loves crusty breads, baguettes, that kind of thing. It's a favorite snack (along with snap peas, go figure).

So as she ran ahead, towards the bread, I flashed on an image of me having done the same kind of thing when I was her age, skittering ahead of my mother to where we were heading in the grocery store to select and make a case for the variant of the staple that I liked best (or disliked least in some cases). The flashback was strong, I remembered the store, a neighborhood market, with worn and warped wooden floors, and shelves that seemed more loosely grouped than regimented by product rows. But the thing I remembered most in that flashback, were the odors from that old store.

When I was a kid, we spent a lot of time in grocery stores that had odors, places where you could smell the food the minute you walked in. So on Tuesday night, as I stood there in the supermarket, with its garish lights, and abundance, was the absence of scent. Even in the bread section, there was no smell of fresh baked bread. Even in the vegetable section, where fruits and vegetables are laid out, there was no odor of fresh vegetables. And forget about meats and cheeses, which are shrinkwrapped, boxed, cellophaned and styrofoamed into odorless units. Between the packaging, the cavernous size of more and more supermarkets, and the air conditioning, 1/3 of the intimacy and sensuality of food shopping (texture and taste being the other two thirds) evaporates. I think it literally evaporates into the large cavernous spaces of the modern supermarket, with its broad expanses and conditioned air. The odors are either locked in plastic or pushed out by filtered air.

Stores should be clean, of course, but shopping for food shouldn't be so sterile, so plastic, so distant from the olfactory pleasures food can offer.

This summer, if you find a small neighborhood grocery store with good produce, meats, and cheeses, breathe deep, and remember that scent, a mixture of earth and green and fruit, the smell of tomatoes, of an orange's pectin, of arugula, of corn, the flavors of cheese in the air, that sort of tangy sweet muskiness of combined meat odors, that all together mix and give the store its own perfume. Remember that scent the next time you stand in a large supermarket and can't smell anything.

Small stores with fresh vegetables, with cheeses and meats that hang by cord above the counters where you order your slices and cuts, with baskets of beans that you scoop into bags on your own, with stacks of potatoes and beets; small stores with lower ceiling, narrower aisles, those are places where you can still smell food when you walk in, where you can look at it, ask about it, get small tastes of this and that. If you've a store like that in your neighborhood, visit it often.

And shop there too, buy something, keep it in place. Your food will taste better if you do.

Remembering





My Aunt Lucille sent me a clipping from the Hartford Courant that she had saved for 34 years. It's a picture of me when I was ten, getting a golf lesson from the golf pro at Goodwin Park, a municipal golf course in Hartford, CT, where I grew up. The year was 1969; the lessons were sponsored by the Police Atheletic League (PAL). Victoria Rd., where we lived, was the last street in Hartford before you entered Whethersfield, if you walked west, the street lead into Goodwin Park. If you entered the park there was a skating pond, with an ice-house, a picnic pavillion just near it, and then just beyond the picnic pavillion, a path to the club house of the golf course. Goodwin park has two courses, an 18 hole course and a nine hole hacker's course -- mostly flat and straight, the hacker's course, with no water and I think no sand traps, but I can't remember for sure.

The path to the club house wasn't marked really, but essentially one walked up between the 18th hole of the 18 hole course and the 1st hole of the nine hole course.

And that's what I did that summer, I'd walk up Victoria Rd., past the pond, through the picnic grounds, between the fairways of holes 18 and 1, and get a golf lesson. For a few years after that, until I started high school, I played golf almost every day in the summer, nine holes in the morning and nine in the afternoon on many days. It was only 50 cents a round for city residents.

I played most often with a kid from the neighborhood named Brian Sherry. One of Brian's arms ended about where his elbow would've been -- a birth defect -- but he played all kinds of sports -- golf, football, baseball. In baseball he'd gotten real good as a fielder and could quickly snag a ball, tuck his glove under his short arm, pull his hand out of the glove and get the ball to the infield. In football he often quarter backed, and in golf we swung away.

I think those summers, between when I was 10 and 13, were some of the most idyllic I've yet lived.

Teaching Writing is Hard Enough


Steve Krause (see link to his Blog on the left), kicked off a discussion on TechRhet, an email discussion list for teachers and others interested in the intersection of technology and rhetoric, about whether instructors of writing in first year college writing courses will really be able to have students create compositions using richer multimedia. His wondering was sparked by attending the 2003 Computers and Writing conference, where numerous sessions described how instructors had students creating Flash projects or doing work in iMovies.

What strikes me most profoundly, even more so than the merits of teaching iMovie in a writing class (and I think one can make a case for including an iMovie in the course), or the issue of technology and access, or even the issue of how long it might take a teacher to get up to speed on the technology and to understand it deeply enough to teach it, is simply this: it's hard enough teaching students simply how to write everyday prose well.

It's hard writing even a few good paragraphs for a Blog, or an email message, or an essay. Organizing one's thoughts along the relatively uncluttered interface of a blank page, whether the page is paper or pixel, is hard to teach, and hard to do, without adding the complicating factors of different interfaces and modes of composing (audio, visual, moving image). Again, it's not that these things can't be used, nor that students might not benefit from using them or learning them.

But it's much more work to write with more than words. Even doing a simple, text only, linking to nodes hypertext is more work than writing a standard linear essay, if only because of what goes into learning and doing the protocols and mechanics of linking.

Having Gone Off Line
Not for lack of access (I had my laptop with its built in modem and a phone line handy.), I was off line for four whole days. Instead of connecting and keeping my email inbox lean by copiously deleting, or logging in here, I spent a few days hanging out with family, not doing much of nothing except hanging out, playing cards, eating a bunch, running errands here and there. Most of the work I do, and many of my social connections, are conducted by email. So when I was off line, I was gone for three days from the world where I spend most of my working hours.

The fun part of taking a simple break from work, with no planned events or things to do, was in getting away from a job with deadlines to meet, meetings to go to, and other planned events or things to do. I shucked that skin for a while. For a while the prospect of living that way continuously, without having anything in particular that I had to do, seemed appealing.

Of course, if the respite became the routine, appeal would turn to ennui pretty quick. I was reminded especially of that by a piece in today's New York Times that looked at how many people have opted -- or have been forced to opt -- out of the job market. These are people who, unable to find jobs, have decided to stay home, or go back to school, or are living off savings.

One person interviewed remarked on how much he missed work, on having a work life, an office to go to, people to work with, projects to work on, challenges to meet, problems to solve.

The paycheck matters, but so too does the work, the place of work.

As much as I enjoyed, and wouldn't mind a few more days of just hanging out, I'm glad I'm going back to work tomorrow.

Flirting With Spring
The cold air's arrived and Boston's flirtation with warm, spring-like weather has ended. Cold tonight, and tomorrow, and perhaps some sleet and freezing rain on into Friday. This after a chilling-to-the-bone snow whipped winter. This after days of nonstop rain and only day or so of ice-cream weather. And you know, I really think that whiplash change of elements is kind of cool, maybe a bit psychically cruel, especially if one leaves the house in warm weather clothing and then has to shiver their way home at night.

As much as I really want to see a string of days where it's possible to walk comfortably barefoot in the squishy-cool damp grass of a newly green spring lawn, the kind you get on that day when suddenly the trees have budded and the crocuses and tulips startle your vision, as much as I want that, I don't mind these flirtations with warmth followed by the return of cold and dreary skys.

Weather should be coy. It's one of New England's charms, that weather changes by the minute.

And too, there's something not-dreary about otherwise dreary weather. There's beauty in the gray and fog of rain, the drenching cold of sleet, especially if you're dressed right for it and are out it in the weather on foot. And really especially if you can walk in the woods, or across an open field, away from sidewalks that hug traffic, away from sidewalks where the pedestrian is so easily beseiged by walls of water when cars speed through those long thick puddles that collect at the road's edge.

A Convention of Clowns. Really
I came to St. Louis yesterday afternoon and stopped by my hotel to get check in and eat lunch before heading off to a meeting with members of the Meramec English Department. I was a bit tired, a little groggy, and encumbered of the usual stress that comes from being in airport, where every one is a suspected terrorist and treated accordingly so.

I trudged off the shuttle, but as I made way to the registration desk, I was passed by a clown. A real clown, with baggy clown, a red clown nose, purple fuzzy clown hair and with an oversized clown flower in her oversized clown jacket. And coming towards me, from the opposite directions, were two more clowns, chatting, checking the time. And to my left, seated in the lobby couches, hunched over a something I could see, but conversing away like three business executives planning a presentation, were yet more clowns.

And they all had badges. I'd stumbled into a clown convention.

And just the site it of it all, with the juxtaposition of so much color and clown clothes on people who were being, well, so convention-like, rather than clown like, was better than a seeing a clown in performance mode. It was wonderfully funny.

And so I felt better, just by the sight of it all.

Classic Reader
Here's a pretty cool site, that was passed on to me from a colleague at work. It's an interesting experiment in a (so far) free online reader of classic (aka public domain) texts. Registering at the site is easy; providing email is optional, so you don't have to worry about spam and marketing materials. Registering creates an account on the site so you can write and store annotations on the texts. If you're interested in this kind of stuff for distance education, or computer-based classrooms, or just to see an alternative form that digital publishing might take, give this site a look-see:

----Original Message Follows----

FYI:

http://www.classicreader.com/
At this site you can read, search, and annotate great works of literature by authors such as Dickens, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and many others. The collection currently contains 743 books and 1041 short stories by 211 authors. New works are added to the collection on a regular basis, many at the suggestion of readers. The works are split into seven categories: fiction, nonfiction, children, poetry, Shakespeare, short stories and drama.

Talking to Teachers
I really enjoy talking to teachers. At the OAH conference today I had lunch with a number of historians, good and dedicated scholars who also really cared about teaching history well. I was struck by the amount of though and care they put it into engaging students in history. Their goal, across the board was simply this: to have students do history, not memorize history.

That's such an important distinction. They want students to think about history, about exploring the past, and about learning from it so that they can understand it deeply and relate what they learn to their lives now.

History for these scholars isn't just a list of dates and causes, but rather is, to put it crudely, critcal immersion in the past. The people here that I've met want their students to viscerally experience the past and the struggles, passions, and day to day life of it.

It's all very vibrant and exciting.