[A fun little conversation I'm having with Laura in this comment thread includes her question about differences between Chinese literary types and Western ones. It reminded me of this post I wrote last year on Change.org, and planned to cross-post here eventually anyway. I hope you agree that its quotes are lovely things.] ~     ~     [...]

Readers of George Orwell’s Animal Farm should remember Squealer, the pig whose “journalism” manipulated the entire animal society into unquestioningly supporting the dictatorial pig Napoleon. If they studied Animal Farm in the classroom, the depressing odds are they learned it as a good, all-American attack on socialism. The most simple-minded of our teachers make a [...]

MAD=Mutually Assured Destruction. A serious Cold War joke. Don’t have students read about this in textbooks. Show them the below instead. Amazing. From Zero Hedge: Who needs a wartime nuclear exchange when you have peaceful countries nuking the gamma rays out of their own sovereign territories – now that the environmental theme is rather popular, [...]

I’m always looking for models of real readings to share with students. The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein gives us a good one with his reading of a recent opinion piece by conservative NYTimes columnist David Brooks. At issue is Brooks’ argument that deficit spending during periods of debt crisis makes consumers insecure, and thus deficit [...]

The Inspiration Gap: it’s 0ne of the weirdest things about teaching teens. This Gap yawns between the adult who knows this stuff — history, literature, science, whatever — is endlessly wondrous, and the majority of students who haven’t figured that out yet and, worse still, in so many cases are so educationally poisoned they refuse [...]

Teaching method 1: Have students learn about child labor in 19th century sweatshops by having them read about them in their unfailingly sterile, detached textbooks: Factories in the 19th century had no child labor laws. Children of all ages were made to work in sweatshops for long hours and little pay, with no protection from [...]

If you just want to watch my recent keynote address in Australia — which, as farce would have it, turned into two addresses — just click on the screenshots of each speech below. But I hope you read the little mock-heroic back-story. The Missing Link: Texas Politics Distorts US Textbooks (watch before Speech Part 2. [...]

Just a quick share: I’m giving my Chinese history / China studies students this “starter kit” of RSS feeds about contemporary China from Asian and Western sources to start them on their self-directed explorations (and small group blog reports) about whatever they want to learn. It’s the cream of my own Google Reader “China” folder, [...]

Second draft: On Two Ways of Reading: Slavery reads on its knees. Freedom reads on its feet. So a high school teacher’s job: to teach students to find those feet? I’m just looking for snappy first principles here. Ones within the 15-year-old attention span.

Nothing like seeing a friend from three decades ago, when you were a new and very green adult in the world, to stir up the mind. John and I also talked a bit about Gilgamesh today. Me talking about Gilgamesh is nothing new. I do that with anybody and everybody who’ll listen. But talking about [...]