Paul Revere, 1768, by John Singleton Copley (1738-1815)
John Copley painted all the bigwigs of revolutionary Boston, including this portrait of the famous horse-mounted alarm before he turned older and grayer.
And as April 18 is the anniversary of Revere’s ride, April 19 is the anniversary of the “shot heard ’round the world.”
Teachers, this is your cue to break out the Longfellow and Emerson and Whitman, and tie them together in the thread that runs from the French and Indian War clearly through the American Civil War, and we might hope, to today. Give the kids some culture to get their mental juices flowing for the tests.
It’s that Easter season among western Christian sects; this is Holy Week, which commemorates Jesus’s final entry into Jerusalem and the events leading Jesus’s crucifixion.
Our congregation will stage a “living” Last Supper a la da Vinci, which got me to thinking about the painting, which reminded me of this post from years ago; some minor updating, and I’ve added a new version I found from ABC’s series, “Lost,” which was in the middle of its run when I posted this originally in 2008:
If you need a 20 minute lesson on the influence of Renaissance art on contemporary art, this is one many high school kids may find interesting, if not amazingly historically informative. I suspect there is a great lesson plan hiding in there about 20th century history as reflected in parody art.
It’s a brilliant and subtle demonstration of the power of DaVinci’s art that there are so many copy cat pictures, don’t you think?
I did notice, however, that Barker left out the Mel Brooks version, from “History of the World, Part I.” It may not fit the meme.
“Last Supper” as portrayed in Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, Part I”
“Lost” Last Supper; probably a publicity still, found at Art is Everywhere.
Do you have favorite parodies or homages of the Last Supper left off of these lists of 31 different versions? By all means, list them in comments, with links if you have them.
It’s the second day of classes here in the Dallas Independent School District (Dallas ISD, or DISD). Already we experience great trials from the loss of funding across the board in Texas education, as Gov. Rick Perry encouraged the state legislature to cut more than $4 billion from schools. Cuts will be larger next fall.
At Molina High School we have about 25% more students, with 10% fewer teachers. Classes strain the seams of the school — classrooms are crowded, desks and chairs are in short supply. Computers promised for teachers, supposed to be delivered eight months ago, still are not delivered. Printers, printing supplies, and paper, stand in conservation mode. There are so few technical support people that those few new computers delivered often are not set up to operate yet.
This year’s inspiration for Dallas teachers comes from Dalton Sherman, a fifth grader at Charles Rice Learning Center. Here’s a YouTube video of the presentation about 20,000 of us watched last Wednesday, a small point that redeemed the annual “convocation” exercise, for 2008:
Sherman’s presentation rescued what had been shaping up as another day of rah-rah imprecations to teachers who badly wanted, and in my case needed, to be spending time putting classrooms together.
(By the way, at the start of his presentation, you can see several people leap to their feet in the first row — Mom, Dad, and older brother. Nice built-in cheering section.)
Staff at DISD headquarters put the speech together for Dalton to memorize, and he worked over the summer to get it down. This background is wonderfully encouraging.
First, it makes a statement that DISD officials learn from mistakes. Last year the keynote was given by a speaker out of central casting’s “classic motivational speaker” reserves. As one teacher described it to me before the fete last Wednesday, “It was a real beating.”
Second, DISD’s planning ahead to pull this off suggests someone is looking a little bit down the road. This was a four or five month exercise for a less-than-10 minute presentation. It’s nice to know someone’s looking ahead at all.
Third, the cynical teachers gave Dalton Sherman a warm standing ovation. That it was delivered by a 10-year-old kids from DISD made a strong symbol. But the content was what hooked the teachers. Superintendent Michael Hinojosa provided a death-by-PowerPoint presentation leading up to the speech, one that was probably not designed solely as contrasting lead in. In other words, Dalton Sherman’s speech demonstrated as nothing else the district has done lately that someone downtown understands that the teachers count, the foot soldiers in our war on ignorance and jihad for progress.
The kids came back Monday, bless ‘em. School’s in session, to anyone paying attention.
Summers for teachers fill up quickly with various training courses — right now, somewhere in America about a thousand teaches gather every morning for a week of AP course training, for example. In larger districts like Dallas, classes convene for teachers in a dozen different locations.
Some teachers scramble to complete courses for advanced degrees, packing a semester or two into a few weeks in the summer.
Our friend Jim Stanley suggested some training we might find out of the catalog of Glenn Beck’s new, for-Glenn-Beck’s-profit school; heck, anyone could profit from these:
The Top Ten Course Offerings at Glenn Beck’s New “University”
10. Chalkboard Management
09. Making Friends with Cocaine
08. How to Weep Like a Televangelist
07. Hatriotism 101: An Overview
06. How to Link Absolutely Anything or Anyone to Marx, Lenin or Hitler
05. Hysterics: Reclaiming An Artform For the Angry, White Male
04. Screw The Bible! (And Turn to Chapter Four of Atlas Shrugged)
03. How to Ban Scientific Darwinism, While Simultaneously Advancing Social Darwinism
02. Alan Keyes: Proof That There Are, Indeed, Some “Good Ones”
And the number one course offering at Glenn Beck University . . .
01. Washed Up Disc Jockeys. Is There Anything They DON’T Know?
Glenn Beck U recruiting poster, from All hat No Cattle
Tip of the old scrub brush to Jim Stanley, with many thanks.
You’re internet and culture savvy — you probably already know all about this stuff.
OK Go’s music appeals to many. The appeal convinced a major record label, Capitol/EMI, to sign the band to a deal. OK Go worked hard to promote the music of the band, including videos. Capitol looked at the videos, intensely creative works of art on their own, and pulled in the reins. Okay to show the vids, the label said, but don’t allow downloads . . .
Minor twist on the old band meets label, band wins label story: OK Go got out of the contract. They lost the label.
Now they’ve got an astounding new video to go viral, one that simply delights younger viewers and brings in older viewers with whispers of “shades of Rube Goldberg!” (Who was Rube Goldberg? Younger readers go here.)
After the overwhelming success of the video for its 2006 song “Here It Goes Again,” in which its four band members execute a tightly choreographed dance routine built around a handful of treadmills, OK Go has lofty standards to live up to. With roughly 50 million views on YouTube, “Here It Goes Again” stands as one of the most popular music videos of the Internet era.
Not one to shy away from a challenge, the band set about constructing a painstakingly executed two-story Rube Goldberg machine, set to trigger in time to the music for its latest video, “This Too Shall Pass.” Although it starts out small, with a toy truck knocking over some dominoes, the contraptions that make up the machine rapidly get larger and much more complex — pianos are dropped, shopping carts come crashing down ramps, and one band member is launched headlong through a wall of boxes. After assembling a team of dozens of engineers to construct the set, more than 60 takes were needed to get everything working just right during filming.
Toughest part? EMI, parent of Capitol, didn’t want to allow downloads of the music or video.
The band’s label, EMI, didn’t see things the same way. In an effort to maintain some control over the dissemination of the music video, EMI denied listeners the ability to embed it on their own Web sites and blogs. After receiving a deluge of complaints, the band eventually persuaded EMI to enable embedding. Soon afterward, however, OK Go parted ways with EMI to start its own record label, Paracadute.
Personal quandary: I’m not sure that I don’t like this version of the song, with the Notre Dame marching band, better than the Rube Goldberg version. What do you think?
Personal confession: Problems of mishearing lyrics abound. I listened probably a dozen times thinking the refrain was “When the money comes.” It makes more sense, and is much less cynical and wooish, with the real lyric, “When the morning comes.”
More:
OK Go’s website — with upcoming shows highlighted (Oh, to be in Salt Lake City on April 13, 2010, or St. Louis on April 18 . . .) (From the website: “PS… Oh, fine. More news now: If you can’t get to one of the thirty-plus shows on the upcoming tour, fear not: the boys will be on your TV. In the next month they’ll visit Carson Daly (4/16), David Letterman (4/28), Steven Colbert (4/29), and Jimmies Kimmel (4/1) and Fallon (5/4). They’ll also be at Bamboozle, Bonnaroo and Sasquatch. Some busy months ahead.”)
Well, once I noticed that, I had to check. No band with a name starting with O, Q, or X has covered the song. The other 23 letters are all represented. Oh, but she lists bands whose names start with “the,” and there is a band named “The Quality Kids.” Does that count as Q? Nearly 230 different covers of the song all together.
Caption from the New York Times: E Clampus Vitus has tens of thousands of members across seven Western states, though nowhere are the group's eccentric ways more alive than in California. Above, Noble Grand Humbug Scott Neilsen, left, and Steve Slonecker at Ed's Restaurant in Twain Harte. Photo fro the New York Times, by Jim Wilson.
You don’t think history can be fun? Consider the group of Californians known as Clampers, who gather to celebrate history in a place called Twain Harte (ask any California historian, or American literature mavin, how the town got its name):
“It’s a common saying that no one has been able to tell if they are historians that like to drink or drinkers who like history,” said Dr. Robert J. Chandler, a senior historian at Wells Fargo Bank and a proud member of the group’s San Francisco chapter. “And no one knows because no one has been in any condition to record the minutes.”
Whether a historical drinking society or a drinking historical society, the Clampers claim tens of thousands of members in 40 chapters across seven Western states, though nowhere are the group’s strange ways more alive than in California, where members are said to have included Ronald Reagan; John Huston, the film director; and Herb Caen, the famous San Franciscan master of the three-dot journal. Some Clamper membership claims, of course, can be suspect. It is true, however, that many noted historians have been members, as is the current director of the State Office of Historic Preservation.
I already like the bunch: The Order of E Clampus Vitus.
Read about them in the New York Times.The Times carries a series of stories based on the WPA-produced state guide books (Works Progress Administration). Each one of these articles would be a good topic of focus for a lesson plan. Other articles in the series so far include:
My children lived to see a Boston Red Sox win in the World Series, already in their short lives.
100-year old Cubs fan Richard Savage, who saw the Cubs lose the World Series to the Boston Red Sox in 1918, hopes to see the Cubs win a World Series - AARP Bulletin Today
With the triumph, the Cubs pushed Milwaukee nine games back in the National League Central race and a half-game behind the New York Mets in the wild-card playoff race while reducing their own magic number to four.
“We just figure if we keep winning ballgames, good things will come for us,” Dempster said. “Don’t get caught up in the standings or numbers or anything like that. Just come to the ballpark and try to win every day. This is big.”
This year’s inspiration for Dallas teachers comes from Dalton Sherman, a fifth grader at Charles Rice Learning Center. Here’s a YouTube video of the presentation about 20,000 of us watched last Wednesday, a small point that redeemed the annual “convocation” exercise, for 2008:
Sherman’s presentation rescued what had been shaping up as another day of rah-rah imprecations to teachers who badly wanted, and in my case needed, to be spending time putting classrooms together.
(By the way, at the start of his presentation, you can see several people leap to their feet in the first row — Mom, Dad, and older brother. Nice built-in cheering section.)
Staff at DISD headquarters put the speech together for Dalton to memorize, and he worked over the summer to get it down. This background is wonderfully encouraging.
First, it makes a statement that DISD officials learn from mistakes. Last year the keynote was given by a speaker out of central casting’s “classic motivational speaker” reserves. As one teacher described it to me before the fete last Wednesday, “It was a real beating.”
Second, DISD’s planning ahead to pull this off suggests someone is looking a little bit down the road. This was a four or five month exercise for a less-than-10 minute presentation. It’s nice to know someone’s looking ahead at all.
Third, the cynical teachers gave Dalton Sherman a warm standing ovation. That it was delivered by a 10-year-old kids from DISD made a strong symbol. But the content was what hooked the teachers. Superintendent Michael Hinojosa provided a death-by-PowerPoint presentation leading up to the speech, one that was probably not designed solely as contrasting lead in. In other words, Dalton Sherman’s speech demonstrated as nothing else the district has done lately that someone downtown understands that the teachers count, the foot soldiers in our war on ignorance and jihad for progress.
The kids came back Monday, bless ‘em. School’s in session, to anyone paying attention.
Which state fair has the most fried foods? Which state fair has the oddest fried foods? You can make nominations in comments.
State fairs drive local economies, sometimes, and occasionally a bit of history gets made there. Certainly they are places where culture and history are on display.
Minnesota’s State Fair is so good even Teddy Roosevelt visited — it’s been an almost annual event since 1859. I’ll bet Roosevelt had a good time, though I wonder if the Fair served him a bag of their famous mini-donuts — 388,000 bags of donuts served last year (do they rival corny dogs?).
Beloit College’s Mindset list is an annual event, now. The college puts together a list of things entering college freshman have never done without, trying to help faculty understand what freshman are thinking, and not thinking.
This year’s list, for the entering class of 2012, holds a few jolts for anyone over the age of 30. One last minute change was required, however, when Bret Favre left the Green Bay Packers for the New York Jets.
Here’s the list, and it continues below the fold:
Students entering college for the first time this fall were generally born in 1990.
For these students, Sammy Davis Jr., Jim Henson, Ryan White, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Freddy Krueger have always been dead.
Harry Potter could be a classmate, playing on their Quidditch team.
Since they were in diapers, karaoke machines have been annoying people at parties.
They have always been looking for Carmen Sandiego.
GPS satellite navigation systems have always been available.
Coke and Pepsi have always used recycled plastic bottles.
Shampoo and conditioner have always been available in the same bottle.
Gas stations have never fixed flats, but most serve cappuccino.
Their parents may have dropped them in shock when they heard George Bush announce “tax revenue increases.”
Electronic filing of tax returns has always been an option.
Girls in head scarves have always been part of the school fashion scene.
All have had a relative — or known about a friend’s relative — who died comfortably at home with Hospice.
As a precursor to “whatever,” they have recognized that some people “just don’t get it.”
Universal Studios has always offered an alternative to Mickey in Orlando.
Grandma has always had wheels on her walker.
Martha Stewart Living has always been setting the style.
Haagen-Dazs ice cream has always come in quarts.
Club Med resorts have always been places to take the whole family.
300 popped up on some channel last night, and we got a time delay recording to watch it, which I did, mostly. Interesting stylization. Cartoonish characterizations, which one should expect from a movie intended as homage to the graphic novel that directly spawned it.
A monument to Leonidas I - Inscription, "Molon Lave," which roughly translates to "Come and get it!"
Several sources dated the climax of the battle as August 11, 480 B.C. — 2488 years ago yesterday. (The battle is said to have occurred during the Olympics that year, too.)
World history classes dig through that period of history in the first semester. Teachers, it’s time to think about how we’re going to facilitate this history this year. As always, some bright student will wave a hand in the air and ask, “Mr. Darrell! How do they know what happened if no one survived, and nobody had their Sony videocorder?”
At least one other student in the course of the day will be surprised to discover the movie wasn’t a filmed-on-the-spot documentary. But apart from that, how do we knowthe events well enough to pin it down to one day? And, since the Greeks surely didn’t use the Gregorian calendar, since it wasn’t invented until the 18th century — how do we know the date?
The short answer is “Herodotus.” The longer answer may resonate better: This is one dramatic battle in a year-long fight for the history of the world. The Greeks were understandably and justifiably proud that they had turned back Xerxes’s armies and navy (The Battle of Salamis, a bit after Thermopylae). So, these events were preserved in poetry, in the chronicles, in song, in sculpture, and in every other medium available to the Greeks. Your AP English students will probably tell you the movie reminds them of The Iliad. There’s an entré for discussion.
Turning points in history: Had Xerxes succeeded in avenging his father’s, Darius’s, defeats, and subjugated the Greeks, history would be much different. The culture the Romans built on, the trading patterns from east to west and around the Mediterranean, the technologies, the myths, and the stories of the battles, would be different. (Remember, one of Darius’s defeats was at the Battle of Marathon, from which we get the modern marathon racing event, the traditional close of the modern Olympics.)
How do we know?
How do you handle that question? Tell us in comments, please.
Resources and commentary on Thermopylae, Leonidas, and the 300:
Controversy – all characters in the movie have cadrtoonish portrayals. Cartoonish bravery and valor is easy to explain away. Persians are portrayed bizarrely, in often-offensive caricatures. This would be a good time to remind students of the achievements of various Persian cultures, and those of Xerxes I himself.
Poet W. H. Auden taught students at Swarthmore for three years, 1942-1945. Swarthmore’s library started rather early to collect Auden’s manuscripts and other materials, including the typewriter he used there — an Underwood, as you can see, below.
Auden’s poetry was contemporary, and it reflected the fears and passions of lovers, and lovers of liberty, in the face of the fascist threat of World War II. Auden died, aged by tobacco, alcohol and barbituates, in 1973, aged 67.
You’ve got to love C-SPAN. Commercial television networks spend billions purchasing rights to be the sole broadcaster of sporting events, the Superbowl, the World Series, the NBA championships, the NCAA basketball championships, the Olympics.
What’s a money poor, creativity- and content-rich public affairs cable channel to do? Well, gee, there’s the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth coming up in February 2009 . . .:
Note the site, set your video recorders (digital or not — just capture the stuff). C-SPAN plans monthly broadcasts on Lincoln and the times, plus special broadcasts on certain events — November 19, the 145th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, for example.
Teachers, bookmark that site. Are you out for the summer? U.S. history teachers have a couple of months to mine those resources, watch the broadcasts, and watch and capture the archived videos, to prepare for bell-ringers, warm-ups, and lesson plans.
What will your classes do for the Lincoln Bicentennial? Will that collide with your plans for the Darwin bicentennial?
RT @coolcatteacher: @angelamaiers Think of me when you roll over tonight at 2am. I'll likely still be grading. ;-) Hope to get out soon.Splashed: 1 hour ago
@CBSDFW Most North Texans don't support adults quizzing 8-year-old boys about their sexual orientation; those protesters are weird.Splashed: 1 hour ago
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Posted by Ed Darrell 
