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well that explains why everyone laughs at me.
Brother, it's not the socks... you need to stop wearing those late 1970s short gym shorts. ;D
You also have to remember that nearly (but not all) the battles were fought on southern soil. I would say that tends to make remembering more significant.
Well, let's see...My office is on "Battleview Parkway" and is less than 100 meters from the border of a battlefield national parkMy house is a mile from another Civil War battlefieldI grew up being drug from one battlefield to anotherMy father grew up at the foot of Marye's Heights and as a little kid, would walk out in the yard after a rain to collect Minnie balls from the little vegetable gardenOn another level, growing up, Lee-Jackson day was a holiday.There are schools dotted all over the Virginia map named "R.E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Stuart" (admittedly, there are just as many named "Jefferson")Really, I think that it has to do with the cult of the "Lost Cause" -- while the Confederacy lost the war, I don't think that most Southerners of the time ever admitted that they had been defeated. The myth of the Lost Cause was active in revision of primary school textbooks up through the 1930s (and I think some of that legacy is left). In the pains of reconstruction, I think that people clung to whatever they could to hold onto their dignity - and as a result, the war has become a lasting part of the cultural memory - although it is fading somewhat.
Ouch!Okay, I was a decade ealier, but slide number 4 rang true in 1979 and 1989 - the high school letterman's jacket. I wore that thing EVERYWHERE!On a cultural historian's note - notice how many shots there were of people casually smoking in the public/common areas of the mall? Those scenes have gone the way of the public phone booth and rotary phones!
Patrick – here's my take…As mentioned above, he doesn't know anything about you, your situation, your studies, or the quality of your work.Second, he doesn't know anything about the rigor at AMU.Third, forget the accreditation thing as part of your argument - accreditation is the price of admission. Instead, point out that APUS (American Military University's parent - the actual accredited institution for those readers who aren't that familiar with AMU) was the first fully online school to receive the Sloan Consortium's award for best practices in online education (2009). There is a pretty impressive list of brick and mortar schools who have received Sloan awards in the past (and an even more impressive list of brick and mortar schools with online programs who HAVE NOT been recognized by Sloan, ever)! APUS (AMU) also won back-to-back awards from Sloan (2009 & 2010) for effective practices in learning outcomes assessment (that's actually measuring what students learn). (Sloan C is made up of some 1500 schools, by the way.) (http://www.apus.edu/news-events/news/2010/07-21-10-sloan.htm)(http://www.apus.edu/news-events/news/2009/092909_APUS_Wins_Sloan_C_Honors.htm)(http://sloanconsortium.org/awards_excellence_recipients)(http://sloanconsortium.org/effective_practices/using-community-inquiry-framework-survey-multi-level-institutional-evaluation-an)(http://sloanconsortium.org/effective_practices/semantic-mapping-learning-assets)For someone pontificating about academic quality and rigor, I'm embarrassed for him for his level of ignorance. What level of research has he conducted? How has he measured academic rigor at AMU and what schools did he compare the results with? What are the facts that back up his statements? You know, I learned somewhere along my academic journey that I needed to have facts to back up my statementsAnyone can find the information that I listed in my third point above with about 15 minutes of research on the Internet.
Where are Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing when we need them? ;D
Now, I like a good zombie movie, but those old Hammer Studio flicks with Lee and Cushing... Classics!
Pretty cool – I wonder:1. What's the collected value?2. How did they come to be there - was the original owner a collector? A thief?3. What's the cost to get them operable again?4. When's the auction?
While smart liberals are drawn to academia, smart conservatives choose other paths." I wonder why that is? I will be snarky and say it is because conservtaives want to do something productive. However, it could be argued that being an educator is also productive.Well, Naturally we're Liberal is a good piece explaining liberal academia by a liberal academic.
Okay, here's my cynical streak -- there's less accountability in academia.
Here's one to consider adding to your library, written by one of my undergrad professors – The Battle of Marathon, by Peter Krentzhttp://www.amazon.com/Battle-Marathon-Library-Military-History/dp/0300120850/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1298690649&sr=8-1Pretty readable - but when I read it I still hear his voice (and think of a particular co-ed who sat next to me in all three of his classes.... ::))
Jealousy, yes… reminds me of the old Michael Palin (of Monty Pyton fame) quote about American beer:
Drinking American beer is a lot like making love in a rowboat... it's #*$&ing close to water!
Craft beer makers of America please make note - there is no "Pumpkin Spice" or "raspberries" allowed under the Bavarian Purity Law!
I think that she did “watch what she was saying” in that she didn't single out any particular students. Her comments appear to be generalizations – not targeted at specific individual student's work. She didn't say, I have this one student, I'll call him “Melvin” – who is so stupid, he actually wrote on a test….”I think that the issue should be that the students would have to prove harm - she isn't singling out any one or any one group "all of the student athletes in my class are so lazy..." I think that we, as a society, have become too coddling with our children, especially our teenage children We end up putting a bunch of "young adults" out into society who are not prepared to be contributing citizens.Now, just to turn the page and be fair - I became so frustrated with the local public high school teachers that we made the move to private school for our son - and we live in one of the best school districts in the state! She says in the article that her students got upset when asked to be creative - well, here's some of the really STUPID "creative" assignments. English Literature course - Assignment: Read Beowulf and design and make a t-shirt depicting a scene or character from the book (Really? In a college prep course?) That was the ONLY assignment related to Beowulf. US History - the American Civil War - using a 2 liter soda bottle, create a famous character from the American Civil War, provide a 3X5 card identifying who the person is an why they were significant (Really? This was the sum-total of their assignments for the American Civil War?). Here's a fun one, guess what class this was for: Write, direct, and create a 3 minute digital video depicting a scene inspired by "Fahrenheit 451" - I'll give you a hint, it wasn't Theater Arts.So, I'm sure that she has some extremely valid points, and I defend her right to express her opinion (provided she doesn't violate the Federal Education Rights Privacy Act (FERPA) - which it doesn't look like she did). But it's a two way street that encompasses more than just laying the blame at the feet of the students and their parents. Some students are unmotivated and disengaged because they are lazy. Others are because they are fed up with asinine assignments from teachers who evidently learned their teaching skills from an ad in the back of Rolling Stone.
Another was "How would the war in Europe have been different if the British had not cracked the ULTRA secret or if ULTRA had been compromised?"
Here's my take - for the example above it forced the students to fully examine the impact of ULTRA intelligence. Would the German's have been able to more effectively resupply Rommel in North Africa? Would Montgomery have been effective at Alamein? What did Montgomery know as a result of ULTRA? And there's so much more. So, what's the value of counterfactual in this exercise? It makes the student examine and realize the extreme value that ULTRA brought.
