2) I teach 7th graders Medieval History.

3) So I did this:

4) And then this:

5) And then this:

This went SO WELL!!

There is a post-script:

There is a second, even cooler part of this activity - balancing a cinderblock on my chest while lying on the bed of nails and having an assistant break it with a hammer. I was really excited about doing this, but my Principal was really, really uncomfortable with the idea.

I pushed very hard to be allowed to do it in front of my classes, which is my job.

He was cautious and responsible and looked at the big picture, which is his job.

Ultimately, I wasn't allowed to do the breaking-the-cinderblock-thing with my class, so I did it after school with a couple of colleagues. 

It was even better than I had imagined!

SO.

VERY. 

COOL!

I feel really happy and gratified by the back-and-forth that my Principal and I had over this; we both did our jobs passionately and well, and yes, I do understand that from a liability and a setting-a-good-example, and from a common-sense point of view, this whole exercise is not terribly defendable, so I don't expect to ever be allowed to do it again, but Educational Awesomeness doesn't happen every day and I'm really glad I was there this time when it did.

I'm a big believer in scouring eBay for things to make my life more interesting. This has led to many interesting and eye-rolling conversations with my wife and several interesting projects in my classroom.

For several years now, I've had eBay automatically notify me when any item having to do with the town of Deerfield, NH (where I teach) comes up for auction. As a result, I've built up a pretty substantial collection of antique postcards, letters, photographs and other primary source documents having to do with this town. (See above)

One great resource that I've built up over the years is a collection of Town Reports that covers about 85 years. (These are the reports that each town in Northern New England sends out to itemize its spending over the past year, in preparation for Town Meeting.)

I've had these laying around for several years now, but haven't really known what to do with them.

I finally did what I should have done long ago; I put the question to people smarter than me - my Critical Friends Group. The looked through my collection of primary source material and made some truly inspired suggestions, which gave me enough ideas to rough out an idea for a project:

Step 1: Kid-Proofing My Old Stuff

I've had students look at some of my old postcards and documents in the past, and I know how fascinated they can get by holding old photos of their town in their hands. This kind of engagement seemed like an important element to this project, but at the same time, I didn't want these postcards to get trashed, so I ordered a couple of packages of clear PVC postcard sleeves to protect them.

I knew I wanted to use my old Town Reports, but definitely didn't want them handled too much, so with the help of a colleague, I scanned a number of them into PDF files that my guys could handle as much as they wanted.



Step 2: Interview with an Archivist

If my students were going to be working with primary source documents, they should probably have a good idea of what that means and why these old documents are important. I asked for help on Twitter and was put in contact with Sally Jacobs, an archivist with the Wisconsin Historical Society, who was willing to do a Skype interview with our students.

She did a great job. (See below)

Step 3: Getting My Students Hooked

I gave all my students an entire, unscheduled period to look at fifty or sixty antique postcards of the town. This started the wheels in their heads turning, wondering about what the town was like a hundred years ago.

I wrote four questions on the board for the students to think about as they looked at the old postcards:

1)   Do you recognize this place?

2)   What is the same as now?

3)   What is different?

4)   What is missing? What should be there that isn't? (Suggested by Sally Jacobs)


Step 4: Getting Data From the Town Reports

After looking through several of the Town Reports, a colleague and I came up with five categories that seemed to be common to most of the Town Budgets and that were (at least marginally) interesting: Maintaining Winter Roads, Schools, The Library, Damage by Dogs and Care of the Poor (sometimes listed as "Support of Paupers").

I listed all the Town Reports on my board and had each student choose one to study. There were enough for each student to have one of his own, but few enough that between three classes (two of mine and one of my colleague's), most of the years had two students going over the same data.

Each student brought a USB drive to me and I downloaded a digital copy of her Town Report onto it. 

(Since then, I've realized that it works better to upload each of the Reports to GoogleDrive as a public document and create a TinyUrl for it. This avoids the whole, "I left my USB drive at home" problem.)

I had spent a class period the previous week going over how to calculate a percentage with my guys, so now I asked them to:

1)  Look up how much the Town of Deerfield had spent on its total budget during "their" year.

2)   Look up how much the Town spent on each of the five categories.

and 3)  Calculate what percentage each represented of the total Budget.

I scaffolded this pretty thoroughly in their project packets. (See below)

And because all but the oldest Town Reports had listings of Vital Statistics in the back - how many births, marriages and deaths there had been over the previous year - I had students record that data, too.

This stage  took two-three days of class time. We worked in the Computer Lab for most of that time, though individual students could do this research at home, as well.


Step 5: Graphing the Data

I begged some poster-sized graph paper from my Math colleague and roughed out a graph for the Percentage Statistics and another one for the Vital Statistics. I had each student go over her math a couple of times then, when she was pretty sure she had done everything right, had her graph her data on the charts, then put a slip of paper under the year, so if there was a discrepancy with somebody else's figures, we knew who to talk to about it.

I also had each student graph his percentage statistics as a bar graph or a pie chart so we could get a dramatic comparison of spending in his year.

(And so I could have another element in this project to grade.)

Step 6: Interpreting the Data

We spent a full class period going over our data. What was really interesting was examining the outliers or anomalies - the spikes that had no particular explanation. For instance, the blue spike on the left that indicates a massive (5X) increase in births in the year 1912. What, we wondered, had happened in Deerfield, NH in 1911?

One student suggested that a lot of people might have moved to town that year and the class was in giggles for several minutes as we contemplated a waddling army of pregnant women invading our small town.

As it turns out, the spike in 1912 was a graphing error - the birth rate was only slightly higher than normal that year - but the death rates (in black) were less explainable. The numbers and the math were correct. Students suggested several possibilities, like an epidemic, but that didn't pan out either; we looked at the causes of death that year and there was no clustering of similar deaths around the same time.

We did find another mystery however - one of the deaths had been from "Morphine Habit". The fact that a 19th Century Deerfielder had died from drug addiction was simultaneously tragic and highly cool. We cross-referenced his name against a list I had of Civil War soldiers from Deerfield and found that he had been too old to serve during the war. In fact, what might explain an 83-year old farmer dying from morphine addiction? We still don't have an answer, but the students were impressed by what great stories we were getting from such minimal information.

Step 7: Interviewing a Selectman

Steve Berry, the Chairman of the Deerfield Board of Selectmen agreed to spend most of the day with us last Friday, getting grilled by three separate classes of 7th graders.

Now that they had investigated how Deerfield has spent its money historically, they wanted to ask him questions about how spending decisions are made in town, today.

Click here to see the full interview. (Sorry about the sound quality)

I'm always proud of my guys, but they were completely awesome during both the interviews I sat in on - Mr. Berry was also interviewed by my colleague's class - that I was stunned. I had had each student prepare three questions ahead of time to ask him, but they hardly needed them. They paid close attention and asked really good, insightful questions about budgets, default budgets and municipal spending in general. They showed a high level of genuine interest.

I was very proud of them.

(Apparently, so was Mr. Berry - a very no-nonsense kind of guy - who told me he would definitely be happy to come in next year and do this again.)


Conclusion:

Overall, I couldn't be happier with this project. It went incredibly smoothly for a first attempt and I would only make a few small adjustments before doing it again:

• Next year, I'll scan more Town Reports to have a larger selection available.
• Since they are saved as PDFs, I can highlight passages, so I might highlight the total budget figure in each one to help each student find the first, most important data point.
• I'll upload all the Reports to begin with and avoid any USB complications.
• There were some problems with the URLs assigned by TinyUrl, so I'll find a creative way to name the URLs that won't be randomly reassigned to a Korean Teen Magazine (a tiny, but frustrating complication)

As always, your comments are appreciated.

New Hampshire State Social Studies Standards and Frameworks Met by This Project

Students will be able to:

A1: Use economic and geographic data, historical sources, as well as other appropriate sources

A3: Draw on the diversity of social studies-related sources, such as auditory and visual sources, such as documents, charts, pictures, architectural works, and music

B1: Distinguish between primary and secondary sources

B2: Detect cause and effect relationships

B6: Draw from the source information at a level appropriate to the task at hand, ie., skimming for facts or probing for deeper meaning

B7: Utilize various types of sources such as documents, charts, images, artifacts and maps

C1: Use appropriate sources to gain meaning of essential terms and vocabulary, glossary dictionary, texts word lists

C2: Recognize and understand relevant social studies terms

D3: Gather information by conducting basic statistical analysis

F1: Group data in categories according to appropriate criteria

F2: Place in proper sequence, i.e., in order of occurrence, including in timelines, or in order of importance, etc…

F3: Place data in tabular form: charts, graphs and illustrations

G1: Draw inferences from factual material

G4: Form opinions based on critical examination of relevant information

G5: State hypothesis for further study

G6: Take into account when interpreting events or behaviors context of their time and place

H1: Present visually (chart, graph, diagram, model, Power Point, ets.)

H2: Present orally (presentation, debate, group-discussion, simulation, etc.)

K1: Keep informed on issues that affect society

SS:CV:8:3.2: Analyze environmental, economic, and technological developments and their impact on society. (Themes: C: People, Places and Environment, D: Material Wants and Needs, G: Science, Technology, and Society)

SS:CV:8:4.1: Describe and analyze ways Americans can effectively participate in civic and political life at the local, state, and federal levels,  e.g.,      problem solving, public engagement, or voting. (Themes: A: Conflict and Cooperation, B: Civic Ideals, Practices, and Engagement, J: Human Expression and Communication)

SS:EC:8:5.1: Distinguish among the different methods of allocating resources, e.g., traditional, free market, or command economies. (Themes: D: Material Wants and Needs, F: Global Transformation, G: Science, Technology, and Society)

For the last five or six years, my wife and I kept a broken-down office chair in the corner of our dining room. It mostly held piles of mail and other, not-quite-ready-to-throw-out debris, until the holidays, when it was pressed into service for extra seating. This was somewhat problematic, because it doesn't have any working springs in the back, so an unsuspecting diner might accidentally fly backward onto the floor in a puddle of coleslaw. I had particular relatives I always tried to seat in it.

Last spring, we finally decided to get rid of it, so I brought it to school, figuring that some student with a penchant for dangerous living might get a kick out of it.

That turns out to have been a massive understatement.

For the past nine or ten months, each class period has started with an almost ritual squabble over who gets dibs on the "good" chair.

Because I'm not very bright, it took me several months to figure out how to use this to my advantage. 

A couple of years ago, I had the idea of awarding deserving students with a treat - a Cupcake of Tenacity™ - that I could use to recognize consistent effort. Unfortunately, I could never remember to award the cupcakes with any kind of consistency and I eventually just let the whole idea settle into my dustbin of good intentions.

Slowly though, ever so slowly, another idea slowly started to grow in the back of my mind. 

(It's tempting to compare it to a tiny seed sprouting and pushing its way to the surface, but in my case, a more apt metaphor is a layer of mold growing on forgotten left-overs in the back of a sub-par refrigerator.)

One morning, as I watched a couple of students face off over my broken-down office chair, I heard myself say, "What you you guys do if you ever had a GOOD chair to fight over?"

Click.

Over Christmas Vacation, I spent a couple of days tracking down leads on Craig's List for chairs that might have even more status than the EEFC (see above).

My original thought was something like a vinyl easy chair - the sort of chair you might find in a library. (I remembered buying one of these with a young friend many years ago at a thrift store for about ten dollars.)

As it turns out, there are a LOT of people eager to sell used chairs, but surprisingly few (okay, I guess not THAT surprising...) who want to unload good-condition library chairs for virtually nothing.

In the end, I found this leather office chair for twenty dollars.

It's a little low to the ground, but it's extremely comfortable and even reclines slightly.

Each Friday, I've announced the student in each class who gets to sit in it for the next week. Chair Privileges do not necessarily go to the student with the best grades or even the best behavior. They go to students who have put in a solid effort and demonstrated tenacity in their desire to learn.

To say that the Status Chair has been well-received would be a massive understatement. The looks on the faces of the students who have been publicly awarded Chair Privileges range from furious blushing to genuine shock. By the end of his or her Chair Week, each student has made a big show of leaning back with his or her hands laced behind their head and a "It's good to be King" expression on his or her face.

Will this lead to more tenacity and a better work-ethic in my students? Time will tell. I do know this, though - my classroom has gotten a LOT more popular for meetings after school and one of the other teachers always gets to the Status Chair before I do.

In addition, I arranged for the 7th graders to interview an archaeologist about Roman life. I looked for blogs being written about archaeological excavations at Pompeii, found out who was heading up the American expedition, then emailed him to find out if there was anyone on his team who could talk to our guys. He put me touch with Leigh Lieberman from Princeton University, who agreed to do a Skype interview with us.

I was worried about putting our entire 7th Grade in the same room at the same time, but my colleagues assured me that they would be fine. (They were right, of course.)

To prepare for the interview and prevent "Do you have any pets?" or "What's your favorite color?"-type questions, I made coming up with good questions part of the instruction packet/rubric. I conferenced with each student to help shape their questions into something relevant to their projects.

I Skyped with Ms. Lieberman ahead of time to make sure that I had the technical issues worked out. At the same time, I recorded the conversation to give my guys an idea what their interview would look like. This all seems to have worked well - the interview was a fantastic success (though the credit for that has to go to Ms. Lieberman and the students themselves).

This Year's Lessons and Notes for Next Year:

• Emphasize how long each movie should last (I shoot for 2-3 minutes) and that each member of the team needs to speak.
• Specify a size for artwork and illustrations - six inches would be good.
• Make sure that the students go over all the lines in their art with black Sharpie - pencil lines don't stand out enough on camera.
• The decision to weigh the final videos less heavily was probably a good one. This year's movies were of mixed quality, but entirely secondary to the good research that my guys did. If I was judging them strictly by what I saw on-screen, I would not have gotten a fair assessment of what my students had actually learned.

As always, this project is an evolving work in progress. Next year's videos will be even better.

Students will be able to find social studies-related information:
·      Use economic and geographic data, historical sources, as well as other appropriate sources
·      Discriminate to select the most worthwhile and trustworthy sources
·      Draw on the diversity of social studies-related sources, such as auditory and visual sources, such as documents, charts, pictures, architectural works, and music.

Students will be able to comprehend the wide range of social studies-related materials by using skills:
·      Distinguish between facts, interpretations, and opinions
·      Test the validity of information by using such criteria as source, objectivity, technical correctness, currency
·      Draw from the source information at a level appropriate to the task at hand, i.e., skimming for facts or probing for deeper meaning
·      Utilize various types of sources such as documents, charts, images, artifacts, and maps
·      Cite sources, particularly from the Internet, accurately and completely

Students will be able to find information:
·      Use appropriate sources to gain meaning of essential terms and vocabulary, glossary, dictionary, texts, word lists
·      Recognize and understand relevant social studies terms.

Students will be able to use appropriate internet resources:
·      Access relevant and reliable websites
·      Search effectively and efficiently
·      Judge websites for reliability, bias, and appropriateness

Students will be able to present information in a variety of ways:
·      Present visually (chart, graph, diagram, model, Power Point, etc.)
·      Present orally (presentation, debate, group discussion, simulation, etc.)
·      Present in writing (research essays, abstracts, short answers, etc.)

SS:GE:8:2.3: Describe how culture, technology, and experience affect perception of places and regions, e.g.,    images created by mass media or travel. (Themes: E: Cultural Development, Interaction, and Change, F: Global Transformation, G: Science, Technology, and Society)

SS:HI:8:3.1: Explain how art, music and literature often reflect and/or influence major ideas, values and conflicts of particular time periods, e.g.,     manifest destiny,  protest movements, or freedom of expression. (Themes: E: Cultural Development, Interaction, and Change, J: Human Expression and Communication)

SS:WH:8:3.1: Demonstrate an understanding of how art, music and literature often influence or reflect major ideas, values and conflicts of a particular time. (Themes: E: Cultural Development, Interaction, and Change, J: Human Expression and Communication)

It's been a rough couple of days for America.

It's the kind of time when we all need to tap into our strengths for those who are running low. Brave people need to be braver. Smart people need to be smarter. Kind people need to be even kinder.

My main strength seems to be finding dorky stuff on the internet.

Here are a few things I've found that help restore hope, peace and dorkyness to my life:

And finally, this picture of my son, taken last week while Christmas shopping:

If you still need more, let me know. I have more.

Stay strong.

I'm pretty gullible.

I tend to fall for internet hoaxes with appalling regularity (which, by the way, is a brand-name I will trademark if I ever market a line of adult diapers), but even I didn't buy this one, when it appeared in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Supposedly, this giant crocodile was shot swimming up the flooded streets of New Orleans and was being kept in the freezer of a local hotel. Checking it out on Snopes.com, I learned that this photo had been taken in West Africa, several years previously. Because New Orleans was on so much in everyone's thoughts, it was natural for people to see a group of black men with this crocodile and assume that this was one more in the horrific series of tragedies that New Orleanians had to deal with.

At the time, I used this in a lesson with my classes to teach a timely lesson on media literacy - to be critical consumers of information.

So, earlier this week, as Hurricane Sandy tore into the Eastern Seaboard, and I started finding links to stunning pictures of storm damage, I was a little critical of what I saw. After some research, I discovered that some of the most dramatic of the photos that were circulating on social media were fakes. Others were real photos, but not from this particular storm. Still others were verifiably accurate.

I spent all my class periods yesterday going through four websites that deal with these pictures and discussing the photos with my students. Topics we discussed included:

• Do you think this image is real?
• What makes you suspicious that it might not be?
• How did the people running this website decide if it was real or not?
• Are there multiple shots of the same event from different sources?
• Is the photographer a credible source? (A respected news photographer from the Wall Street Journal, or some anonymous guy with a cellphone?)
• Does the photo play on our fears (particularly of sharks)?

Here are the websites I used. (In the following days and weeks, there will probably be more and better resources for this lesson, but I was very impressed with these, both in terms of timeliness and their really good attribution of sources.)

"Sorting the Real Sandy Photos From the Fakes"  - The Atlantic

This page shows 30 photos, supposedly from Hurricane Sandy and does a meticulous job of citing their provenance.

I led off with this set of photos, because it set a really good tone for our discussion and got my 7th and 8th graders to use their critical thinking skills.

I especially like that they closed out their set with this one.

"Hurricane Sandy Photographs" - Snopes.com

Snopes.com is my go-to source for checking out urban legends, rumors and dubious internet claims. It isn't perfect, but it does a pretty good job of tracking these stories and pictures back to their sources. As usual, they did not disappoint me.

"The Most Unbelievable but Real Pictures of Sandy's Destruction" - The Atlantic Wire

After doing all this critical thinking, my students welcomed the chance to look at verifiably accurate pictures of the storm damage. Power is still out in the town where I teach and most of them hadn't had a chance to see much footage of the storm yet.

Finally, my students were as pleased as I was to see this picture, which I was originally linked to on Twitter with the message, "OH MY GOD! NOW THIS IS HAPPENING!!"

New Hampshire State Social Studies Standards and Frameworks Met by this Lesson:

• Discriminate to select the most worthwhile and trustworthy sources
• Draw on the diversity of social studies-related sources, such as auditory and visual sources, such as documents, charts, pictures, architectural works, and music.
• Distinguish between facts, interpretations, and opinions
• Recognize author bias; recognize propaganda
• Test the validity of information by using such criteria as source, objectivity, technical correctness, currency
• Utilize various types of sources such as documents, charts, images, artifacts, and maps
• Cite sources, particularly from the Internet, accurately and completely
• Access relevant and reliable websites
• Judge websites for reliability, bias, and appropriateness
• Draw inferences from factual material
• Compare and contrast credibility of differing accounts of the same event
• Form opinion based on critical examination of relevant information
• Justify interpretation by citing evidence
• Keep informed on issues that affect society

SS:CV:8:3.2: Analyze environmental, economic, and technological developments and their impact on society. 


SS:GE:8:2.3: Describe how culture, technology, and experience affect perception of places and regions, e.g., images created by mass media or travel.