Year 2011 – Fall Semester, Week Four Updates.

The Teaching Front

We’re midway through the French-Indian War in my American History 120s, having blasted through Early Colonialism as rapidly as possible. There are important components which I will pick up later, namely triangular trade, mercantilism and the like when we approach the American Revolution. I didn’t waste any time on the Salem Witch Trials (I never do). On the other hand, I spent a significant amount of time laying down the foundation of slavery in America.

At our present pace, we should arrive at the first exam dates by the end of week five, start of week six. This is later than my peers, probably because I spend a lecture day or two talking about the nature of history in general. On the other hand, I’m further along on the timeline than many of them.

Not that it is a competition. Each teaches there own way. Fortunately for me, the majority of my peers recognize and respect this concept.

In American History 121 I’ve got a split between my two evening classes. One of them is about to fight the Spanish-American War after we spent time on the concept of Imperialism. Prior to that we used Andrew Carnegie as our focal point for the Second Industrial Revolution. And of course, we covered Reconstruction. In the other class we are just about to emerge from Reconstruction. Hopefully we’ll pick up speed over the next two weeks.

I’m building new exams for all classes this semester, generating new essay questions as we move along. I’ve been using the same essays for a couple of years now and it seems to be long past time to switch things up.

Once we clear the first exams I’ll proceed forward to the Pre-Revolutionary Era and Theodore Roosevelt respectively. I think I’ve got at least two to three good classes with the potential for a fourth if I can weed out the dead weight or get them to see the light. The first exam almost always serves as a wake up call for many of them. They’ll make a decision to double down or bail out based upon what happens in the next couple of weeks.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this period is that I provide ample warning for what is coming down the pike. It isn’t an ambush by any means, instead it is perhaps more akin to a carefully scripted training exercise. They are given metrics by which I will grade the exam in the form of commonly made mistakes. In many ways, it is another history lecture for the students, a history of their predecessors and how they tend to react to the first exams in my classes.

Sadly, they frequently ignore these warnings and advance to contact expecting to get through without too much trouble.

They are often sorely mistaken.

Lastly, I had a guest visit my classroom to see how I did business. She was there on the day we killed General Edward Braddock, a bastard in need of frequent killing if you ask me. Later when I talked with my guest, she said if she had more history instructors like me, she might have chosen a different discipline. She gave me high marks for getting my students to class on time, keeping their attention and moving forward at a brisk pace.

I’ve got to say, I always appreciate positive feedback concerning my teaching. Thanks!

The Writing Front

I was able to get fiction writing done on three separate instances this week. Next week, the plan is to increase that to four days a week, Monday through Friday, probably around the two pm time frame. That isn’t my strongest time creatively but it is open and the campus is relatively quiet.

I also transcribed some of the longhand material, tweaking and refining as I went. I’m pretty happy with the results so far.

The goal is to have a finished product ready by semester’s end. Perhaps I might sign up for the National Novel Writing Month competition. This is slated to become a novella sized project and I think the subject matter I’ll address warrants that much coverage.

It feels good to be back in the saddle again. This wouldn’t be possible without the support of the Woman I Love, Trinity, who got her vehicle back to operational status, freeing me from transport duties.

Thank you very much.

The Fitness Front

The transportation freedom mentioned above has given me the flexibility to focus on my efforts in the swimming pool. This week the goal was to complete 4000 yards by today. I fell short by a 1000 yards since I didn’t go today.

On the other hand, my weight is now down to 190.5 pounds, more than twenty pounds less than my January 2012 high of 212 pounds.

My energy levels are good on a relatively consistent basis. On the rare instance when I am late to class and I have to drop for push ups (I believe in paying for breaking my own syllabus rules, believe it or not) I can easily pump out more push ups than are actually required. In fact, I got applause in one class for pumping out twenty without too much effort.

Not bad, given that I had swam a thousand yards with a 25 push up warm up a mere thirty minutes earlier.

The only downside of the renewed fitness condition is that I often underestimate how much projection power I have.

I’ve become known as “The Loud One.”

Other Fronts

The new glasses came in to replace the pair I busted last week. Now all we need to do is just count the days down to the next two pay days on the 22nd and the 1st respectively. Those resources should, finally, after ten months of economic misery, lost sleep and bubbling anger, allow us to patch the last of the major holes in the budget. Barring anymore disasters, we can move forward with getting our fiscal house in order.

I continue to read Dario Cirello’s Aegean Dream, a memoir of the time Dario and his wife spent in Greece. It is strange to be reading this while I am taking Spanish. The commentary on language troubles matches my own efforts at trying to speak Spanish intelligently.

Finally, the new Kindle arrived to replaced the dead one. I’ll pick it up from the landlord’s office tomorrow before I head off to training with the Lifeguard Company I work for.

So it goes. Things are getting better by the day, barring an exception or two. May the upward climb continue.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri

A Tuesday Pondering: A wish list for technology in the classroom.

When I was a kid, I always thought the early decades of the 21st Century would feature the usual exotic gear of science fiction. Perhaps we’d have HAL 9000s without homicidal tendencies, teleport systems and the like.

Instead, when I walk into a classroom, here is what I have in the year 2011.

1. I have a computer console, perhaps as old as three years maybe more. The computer contained therein is at best, a slow, fickle device which runs about as reliably as my radio teletype rig did when I was in the Army.

2. I have a projection system which, unfortunately, is only as good as the computer it is hooked up to. It projects images either onto a “Smart Board,” or a screen.

3. In some classrooms, I have the aforementioned “Smart Board.” This device is designed to incorporate multimedia on a traditional wall type surface.

4. I have PowerPoint, which is one of the programs in the computer.

No holograms. No time machines. No smart boards which really are smart. No voice activated computer system which will instantaneously respond to my commands CORRECTLY the first time and every time after that.

5. Oh, I have the Internet.

As a published science fiction writer, you’d think I’d be the first to use all of this technology to maximum effect. I am the second youngest history adjunct we have, which means by virtue of my age, my presence on the net, and a dozen other factors, that I am most likely to embrace the tools in my classroom.

Do I?

No. In a word, I hate them.

Why?

1. The computer is slow, unresponsive and does not respond to intuitive moments when you have to improvise in a lecture in order to make a point. It also vectors you straight into an inflexible presentation mode.

2. The projector is only as good as the computer you have. If the computer is having a good day, then it works fine. If the computer is not having a good day or someone prior to you did something to it, you’ll have trouble. This chews up valuable class time which would be spent doing other things.

3. The smartboard isn’t that smart, is not responsive enough for my tastes and like the projector, is only as good as the computer it is attached to. After a semester of experimentation with the smartboard, I stopped using it.

4. PowerPoint.

My frustrations with PPT are nearly endless. When forced to sit through a PPT presentation, I find myself looking at the clock, wondering if the Presenter or Lecturer is simply going to read from the script. If they do so, I shut them out. Further, in my experience, students will compulsively and more to the point, mindlessly write down EVERY THING THEY SEE BECAUSE IF IT IS ON THE PPT IT MUST BE IMPORTANT!

This slows the class down even further while you wait for the slow writers to catch up.

5. The Internet?

We have campus wide wifi. Guess what the students do with it?

Surf facebook, look at porn and generally do nothing productive.

In other words, I have a room full of what are supposed to be shiny toys designed to help me teach my students. Instead, they are very much like the plagued M-16 which American soldiers and many others have suffered with for decades. Fickle, prone to failure and not terribly effective.

What I’d like is a classroom filled with intuitive technology which could respond instantaneously to my commands, something which is fluid and not limited to a mere linear sequential process. Here is my wish list.

1. A smart board that is essentially an oversided iPad. I could swipe the screen, write on it with a device, tap commands to activate videos, utilize a Skype style function to contact historians for impromptu conversations, link classrooms for learning across disciplines and the like.

Yes, our “smart board” is supposed to be capable of all of that. It is slow, fickle and too unresponsive for my taste.

2. A hologram of some type, something which could conjure three dimensional images of historical figures, give them a voice and allow them to move about the classroom. Even better yet would be a hologram which can interact with the students in scenario based education.

3. A gaming system which allows students to actually enter a historical world. Those who play video games such as Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, L.A. Noire and a host of others know what I am talking about. A virtual world where students can be given assignments where they go in search of various, programmable research assignments. Part of the game would be to successfully interact with the inhabitants of a given time period, conduct interviews and gain further knowledge in that fashion.

This would give them exposure to material culture, technological culture and most important for many, social history in general. It would augment the standard traditional political historical narrative.

4. A computer system which is simple, robust and responsive.

What do I use since I don’t have any of the items on my wish list?

Oral tradition, also known as lecture. I use my dry erase board to draw concepts, stick figures and the like in order to illustrate concepts. I use my storytelling ability to try and conjure that hologram out of thin air, using the student’s own imagination to the best of our collective abilities.

In other words, I use what is essentially ancient, reliable technology to teach in a 21st Century classroom because the other gear is unreliable and interferes with my teaching style.

So it goes. Discuss.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri

Pondering the notion of using points for assessment.

The Teaching Front: Pondering Points

I teach history, not math. We should get this off the deck immediately. My math skills are, to be honest, atrocious. So when I sat down to figure out how to build my first batch of tests four years ago, it seemed to me that the best solution was to build a 100 point test. There would be four such tests in a semester, which matched my own experiences as a student. Issuing the grade the student earned would be a simple matter. Deduct points based upon errors, mistakes and wrong answers, subtract from 100 and there you have it, a grade to issue. If they lost 3 points, they got a 97 percent which would be an A. If they lost 65 points, that would be a 45 percent, which would be an F.

The thing is this. Just what, exactly should something be worth?

I’m not the first person to wrestle with this and there are all sorts of philosophies on what assessment should be used for, how many points to issue, should it be high stakes or low stakes and so on and so forth. An instructor’s assessment methodology, or lack thereof, is probably one indicator of their overall teaching philosophy.

I started with first principles.

First, I always hated homework in high school. To me, it was not much more than paperwork which had to be mindlessly completely. When I did it, which was not always the case, I ground through it reluctantly and turned it in. As soon as it was turned in, I forgot about everything except what the item was worth. If I really hated the class, and I hated half of them in any given year, I probably forgot the point value as well.

One pleasant aspect of college is that in many classes, you do not have homework. This often comes as a culture shock to freshman students, who are used to grinding out the assignments. You still have to do the assigned work, such as reading and study guides, but in most traditional college classes in the social sciences, homework isn’t issued.

It is worth pointing out that once someone pulled the gun away from my head per homework, which were now called study guides and reading assignments, I popped through them pretty quickly. I also retained the information for much longer than I might have otherwise. Not issuing homework also cut down on a number of other issues, such as allocating time to grade the assignments and the fact that most students probably cheat on the homework assignments. My summer working as a lifeguard around a bunch of high school students served only to reinforce that latter notion.

That leaves me with tests, quizzes and essays.

My first year exams were modeled on those issued by Larry Cox for American History at Maple Woods Community College. They were multiple choice exams only, 100 points, each question is worth one point each. It was the type of test I took and I remembered happily blasting through them without any real effort, though I messed up the scantron on the very first test which gave me a fright. Fortunately, we fixed the error and I got a solid A on my first exam.

The problem? Students were having trouble finishing the test. This is something I still struggle with, most people read v-e-r-y . . . s-l-o-w-l-y. The more important the item, the slower they go. They more nervous they are, they go even slower still. If they are prone to test anxiety, more on that in a bit, they tend to freeze up completely.

Another problem is the fact that other students who put in a minimal amount of time memorizing bits of data simply regurgitated the data onto the test, earned an A, just like I did, and moved on without really learning much. Given that survey classes are supposed to be preparing the students for advancement to higher levels and remembering my own troubles in that transition, this didn’t sit easily with me.

A final problem is that I was advised to issue some portion of the test with a writing component. Over the semesters I experimented with short answers, which are maddening to grade and issue points to. Just how much should a short answer be worth? Five points or ten? Twenty or two? It also seemed to me that the short answer wasn’t much better than the multiple choice in terms of assessing their understanding of the material. It was just another version of the multiple choice only I had to suffer through their bad handwriting.

There is cheating on tests as well, I might add.

So I pulled a page from the Western Civ classes I took years ago. On those exams the Instructor used a fifty-five point essay question. There were three per exam, he would pick one at random. Then you’d write. It was a harder test, to be certain, but it did force you to memorize the facts, think critically about the question at hand, organize a response and economize your words plus your time in order to complete the exam before the end of class.

I generated my first essay based exams with a point value of fifty points and issued them to my classes with fear in my heart. There was a lot of nay saying about the average student’s ability to write an essay, some of it well founded I might add. I’d still have the problem of bad handwriting and poor organization to deal with.

But why fifty points? Here is my reasoning.

First, if the point value is too low, like say 25 points, then the student will wargame the exam and figure they can skimp on the effort. At best you’ll get what is basically a short answer paragraph of maybe three to eight sentences which fails to answer the question on any level.

Second, if the point value is too high, then the student worries too much about the essay question, focusing on it to the exclusion of the rest of the exam.

Third, if they blow the essay, that is over half of the exam. Fifty points out of a hundred is a nice, round number to work with. They can’t blow it off, but they can’t blow off the other part of the test either. If they at least put some effort into it, they can get a passing score.

How do I grade the essays? On that matter, it becomes rather subjective and it is often a point of contention.

For one thing, I actually READ each essay. Students frequently assume that what I will do is skim their essay, looking for key terms. I do skim the essays the first time just to see how long it is, how it is organized, what I am dealing with over all. Then I read them.

I look for the following things when reading.

1. Is the essay well organized? Does it have a beginning, a middle and an ending which makes sense? Did the student accurately lay down the historical sequence of events in order to build their answer properly?

Often a badly organized essay is very much akin to a three year old with a box of crayons. It is all over the place and when I talk about essays I actually take a marker and scribble a line that goes in loops all over the board. This graphic representation sinks in for many of them.

2. Did you indent your paragraphs?

Some students do not know how to indent for some reason. When I get their essay, it is a solid block of text which is virtually unreadable. I warn them in advance to indent their essays, tell them how to do it if they have a doubt (place your index finger on the page and start writing from there) and I tell them that if they have a new idea, it probably needs a new paragraph. After all, Thomas Jefferson probably doesn’t want to share his paragraph with Alexander Hamilton.

Failure to indent costs a student one point per each offense to a maximum of five points. Five points is enough to hammer the point through to them without actually failing them if they executed everything else properly.

3. Factual errors.

Telling me that George Washington was at the Battles of Saratoga (for the record, he wasn’t) constitutes a factual error. I can’t brush it off as an opinion or an argument. When a student makes a factual mistake it shows me that they have not mastered the basic details required by the question. Thus I deduct points, anywhere from one to five, depending on the severity of the error.

These errors can and do add up very quickly. I also think this separates the adults from the kids in that someone who is good at memorizing bits of data often lacks the practice and experience of putting the puzzle together. It also serves as a pretty good indicator of what is going on in their headspace.

The complaint, often leveled by students against this element of the grading is that they have no real way of knowing EXACTLY what to put on the test. This type of student is one who still thinks, in spite of everything I have taught them, that history is merely about memorization.

“If only I can memorize the RIGHT details, I can ace Mr. Murphy’s test,” they must say to themselves.

The funny thing is, I do tell them EXACTLY what they need to know. It is called lecture and part of what I am looking for is their ability to summarize their understanding effectively.

4. Lack of details.

This is perhaps the most maddening aside from poor organization. Here is an example.

These guys were mad about taxes so they started a revolution. They fought against those other guys, I can’t remember who they are. It was a long fight with a lot of dead people in it but when it was over, our country was born. I’m sure glad they fought for us because I wouldn’t have my freedom without them.

A student will often say, “This is right, isn’t it?”

Yes.

And no.

Yes, it is a description of something I cover in class. It is right, vaguely. It also lacks nearly every detail one would need in order to figure out exactly what the student was talking about. If the student were to give an informative speech on a lecture in my class using the above paragraph, they would probably fail the assignment. It lacks the standard who, what, where, when, how and why that one needs in order to flesh this out.

Lack of detail will cost a student one to five points per instance.

5. Insufficient length.

This usually goes hand in hand with the above. If I get a blank essay, I’ll issue zero points. If I get a paragraph like the one I mentioned in italics, I’ll be charitable and issue ten points for effort. If the student nails the multiple choice then they’ve got a 60 percent, which is just barely passing.

While disappointing in many respects, these are the easiest to grade. You put ten points on them and move on.

The essay questions themselves are challenging yet if you read them and answer every component of them, it is possible to build a framework from the question itself.

Here is a question from my Western Civ One class.

Describe the causes and motivations of the Peloponnesian War. Identify the major combatants of the war and provide details on the nature of this conflict. Furthermore, was the war inevitable? Did the major combatants want a war and could it have been avoided? Provide your opinion supported by sufficient historical evidence and reasoning.

Students often ask, “Why is this one single block of text?”

I tell them, “I want you to get into the habit of taking blocks of text like this and breaking them down into component parts. When you reach upper level courses, you’ll look back on this question and see it as pretty clear cut in what I’m looking for.”

During the same semester that I issued this question, I brought a 300 level essay question from Trinity’s classes in to read to my students. Even with a Master’s level education, it took me a lot of effort to pull apart exactly what that instructor was looking for. My question simply asks you to tell me what you know about the period in question, lay down the causes and motivations, and provide evidence for your opinion.

The evidence, in this case, was to be pulled from a survey of the historigraphic (a history of history) lecture which detailed what previous historians had said about the war. It was probably one of the most complex lectures I’d ever given a college level course and perhaps a bit too hard at the 100 level. On the other hand, my Western Civ students beat the living daylights out of the question in spite of the difficulty.

In an opinion based question like this one, opinion counts for ten points. If you give only an opinion not supported by knowledge of the facts, you’ll be lucky to get any points at all.

So, to rift off of something Terri Lowry once said, what are my objectives?

1. I want to impart to the student that the study of history is more than mere memorization. They must be able to think critically about the information in order to, at later stages of the game, have a defensible opinion based upon the evidence at hand.

2. I want the student to gain the ability to write a critical essay outside of the core composition courses in preparation for advancement to higher level college classes.

3. I want the student to develop the ability to summarize their argument effectively, balancing the need for time conservation in class against the need to provide as much detail as possible.

4. Finally, I want the student to actually REMEMBER something from my class for longer than sixteen weeks.

In this bit of pondering I’ve only covered the essay portion. I still issue a multiple choice component which is worth two points a piece for a subtotal of 50 points.

Why two points per question? Again, it gets down to time. I think, even though the essay is worth half of the exam, that it is the more important component of the exam. I have to balance that view against the fact that not all students are good essay writers and they have a limited amount of time to complete the exam. If I issued one point per question for a maximum of 50 questions, they would be back to lack of time, which would affect the quality of their essay.

I could simply make the exam a 75 point exam but then we’re back to the problem of a student worrying more about the essay than the multiple choice. I want to get them into the habit of taking both sections seriously.

I didn’t get to test anxiety on this run. Maybe I will later, but this particular essay is long enough already.

Oh, what would I give this entry if I were grading it?

To be honest, it does wander around a fair amount and it does lack detail in places. In other places, it is vague.

I’d give it an 80 percent. Barely a B.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri

The General Sunday Ponderings: How I Became a Soldier.

Twenty years ago this week I was coming to the realization that I had survived my first and last war. In retrospect, that war was a forgone conclusion. Military historians have ascertained that the reasons for the defeat of the Iraqi Armed Forces at the hands of the Coalition Forces of Operation Desert Storm can be traced to poor leadership, poor planning, lack of motivation among the opposing forces, and perhaps an overinflated assessment of the capabilities of Soviet technology.

It was a war that lasted, in terms of ground combat, four days.

It changed everything.

How did I come to stand on the razor’s edge of history? Granted, I didn’t have any effect on it through my personal actions. I was a mere cog, a little tiny bit of the war machine, one that could have been deleted without a second thought. In fact, if I were writing a novel on the Persian Gulf War, which would probably need at least one fire fight to satisfy the readers, I would pick someone other than myself as an example. I saw a lot of things, but in terms of actual battlefield changing actions, I did very little.

I bore witness, and that is about it. As wars go, I got off pretty easy in the initial assessment. So easy that many of my peers, including one particular prick in South Korea, frequently stated that it wasn’t a real war at all.

Tell that to the Iraqis we killed.

I am not a repentant veteran. I never have been. I offer no apologies for my service nor make any excuses. I do not experience any great discomfort at what happened. Perhaps I experience a very real regret that people I bore no personal grudge against were killed and I often wonder about the living that survived the dead.

I wasn’t particularly eager to go to war either. I was not the kind of soldier who sat around masturbating to the latest issue of Guns and Ammo while whispering sweet nothings to my weapon, named after some woman whose pants I failed to get into. I did not volunteer for Airborne training, in fact I actively turned down an opportunity to go. I did not have any particular affinity for elite infantry units such as the Rangers, who seem still to this day to be not much different than Marines. Technology interested me more than living in the mud and if the Air Force had offered as much for enlistment as the Army had, I probably would have been an airman.

Instead, I joined the Army. Money was part of the motivation, family lineage in the Army was another, and finally the lack of any real prospects was a third. Perhaps patriotism figured in at some point though I can be just as cynical as the next American about my home nation. Lastly, if nothing else, I knew I was a fighter. I had spent my teen years fighting. I would spend my Army years fighting and I’d fight some more after that.

It is perhaps a strange thing then that I was influenced by what is essentially an antiwar documentary which was aired in 1983 on PBS. Each night I would sit down in front of my small black and white television set in my bedroom, which was a big thing in my book, having a television, to watch Gwynne Dyer hold for on the futility of war.

The documentary, entitled War, was designed to educate the public on the futile nature of warfare as a means of resolving differences. Like many products of the Reagan Era, it was designed to scare the living shit out of anyone with an ounce of sanity about the probability of a nuclear war.

Here is the installment entitled The Deadly Game of Nations.

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The music with the intro, along with the images, embedded themselves into my teenage brain. Unlike my peers, I never saw anything you might call glory in warfare. I knew it was a bloody, horrifying, dirty business. I knew it came with horrendous costs, all I had to do was look at my Vietnam Era father to see that. From reading the history books along with science fiction novels, I knew that the next World War, the one we still haven't fought and hopefully never will, was going to be the last.

Dyer's job was to talk me out of enlisting. He wasn't a dick about it. He was a veteran of military service himself steeped in a solid background of military education. He was antiwar without disrespecting, demeaning or insulting the soldiers.

In my case, he failed.

To be fair, my father failed too. So did my mother, at least the first two times I signed an enlistment contract. Each time I managed to come up with sufficient justification for enlistment. Threats to crack my kneecaps not withstanding, I signed the dotted line. I should point out that I nearly did so again in 2004 in order to go to Iraq, not because I felt a need to prove myself, but because I felt a need to back up my support for Operation Iraqi Freedom by virtue of direct participation.

Perhaps some perspective is in order.

In March 1989, when I signed the Delayed Entry Program contract, these facts were known.

1. The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of Russia actively targeted civilian population centers with enough ordnance to destroy the planet many times over.

2. The danger of dying in such a war was no less or great at Fulda Gap in Germany than it would be if I stayed in Kansas City, Missouri. What difference does it make if a T-72 gets me, nerve gas or a ten megaton nuke chucked at Downtown KCMO? Dead is dead, no matter where the dying transpires.

3. The two Super Powers had managed to keep the genie in the bottle. I had a belief, perhaps a naive one, that no one would go so far as to chuck nukes around like so many hand grenades.

4. On a personal level, the economy sucked. My job prospects were awful. Four years of active service bearing witness to the failures of my civilian counterparts only serve to reinforce the notion that I had made the right choice.

5. I had to pay for college somehow.

So I signed up, knowing that I was signing a contract. I promised to go fight, and if need be, die. In exchange, the United States of America would feed, clothe and house me. They'd provide a rudimentary if not great medical care program and if I made it to the end of my first four years, they'd give me money for college.

If I could pick up an honorable discharge.

All I had to do was agree to go kill anyone the United States of America declared the Enemy of the Week.

It turned out to be the Iraqis.

If a war was to be fought, I expected it to be at Fulda Gap in Germany. Or maybe, in my wilder moments, perhaps Columbia fighting some Vietnam do over in an attempt to control the drug trade. I didn't expect Iraq and I don't think the Iraqis did either.

Dyer's series is useful for a lot of reasons. Aside from laying out the mindset of a soldier, he captures the attitudes of the early 1980s regarding the military.

1. Soldiers are obsolete.
2. They are preserving an obsolete way of doing things.
3. The equipment they use is expensive, fickle and will probably fail them at the worst possible moment.
4. The Soviets have more of everything, which will lead us to use nukes.

It turns out Dyer was wrong, perhaps sadly enough. He was wrong on every front. We still use wars to solve our problems. We haven't blown the planet up yet (and I probably just jinxed us by typing that). Our weapons are expensive and fickle yet they are also far more effective than anyone could have possibly imagined.

In one respect, I'm glad he was wrong. If he had been right, I wouldn't be typing this right now. I'd be in a grave somewhere, long moldered away to nothing, the victim of a futile effort to dislodge an invader from another country.

In many ways, Dyer convinced me that it didn't matter where I was. Stay at home and catch a nuke or go for a soldier and take your chances. This series did the convincing.

So it goes.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri

The Saturday Updatery: No, I am not dead.

It has been a busy week for yours truly. So busy that my fitness program, which had been running pretty consistent since the start of the new year, got a bit derailed as I dealt with one issue or another.

Let’s get to it.

The Teaching Front

We’re advancing to our first exam, which is far later than normal due to the snow days we’ve had. I’m behind in all of my classes as well, which is yet another struggle. Further, due to the disruptions, it has been difficult to build up momentum and bond with the students. As a result, things are not working quite as smoothly as I’d like. Fortunately, I have no real disciplinary issues on the table.

On the other hand, I see a lot of my students using their textbook and their study guide during the lecture to hunt down terms. On the surface this might seem like a good thing, right? At least they are paying attention to something.

Well, actually, it is a bad thing. It is a sign of a time crunched student, or worse, a bored student, who is attempting to work through the study guide while I lecture. More often than not students believe that the lecture material is not important for the test. I often get students who ask how much of what I lecture on is in the textbook.

Less than you’d think. The lectures are often specifically designed to go deeper into the topics at hand or they are designed to operate hand in glove with the textbook.

So an example would be the lecture on the Pre-Revolutionary Era of American History. The traditional way of teaching this is to start with the Stamp Act, the Sugar Act, the This Act and the That Act and rest assured that is exactly how it sounds to the student. They are merely memorizing bits of info for regurgitation and that is the last thing you want them to do. Memorization is just an early step towards true understanding.

Rather than lecture on those acts, I make the student responsible for reading the textbook’s coverage of those acts. What I do instead is lay out the case for why the Colonials believed that their only recourse was to declare independence from Great Britain. I lay down the grievances and I fill in the background for the Colonial’s historical understanding and perception of events.

How does that work out? Well, I’m two semesters into using that method and if you are a student who does what I told you to do, take notes on the lecture, tie it to your reading and form a synthesis of the two, then they do fine.

Test results aren’t much different between one strategy of coverage or the other, I might add.

In any event, they are doing their homework while I lecture. I think I’m going to put that on the Why Did I Fail The Test? section of my syllabus for next semester.

The Student Front

I’ve not had a chance to update either the Pondering Tree or Playing with Genesis.

We’ve moved into the actual writing of the novel. The group I am in wrote a combined first chapter this last week.

We’re in a computer lab and to be honest, I am growing to believe that this was not the best choice for the class. It is hard to get into an effective group in order to get any work done. The computers serve as a frequent distraction. Given that I was using my laptop on Tuesday, even I am guilty of this, though I had a reason (which is not the same as an excuse) for having that computer out. If nothing else, the clickety-click-click-click of the keys on my laptop are relatively quiet.

In fact, in terms of technology in the classroom, I think it ought to be banned. No videos, no slides, no powerpoints, none of it. Just a board to write on and comfortable chairs for the students to sit in with a large desk to spread out their things. On C-Span this morning (and what a wonderful discovery that is, a place where people discuss without drama or shouting or Jerry Springer like behavior) an education pundit was talking about a high tech public school on the East Coast which cost a pretty penny to equip with the latest and greatest in technology.

The performance at that school? In the toilet. Students surf the net, IM each other or spend their time trying to get the tech to work in the first place.

Banish to the Computer Science Department and leave it there.

I’ll provide a proper update to Playing with Genesis that covers the actual course material and progress later this weekend.

Research Project Number – 05

The Client was on deadline this week, which was something of a surprise to me. I wasn’t aware of the deadline. No matter. I sat down with the backlog I could most effectively contribute to and worked over the material. By deadline time, I had most of the storyline components covered. There are a few lingering errors in the manuscript but I will catch them later.

It is going to be a pretty big novel, folks. I’m looking forward to seeing how the trilogy ends.

The Writing Front

In the Early Morning Rain by Berry Henderson and myself is currently out to market. We haven’t heard anything back yet so we’re hopeful. It is a new market open to e-subs so I’ll be looking over my inventory to see what can be polished up and put into the wind. Many of the valuable things I have learned in World Building will be helpful in that respect.

On the novel front I was able to drag out the manuscript for the first time in a couple of weeks to give it a going over. What I have right now are a bunch of cobbled together, pasted together scenes which are loosely linked together. In looking over the manuscript I think some major work is needed to better define the roles of the various characters.

There is also one glaring problem, the same one I noticed with my previous novel effort, Convergence Point.

When I have the space to spread out and more specifically, work on a military topic, I tend to let the action and strategy dominate the narrative. It is a natural strength of mine as a storyteller and an historian. Unfortunately, without significant character depth and development, no one is going to care about that action. It will be nothing more than a series of cardboard targets getting cut down on the battlefield.

So that part of it needs significant work. It is the sort of thing I can probably hammer out in a week of concentrated effort.

As for the World Building in the novel, I think some refinement of various structures and institutions are necessary. I definitely want to redefine the family structure of this society based upon what I have learned in Melissa Eaton’s Cultural Anthropology side of the course.

If things go according to plan, I’ll use my time during Spring Break in tandem with Trinity’s Spring Break (which is at the end of the month) to get the project ready for submission to market.

Other Fronts

Over the next few days the Great Summer Job Hunt will commence. Now that I am lifeguard qualified I should be able to, hopefully, get a decent job at around 25 to 30 hours a week maximum. Even more ideally, it will be a posting to an outdoor pool.

Trinity is making plans to travel to California to see her eldest son and wife for a week during her Spring Break. I should be able to polish up the novel while she is out there. I’ve got to say that I am glad to see that fences have been mended with that particular component of her family.

Lastly, March 10th is my father’s birthday. He’ll be sixty-nine years old if my math is correct. No one thought he’d get this far given that he has prostate cancer, multiple myeloma, stage three lung cancer and a heart muscle that more closely resembles a chunk of hamburger than a heart.

I chalk it up to sheer cussed stubborness myself.

Trinity and I are going to see about getting some barbecue for tomorrow night so we can celebrate a bit early. Both of us will be tied up during the week with our respective college obligations.

So it goes.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri

The General Sunday Ponderings: Teaching American History II.

American History II

Back in the Winter Semester of 1994 I took American History II with Larry Cox at Maple Woods Community College. I had taken him during my first semester for American History I and unlike many of my students, I truly enjoyed the experience. It was a lecture based course with weekly quizzes, reading assignments and four exams. It was not difficult to earn an A during the Fall 1993 Semester and it was not difficult to earn an A during the Winter Semester either.

In fact, I earned an A on every class I took at Maple Woods in the History Department, which pretty much set my course for my current career.

Years later, in the Fall Semester of 2007 I’d finally get a chance to teach a college level history course. In addition to brushing up on my recent American History, I scoured my brain for memories of that class with Larry Cox and modeled my course accordingly. For my assessment I decided to go with multiple choice exams which were balanced out by true false and short answer. This seemed reasonable enough to me. I also decided to follow the example of another peer who manually graded their exams.

Today? I use a much different test. With each passing semester I utilize more writing for the exams based on the realization that it was not terribly challenging or useful for a student to memorize bits of data only to forget them later. Further, I wasn’t convinced that they were learning anything by using a multiple choice exam. Granted, the exams have their appeal in that you can run them through a scantron reader, which makes grading easy.

Assessment: Writing

So, why writing? I have to admit, I was leery about transitioning over to writing at first. English proficiency isn’t necessarily a requirement for taking American History. We often receive students who struggle to read and write at a functional level. Some might argue that it is patently unfair to expect more of them even though it is a 100 level college course. There is also the fact that if I assign essays for my exams, I have to devote more time to preparing them for that portion of the exam which in turn means I am not concentrating on the material.

Yet I’ve grown to accept that a writing element should be included in the exam. I typically use an essay which is worth anywhere from 50 to 60 points depending on which semester the course is offered. The students receive the essay questions ahead of time on their study guides, usually three questions per exam.

The best strategy for doing well on my essays is to keep decent lecture notes. It helps if a student breaks the essay question down into the component parts as a note taking guide. As they move through the lecture notes and the reading assignment, a good student should be able to figure out which components go where in the question.

In other words, I am asking them to reconstruct the narrative. To me, this seems more challenging than merely expecting them to memorize that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. They have to remember who, what, where, when, how and why. They have to remember the sequence of events and finally, in many cases, they have to remember the motivations and causes of various events in history. They get a bit of help in that I provide a batch of terms to know for each section of the quarter on the study guide.

This, I tell them, is their meat and potatoes for the essay.

Finally, I advise them to write an outline of each essay question as a study method. They are not allowed to use this outline during the exam, which many consider to be harsh. Frankly, using the outline is a little too much like cheating to me.

What are the results? For students who want to learn, I continue to hear nothing but positive feedback on the method. It pushes them to write more. It pushes them to reason with the material far more actively than they would if they simply memorized the data and regurgitated it back onto the exam. It requires higher order thinking to figure out what came before what, who or what motivated a person or nation to take a course of action, and figure out what the consequences were.

Early in the semester we focus mainly on narrative based questions. As the semester progresses I try to transition to questions which require an opinion from the student. I prefer to do this later because many students figured out in previous classes, both high school and college, that a well written opinion which is deficient in fact based evidence was sufficient to get a passing grade. I want to break them of that habit by forcing them to build up their evidence based reasoning first before asking them for an opinion.

Some students do complain about the writing load.

“I didn’t sign up for an English class.”

To which I normally respond that any good college course should feature a heavy writing requirement. Further, writing forces you to think. It is good for you, whether you realize it or not.

“I can never figure out EXACTLY what it is that you want me to know.”

In my more jaded and cynical moments I feel that these are students who try to get through the course while learning as little as possible. If I gave a multiple choice exam worth 100 points, they’d be happy with that. Just memorize that data points, pump them back onto the exam and move on. There is the issue of data selection or filtration, trying to figure out what is a higher priority bit of data from a lower bit. Some students, if you gave them all the time in the world, would respond to the essay questions by regurgitating the lecture notes word for word.

Which is impossible, I might add. The time limitation makes it impossible. A student has anywhere from fifty minutes to seventy-five minutes to complete the essay. They have to make a choice about what is more important in a cloud of data where, to some, everything seems important.

The questions I issue are designed to provide them with some guidance on what I am looking for.

The rest of the exam used to be devoted to multiple choice questions. This semester I am moving away from that toward short term identification. That increases my grading load but I think this will help some students who see a name like Alexander Hamilton and wonder just what, exactly, is important about him. It may also help them put together part of their essay question in a rough draft form on the short identification before moving onto the main event.

Writing, Stephen King once wrote, is the closest thing we have to mind reading. I also think it is the best method of student assessment available in an environment where interviewing the individual students about their knowledge content is not a viable option.

Content

Now, the other issue is just what, exactly, should one cover. Historians and politicians spend a lot of time debating what should be covered in a college history course. We are fortunate in that we are allowed to make up our own mind what is important. Further, just as my students are forced to make choices about what to emphasize in their essays, the time constraints of the semester force me to make choices about what I will emphasize.

The 100 level courses I took focused on what used to be a standard political historical narrative of leaders who made decisions and how those decisions shaped society. The lectures often focused on foreign policy, domestic policy, the advance of technology, and to a limited degree, warfare. The evolution of various political philosophies and shifting social attitudes were also covered in the lectures.

As I marched on into 200 to 400 level history courses, the instruction shifted radically, as did the assessment methods. The emphasis moved toward a heavy emphasis in social history, which is basically the history of the everyday person in a given time period.

To be perfectly honest, and I’m bucking the trend here, I am not sure I understand the value of social history. The theory is that students will find resonance in the narrative if they read about people like themselves in a given historical time period. Another aspect of social history deemphasizes the focus on leaders with the notion that people of the society pretty much shape the decisions any given leader will make.

To sum it up, social history is history with “the people” put back into the narrative.

I take issue with this because I do not think one can readily compare the existence of a Roman slave during the Fall of the Roman Republic with a Dustbowl Farmer trying to get to California during the Great Depression. The Marxist Historian would tell you that both are lower class in the society and they would be correct. They would also be correct in telling you that an apple and an orange both belong in the fruit section of your supermarket.

There was also a studied deemphasis (contempt is probably more accurate) toward covering the topic of warfare. My instructors covered this point by stating, “The wars aren’t terribly important.” There is also a prevalent attitude that it is better to teach peace rather than war. Thus if I do not focus on it and the rest of my peers avoid it as well, we which reach a point where war fades away from the society.

Perhaps an oversimplification but I think it is an accurate assessment.

Finally, there was an attitude, fueled in part by James Loewen’s book Lies My Teacher Told Me whereby we pull down various leaders and figures in American History and replace them with figures who have been ignored. He has a valid point when he discusses the concept of “heroification” in American History. Consider that for quite some time it was inappropriate to discuss the historical record concerning Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with his slaves. I freely discuss the Sally Hemmings controversy when I get to Jefferson partly because I think students should understand that historical figures were often a collection of contradictory attitudes and behaviors. This provides some depth to figures who might otherwise come off as paragons of virtue, indistinct from the other paragons of virtue.

My only criticism of the concept of heroification is that the profession seems hellbent on removing someone like Jefferson and replacing him with another paragon of virtue.

Consider Martin Luther King Junior, leader of the American Civil Rights movement. He is considered a hero in the eyes of many and rightfully so. When I lecture, do I discuss the FBI records which detail his extramarital affairs?

There are some who would say I am attacking Martin Luther King Junior by doing so, seeking to undermine his important contributions to our society.

I’ll leave that question unanswered for now.

So, what do I focus on?

To be honest, I tend to focus on the standard political historical narrative. While focusing on this narrative I try to breathe life into a sampling of historical figures who I believe can serve as focal points for a number of different issues during a given period of history. The course is currently weighted toward foreign affairs partly because I feel that students simply do not understand is going on in American Foreign Policy. I try to outline the rise of American Power and how we found ourselves at the top of the international hierarchy at the end of World War II. I also try to outline the political philosophies which drive our foreign policy.

And yes, I spend time on the wars. Some students complain that I glorify the wars, which isn’t quite accurate. I preface the lectures on warfare by covering the very real personal cost my own family has paid for these wars. It is my hope, when I cover such topics, that they will come away with a greater depth of understanding with regard to human conflict.

“War is bad,” isn’t enough if you ask me. We all know it is bad just as most smokers know that smoking is bad. It is right there on the package from the Surgeon General yet they do it anyway, just as humans continue to use war as a means of resolving their differences. When I cover warfare I try to impart to them the cost of war and why the wars happens anyway.

Maybe, I tell them, you’ll be able to stop the next one if the reasons for going to war do not add up. You’ll be able to come to your own conclusion based on your education, not on some talking points someone hammered into your head.

I also try to cover the evolution of rights in American History II as they spread from white male voters to the rest of the citizenry with an emphasis on gender and race based discrimination. This topic alone is worthy of a stand alone course and I do not claim to cover it with the full justice it deserves. In general I tend to conclude that aspect of the course with an optimistic note that the society is an experiment in progress and we tend to expand the recognition of rights overtime as opposed to curtailing them.

Social history? I do not spend much time on it. At the 100 level, frankly, I can’t see where any of it would apply. The students often come to me with a very deficient baseline of information, one I have to spend a lot of time filling in. It seems to me that if it is going to be taught at all that it should be relegated to higher level courses.

To be honest, I wish my instructors had spent more time on historiography with concentrated readings assigned from notable historians in any given field. That would have been far more valuable to me than learning about the lives of lower class people in any given moment of history.

To conclude, I never feel like I have enough time to get to everything. Some students leave the class a bit disgruntled that their favorite topic wasn’t covered. They seem to have a fixation on the history of crime in this country, one which I find rather mind numbing and dull.

I think in a future entry I’ll discuss why I focus on specific people as focal points in the historical narrative.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri

The Monday Teaching Ponderings: Why did I fail the test?

The following is a document which I have attached to my syllabi for nearly three years now. It started off as a short list of six points. It has now, as you can see below, grown to nine points.

Enjoy.

American History
Updated: Tuesday, 01-18-2011

Why did I fail the Test?

In order to expedite the learning process and facilitate troubleshooting the potential reasons why students perform poorly on their exams, I have provided this list of primary factors which result in poor performance. This is not all inclusive, but it does cover the majority of poor test score issues.

1. Talking in class: Talking in class is perhaps the Number One pet peeve of the Instructor. Talking during the lecture not only takes your attention off of the material, it distracts everyone around the offending student. It is also THE PRIMARY COMPLAINT of your fellow students. Frequent offenders will be removed from the classroom without debate or discussion.

2. Someone next to you was talking: If you are distracted by a fellow student during the lecture then there is a pretty good chance that you missed something important. It is incumbent upon you to take action to correct this. It is within your right as a student to ask that your peer remain silent during the lecture. If they are unwilling to remain silent, report the behavior to the Instructor for further corrective action.

3. Sleeping in class: If the student is sleeping, the student is neither listening nor taking notes. A frequent excuse is that the course is boring. Part of education is learning to adapt and overcome which includes staying awake, whether you want to or not.

4. Texting in class: If the student is texting the latest non course related social gossip, they are not taking notes. Moreover, they probably aren’t paying attention either. Texting students are obvious to everyone around them to include the Instructor (who sees you hiding the phone under the desk, in your pocket, on your lap, etc). Aside from the fact that the syllabus states texting is forbidden in the first place, it is usually a self eliminating problem. Texting students perform poorly.

5. Poor attendance: If the student is not in class, they are not there to listen, take notes and learn. Reading the textbook alone and cribbing off of the notes of your peers will not suffice.

6. Late to Class: It goes without saying that if you are late to class, you probably missed something important. Tardy students invariably disrupt the class by asking their fellow student what they missed, impeding the learning process even further. Show up on time. It is that simple.

7. Failure to take notes: Learning does not occur by osmosis. The student must be an active participant and in a lecture based class that means taking good notes. Simply listening to the lecture will not work for the majority of the students in this class.

8. Failure to read the textbook: The textbook and the reading assignments are provided as a means of giving the student additional context and the opportunity to THINK about what they have learned. Learning is not just the mere memorization of facts. Learning is about understanding, in the case of history, why things may have happened the way they did and how they pertain to present day events.

9. Listening to your iPod during the lecture: The iPod or similar device is forbidden in any case. If you are listening to it, you aren’t listening to the lecture and you will fail your test.

There are other reasons but if you find that you have one or more of the following symptoms during the course of the semester, this might explain poor test performance. It is up to the student to be proactive and correct the problem.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri

The General Sunday Ponderings: 20 Years Ago in the Arabian Desert.

Operation Desert Storm

Tomorrow, which is already here in some parts of the world as I write this, is 17 January 2011. Twenty years ago on this date, Coalition Forces were directed by President George H. W. Bush to take measures to eject the Armed Forces of Iraq from the Emirate of Kuwait. The Kuwaitis, those would could not flee, had lived under Iraqi military occupation since the invasion on 2 August 1990.

Tomorrow, I suspect, there will not be much in the form of news or commentary on this day. In fact, I suspect the day will be lost in the ongoing news punditry over the recent shooting in Arizona. In Australia they will be rightfully preoccupied with recovering from the recent flooding in Queensland while preparing for more flooding in the weeks ahead.

At footnote at best for most folks.

The Persian Gulf War is a strange thing to ponder on. When the invasion took place most of my peers in the Army were pretty certain that it was much ado about nothing. When the 82nd Airborne and the 101st were sent into Saudi Arabia, we still figured there would be a lot of chest thumping without a lot of action. Vietnam had made the country casualty adverse, fearful of a disaster and we tended to believe the stereotype of a politician who didn’t want to risk their career in a military operation.

So it was somewhat bewildering to hear General Colin Powell give the deployment order to the 1st Infantry Division over CNN’s live coverage of the situation. We sent our vehicles off to get a quick and dirty coat of desert tan to cover up their forest green camo. We went down to the warehouses on the main post of Fort Riley to pick up what would eventually become known as chocolate chip uniforms. We began to load our gear onto rail cars in the driving Kansas snow.

Surely, we thought, it would all be called off. Our leaders would choke, they had been choking since Vietnam. The war protesters would stop things before we got anywhere, right?

I was wrong. We arrived in Saudi Arabia, unpacked our gear and made our way to Tactical Assembly Area Roosevelt. We spent our first few weeks soaking wet, enduring the wettest winter in decades. This is partly due to the fact that our battery commander was a marching moron that didn’t seem to understand the concept of placing our camp sites on slopes as opposed to flat terrain prone to flooding. We were on such a water logged wadi when the war began.

The bombing didn’t impress me per se. I couldn’t see it. We didn’t have televisions and our news coverage was spotty at best. Ever so often we got a newspaper. Maybe someone picked up something on a radio or our leadership finally got around to telling us something. We didn’t even get mail from home until the second week of February because it was more important to ship ammo for the howitzers than it was to send on deuce and a half back to pick up the mail which was piling up in the rear.

What little news we did get we tended to get from Baghdad Betty, the Voice of Peace. When they weren’t playing current Top 40, they spent their time telling us about the protests, “No Blood for Oil,” and the like.

At the same time, we got pretty grim estimates on our chances for survival. We were going up against the battle hardened Iraqi Army. They were armed with the latest in Soviet technology. In turn we were armed with overpriced, technologically fickle crap which would kill the undereducated, lower class, bottom of the barrel soldiers who were too stupid to get a real job.

We were all going to die. That was the story.

Oddly enough, while we believed we were not going to come out of it well, we weren’t terribly concerned. In looking at my personal journals of that time, I spent more time worrying about threats to shoot us for disrespecting non-coms in a combat zone. I spent time watching the crazy corporal who liked to sight his weapon in on my skull at night while I laid my M-203 in his general direction.

I read.

I wrote.

I waited, like my peers.

By March 1991 it was all pretty much over. A four day ground war, minimal losses among Coalition Forces, heavy losses to the Iraqis. There was a lot of screaming about General Rhames decision to use armored bulldozers to clear out Iraqi Trench lines in our area of operations.

The war changed things for the United States of America. At the end of the Cold War, fresh off the success of Operation Desert Storm, many felt the United States should be more proactive in using military force to improve the world. We would use that force time and time again, far more often than we had between the end of Vietnam and 1989, to intervene in the affairs of others. Rather than drawing back to our own borders, we stayed involved.

In my history classes, when asked, I often refer to “my war” was the “one we should have finished or not have bothered with.” I suspect the United States could have lived with Saddam Hussein in charge of Kuwait. I also suspect that Saddam would fail if he attempted to invade Saudi Arabia. Conversely, if we had finished the war back in the early 1990s, we might be living in a more secure, peaceful world. Pundits argue otherwise stating that what we got in 2003 is what we would have gotten if we had gone to Baghdad in 1991.

We have a habit of leaving unfinished business in various corners of the globe and I felt, as we were leaving the region in May of 1991, that this was a perfect example of that. We promised the Shia and the Kurds our assistance if they rose up against Saddam Hussein. They did and we didn’t. The refugees of those crushed revolts came streaming across our lines at Safwan, terrified, starving in some cases, beaten in all cases.

Australian writer John Birmingham, in some of his interviews for the Without Warning trilogy, often points to the weeks before March 2003 as the apex of American Power and Respect. As I ponder this day, I must respectfully disagree with my friend and colleague.

I think March of 1991 was the apex of American Power, full of potential in a new era. I think our greatest mistake, aside from not finishing the Persian Gulf War in the first place, was not having the sense to draw back from the world.

Become isolationists again? Is that what I am arguing? No, the planet is too small for that. However, we could have taken a giant step back away from some of our post World War II obligations. We could and should have given the rest of the world an opportunity step up and fill in the voids we had covered since 1945.

Perhaps if we had done so, we would be in better shape today.

Things to ponder.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri

Pondering the Fallacy of Presentism in History Classes and in American Science Fiction.

Sometimes when I read my student’s essay responses to the exam, I wonder what they are thinking. Or worse, what they are being taught outside of my classroom.

One frequent essay question which appears in my American History 121 classes is the issue of dropping the atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War II. It is one of the most controversial issues in American History today and is often grist for the revisionist’s mill in politics, history and even science fiction.

I give a pretty extensive lecture on the Rise of Japan stemming back to the 1840s and 1850s with the efforts of Commodore Biddle and later Commodore Perry to open Japan to trade with the United States. The lecture is perhaps more broad and than deep but in my defense, it is a survey course and I feel that it does provide some aspect of multiculturalism for the students. It is also a classic clash of two different cultures. I also give an extensive lecture on the causes of the war between the Empire of Japan and the United States, the nature of that war and the views of the Japanese Government up to the use of the atomic bomb.

Students are asked to analyze the options facing US leaders in 1945, consider the alternatives and then provide an opinion. In order to get most of their essay points, the student must demonstrate that they have a grasp of the events, particularly the causes, motivations and perceptions on both sides of the fence.

As a rule, when I give this lecture, I do not give my personal opinion on the matter. There are a number of reasons for this. First, I do not want my students regurgitating my own words back to me. Second, I am not trying to create intellectual clones/drones, I want them to learn to think for themselves. Third, I do want them to struggle with the material and give a solid, well argued opinion.

On the better essays, I get the usual arguments pro and con which have been exhaustively debated elsewhere. The pro-bombing argument is that it shortened the war, saved lives and was the only thing that would break the Japanese. The anti-bombing argument is that it was immoral, a war crime, and used primarily to dissuade the Soviets from invading the Japanese mainland as well as to show them who is boss in the post War world.

Sometimes I see arguments which make me wonder what is going on in their heads. For instance, one option was to continue General Curtis LeMay’s firebombing campaign. I take great pains to point out, for a lot of reasons, that the firebombing killed far more Japanese civilians than both nuclear weapons combined.

To my horror, I have seen students argue that firebombing is better than the atomic bomb. Which leads me to wonder about their thinking. It is okay to firebomb but not okay to nuke? How is one any better than the other? They will argue that using the atomic bomb is unethical under any circumstances. Once they’ve made the statement, they do not elaborate on why the atomic bomb is unethical and how that compares to firebombing.

I will say that the anti-bombing side has never argued for a ground invasion, nor have they argued for a naval blockade to starve the Japanese into submission. No, what I have seen, on very rare instances, is something that bothers me.

Students on the anti-bombing side will argue that the cause of the problem stems back to Biddle and Perry’s efforts to open Japan. That, on the face, is a pretty sophisticated argument and one worth conceding. It does ignore the reality that a European power was likely going to open Japan up to trade anyway but since I do not lecture on that and the textbook doesn’t even cover that topic I give them a pass on that score.

What follows is what troubles me. Basically it can be summed up as follows.

If only Perry and Biddle, as well as the United States, had been respectful of the culture of Japan, perhaps the hundred years of diplomatic strife which lead to World War II could have been avoided.

Read that line for a minute and tell me if something bothers you about it. It seems pretty solid, doesn’t it? It shows that the student in question (multiple students have used this argument, I might add so I am not singling any one particular student out). Even with my qualification, I have to admit that I’ve been reluctant to blog about this. My concern is that students will troll the internet looking for material to use in their essays or papers at other campuses. I have additional concerns but I will keep those to myself as they do not quite pertain to the matter at hand.

The problem with the statement in italics is that it is a fallacy. It makes the assumption, a false one, that Perry, or any other American dealing with Japan up to 1856, didn’t respect Japanese culture. In fact I’d argue that Perry had a great deal of respect for it in that he studied what he could of their culture in order to figure out how to accomplish his mission, which was to open Japan up to US Trade.

What he learned, from Biddle’s failure and his studies, is that the Japanese respected belligerency and strength.

Perhaps what the student meant by respect is that the United States respect Japan’s desire for isolation and not resort to belligerency in order to open the Empire up. Thing is that Commodore Biddle tried the diplomatic, tactful approach during his mission in the 1840s and was pretty much blown off. Worse, he left the Japanese with the impression that America was incredibly weak and not deserving of respect.

The problem I’m describing, and I relate this in lecture, is a clash of differing cultural values on what constitutes respect between the Japanese and the Americans of the time.

What is probably most likely is that the students in question feel that if Perry and Biddle had a respect for Japanese culture in a 21st Century American sense, then perhaps the war could have been avoided.

And herein lies the core problem, the fallacy of presentism. Presentism is when a student of history takes their present day values system and makes a historical interpretation through that filter or bias.

If only Commodore Perry had been through a sensitivity session. If only he had our 21st Century values.

Well, you can and probably should make a moral judgement on those grounds, but does it get at the historical truth of the matter? Do we gain a clear perspective of what Perry was thinking in the 1850s?

Or perhaps I should put it this way.

To expect Commodore Perry to behave as a 21st Century US Naval Officer would is no different than expecting Socrates to hold forth on the Petrine Theory of Papal Supremacy. It’d be pretty difficult for Socrates, Plato or Aristotle to do any such thing as the Catholic Church didn’t exist yet. Or perhaps just as unlikely would be to expect Marcus Tullius Cicero to write extensive essays on the Enlightenment or Marxism.

Out of what time warp is Perry supposed to get these values? He isn’t a product of 21st Century America, he is a product of early 19th Century America. He simply wouldn’t see the problem of contact with Japan in the same manner as we do.

He wouldn’t have foresight of coming historical events either. I suspect if the Americans did have a crystal ball showing them what was down the pike that they probably would have behaved far more aggressively than they did.

How does this apply to American Science Fiction?

Well, a classic example is The Lucky Strike by Kim Stanley Robinson. Ostensibly an alternate history concerning the use of the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945, Robinson uses a protagonist who is somehow inculcated in the values of late 20th Century Liberal America. The protag, Captain January, is disgusted by the bomb and believes that he best alternative is to drop the bomb into the ocean near the coastline. When he does so, the Japanese see the effect of the bomb and surrender.

The moral of the story? If only we had tried something else then things could have ended better than they did.

Aside from presentism, the story is also flawed due to a poor understanding of what was going on in the halls of Japan’s government in 1945. Their reaction to the bombing of Hiroshima was simply to state, and I paraphrase, “We lose more in firebombings than we did with this one atomic bomb. We may as well continue to fight.”

Dropping the bomb into Tokyo Bay would not have impressed them anymore than the actual bombing of Hiroshima did.

I have also seen this in the Fantasy and Steampunk movements. There has been an effort over the last few years to modify the traditional medieval style Fantasy away from the original European roots into something that is more reflective of our 21st Century progressive values. The same can be said for the Steampunk movement with calls issued to move away from depictions of racism, colonialism, imperialism, and sexism.

As a fiction writer, I’m supportive of the idea that you ought to be able to write whatever it is you want to write. As a reader and a historian however, I have to admit that I find these politically correct fictionalizations of the past to be something of a disservice. Part of why the Fantasy genre doesn’t interest me in the first place is that it seems to focus to the exclusion of all else on the nobility. Everything is too clean, too neat, with most problems whisked away with a sword or magic. I suspect before long it will be this way with Steampunk as well, a distorted, sanitized view of what Victorian culture was like.

The past as it should be, not how it was.

Such things I am pondering today.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri

What is America?

A couple of semesters back I took American Literature II with Terri Lowry, who is the instructor in a Creative Writing class that I take over and over again to maintain some level of skill. It should be noted that while I hold a minor in English, none of my coursework is in American Literature.

In fact, I avoided it when I was going through undergrad the first time.

I could have gotten more out of the class than I did, all things considered. It can be incredibly difficult, playing college student and college history instructor at the same time. Turns out that your teaching takes priority when the rest of your life isn’t. That said, Terri had a question which she put to the class.

What is America? What does it mean to be an American?

There is no right answer in my mind, though I hear a lot of answers that simply exasperate me.

A common narrative theme in American History classes is this.

The United States of America is an aggressive, racist, imperialist superpower which is bent on crushing everything beneath her feet. It ruthlessly exploits the resources of the planet as well as non-Americans, engaging in wars of conquest which rival that of the Roman Empire or Nazi Germany. It is a pseudo Christian theocracy which suppresses dissent and demands conformity.

That is off the top of my head but I think that is a pretty accurate reflection. It is a theme I heard repeated over and over again when I went to Park University for my undergrad in the mid-1990s. It was prominent in the news media of the time and if you tune to the right channel, you’ll hear it again and again. Go for a stroll in the Livejournal Science Fiction Community and you’ll see variants of this narrative as well.

Basically, America is evil personified. She needs to have her wings clipped.

A narrative like this has some basis in fact. Let’s run through them.

1. The systematic conquest and oppression of the Native American populations of North America.

Sometimes this is referred to as genocide, which I think is overstating the case. Efforts were made to reach some sort of understanding with various Native American tribes which would preserve them. Yes, agreements were made and frequently broken. Yes, the United States did engage in wholesale slaughter but genocide in my mind is indicative of an effort to completely exterminate a given population. I do not think this is the case.

Which doesn’t really matter, semantics aside, what was done to the Native Americans was pretty bad.

Yet you ought to ask yourself if it could have happened differently. I personally do not think so though some historians would argue, “If only we had been more respective of their culture.” Expecting someone like George Armstrong Custer or Andrew Jackson to embrace the concepts of tolerance, multiculturalism and diversity is not much different than expecting Julius Caesar or Marcus Tullius Cicero to start holding forth on the better points of the Enlightenment.

2. The United States is a racist, Eurocentric society which systematically oppresses people of color.

Historically, this is valid. Slavery, Jim Crow Laws, Segregation, the Chinese Exclusion Act, etc, etc, the list goes on.

3. The United States is an imperialist power.

I suppose that depends on how you define “imperialist power.” We do not presently have significant colonial possession in the traditional sense. Granted, you could argue that this is because we have either let them go, such as the Philippines, or made them states, like Hawaii.

But would you call South Korea a colony? I think think they’d appreciate such a comparison even if their peers in the North would make just that point.

There is Iraq and Afghanistan but neither of them look like colonies to me. Afghanistan doesn’t even possess anything of real value when you get right down to it. We are there mainly due to the events of September 11th. As for Iraq, I’d argue that putting paid to a dictator like Saddam Hussein was a good thing, not a bad one.

4. It ruthlessly exploits the resources of the planet.

We have a population of 300 million plus living in a petroleum based economy. Show me a first world nation that isn’t exploiting the resources of the planet ruthlessly? Show me a developing nation that isn’t exploiting the resources of the planet ruthlessly?

5. It is a pseudo-Christian theocracy.

Speaking as a militant agnostic, borderline atheist, I would argue that there is plenty of religious diversity in this country. Granted, the country is not particularly friendly towards the Islamic faith at the moment but then one might want to refer to a hole in NYC as the cause.

6. It isn’t much different from Nazi Germany or the Roman Empire.

Hmm. There is a saying about the Romans, something to the effect that they make a desert and call it peace, meaning that they do not play patty cake with their enemies. The United States operates a little differently but I’ll get to that in a second. As for the comparison with Nazi Germany, I simply do not see it.

Or consider this, if the United States of America did operate the way Nazi Germany did, here is how history might have unfolded since September 11th.

First, the response probably would have been nuclear in nature. I suspect a truly Fascist state would not hesitate to bomb whole populations out of existence simply on principle alone. Second, we probably would have invaded any state suspected of harboring people sympathetic with Osama Bin Laden.

In other words, we would have given Bin Laden exactly what he wanted.

Third, we would simply lock up/execute anyone considered to be either a terrorist or a dissident.

Strange thing. You can’t really do that here in the United States of America, at least not for long, as someone will eventually find out and stop you.

Still, the record is pretty damning.

Does the United States of America have any redeeming traits? Or should it be relegated to the dustbin of history as soon as possible?

Well, I wouldn’t write us off just yet.

Here is a narrative theme that I explore in my classes.

The United States of America is a work in progress, flawed in many respects, prone to mistakes and yet she constantly strives to better herself. She has expanded the rights and freedoms of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights originally reserved for white male aristocrats to ever growing numbers of people. She has sent her own sons and daughters overseas to help restore order. She offers aid and comfort to other nations in times of need and in the aftermath of various wars fought through history. She is a center of technological, cultural, and political innovation, pushing forward to improve the standard of living for everyone.

A more perfect Union. I think that is what America is. We are constantly arguing with ourselves as to what that means, who will be included in it, and how they will be included in it. We have committed crimes in our past but I think our accomplishments, our contributions, and our ongoing self examination give us some shred of redemption from those who would cheerfully damn us.

What did we get right?

First off you have the Constitution of the United States of America and the Bill of Rights. These two documents helped to frame a Federal Republic which would serve as a model for other nations as they moved away from absolute monarchy and/or tyranny. It is an amendable document which enables us to correct flaws contained within it such as the 3/5th Clause and adapt to changing conditions in the society with amendments that permit women and ethnic minorities the right to vote.

Second, over the last two centuries, we have expanded the ability of all of our citizens to participate in government.

Third, we have overturned laws which discriminated against people of color. We have also passed laws which are designed to redress grievances created by decades of systematic discrimination.

Granted, personally, I agree with the grievances but not the current solution, which I think punishes people for crimes they did not personally commit. That said, as a historian, I count programs such as affirmative action as a sign that we are trying to right the wrongs of the past.

Fourth, we helped Europe get back on their feet after World War II. This was as much out of economic self interest as anything else.

Fifth, we have served as a powerhouse of industrial and technological innovation. We may be moving away from this, the jury is still out, but our contributions in science, industry and technology can not be disputed.

Sixth, we feed the planet. While we are an industrial nation, we are also an agricultural nation.

Finally, in terms of culture, I think we have done a great deal to push forward the ideals of equality and egalitarianism. Granted, our greatest problem is that we do not always practice what we preach nor do we always live up to those ideals, but I think we strive to reach them as best we can.

So I guess I’m not as down on my country as many writers and historians are. I am not particularly a “My country right or wrong,” sort nor do I see my country with rose tinted lenses.

But I don’t see us as the arbiter of all that is evil, corrupt and wrong on planet Earth either.

In these ramblings, I do not know if I really answered the question Terri put to us. When I wrote a paper on this topic in her class (this is not a reproduction of that paper but I suspect if I found it that it would cover similar themes) I do not think I ever came up with a satisfactory answer either.

I will say this.

The United States of America is my homeland. She isn’t perfect by any means, but I’m proud to live here while acknowledging her flaws.

And her contributions.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri