Declaration and Constitution – sources

Cross posted from Mr. Darrell’s Wayback Machine, with permission, with minor edits.

Everybody needs to have a copy of the Declaration of Independence and  U.S. Constitution close at hand.

Original rough draft of the Declaration of Independence written out in longhand by Thomas Jefferson, featuring “emendations” by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams – Library of Congress Manuscripts Division

Too often I’ve been in classes where textbooks didn’t have them, though in some cases the course clearly required it (especially irritating in high school texts, but not unheard of in college texts).  The two documents are covered in depth in the requirements for Texas 10th grade social studies (world history), but not in the texts.

Both documents provide a foundation for analysis of events following, through the 19th and 20th centuries.

Where is the student of world history to find them?

Here:

Declaration of Independence

• History, images and transcript, at the National Archives
• Library of Congress resources
• Text at USHistory.org
• Text at the Yale Law School’s Avalon Project
• Historical documents (including the Declaration) at the U.S. House of Representatives Education site
• Visit the Declaration and the Constitution, at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Constitution of the United States of America

• History, images and transcript, at the National Archives
• Bill of Rights at the National Archives
• Text at Cornell University Law School’s Legal Information Institute (LII)
• Historical documents (including the Constitution and Bill of Rights) at the U.S. House of Representatives Education site
• Constitution in two columns with explanation in modern English, from the U.S. Senate website
• Amendments to the Constitution proposed, but not ratified
• Annotated Constitution, from Findlaw.com
• Constitution in several different formats, from U.S. Constitution Online
• Constitution Bee, study site for students from the Bill of Rights Institute
• Videos from the Bill of Rights Institute

Rotunda of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., where the Declaration and Constitution are kept on display – National Archives photo

All study for the tests and no play makes Jack and Jill perform worse on standardized tests

Newark Star-Ledger file photo of kids at recess at Newton Street School. Patti Sapone photo

The old classroom teachers knew it.  The new, test-the-hell-out-of-the-little-brats administrators need to learn it.

Kids need physical activity to be good students.

A study published this month in the journal Pediatrics studied the links between recess and classroom behavior among about 11,000 children age 8 and 9. Those who had more than 15 minutes of recess a day showed better behavior in class than those who had little or none. Although disadvantaged children were more likely to be denied recess, the association between better behavior and recess time held up even after researchers controlled for a number of variables, including sex, ethnicity, public or private school and class size.

The lead researcher, Dr. Romina M. Barros, a pediatrician and an assistant clinical professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said the findings were important because many schools did not view recess as essential to education.

The article in the science section of the New York Times put it well:

The best way to improve children’s performance in the classroom may be to take them out of it.

A convicted murderer in prison gets an hour a day for exercise.  But our kids, the high-performing ones we depend on for our nation’s future?  We treat them worse than convicted felons?

Nota bene: Even just a little movement works.  It works for adults, too.

Resources:

• PEDIATRICS Vol. 123 No. 2 February 2009, pp. 431-436 (doi:10.1542/peds.2007-2825) (subscription required for full text),  “School Recess and Group Classroom Behavior,” Romina M. Barros, MD, Ellen J. Silver, PhD and Ruth E. K. Stein, MD, Department of Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Children’s Hospital at Montefiore and Rose F. Kennedy Center, Bronx, New York

  OBJECTIVES. This study examines the amount of recess that children 8 to 9 years of age receive in the United States and compares the group classroom behavior of children receiving daily recess with that of children not receiving daily recess.

• See this year-old post at The Elementary Educator
• Post in agreement from the venerable Trust for Public Lands, one of the best and best respected non-profits in America