Current Project: Cutting it Down to Size

Scissors.

I've spent a lot of time in the past year--heck, the past three months!-- applying for various things, like fellowships and summer positions. Now that I have a proposal that decently explains what my dissertation project is, it's not so hard as it once was to apply for these kinds of things because I don't have to start from scratch. However, it is a great exercise in editing, for in addition to the specific pieces I have to write for different things (What collections will you use at this library? What's your teaching background?), I need to cut or lengthen the basic description of what it is I do, exactly. This process has led me to think about whether it might be fruitful to incorporate the skill of cutting work down to smaller sizes into a classroom activity, and how it could be done. 

Short Descriptions

 It's hard to write a short description! That's why there are eleventy million resources on how to write an abstract. It's particularly hard to be brief if you're trying to convince the reader you're exceptionally smart and have many complex ideas. As a recent panel on historians writing historical fiction observed, "graduate school ingrains students to write in technical, polysyllabic language." How do you express the complex ideas you've explained in a 13 page proposal when you have a 300 word abstract to work with? How do you decide which jargon to center and explain and which to eschew in favor of simplifying the story? And its particularly exciting to do so when you already have a 500 word description which you feel is perfect-- and need to cut it to 300 words.

This is an academic problem, but it's also an everyday life problem. There are good and probably boring real world examples about business or whatever, of course (Cover letters! Product descriptions! Interview prep!) , but here's a good silly one: haven't you ever wished, when you were stuck in the corner at a party being bored to death by a thousand-word story about a ten-second interaction, that someone had taught that person how to edit?  

Editing and Peer Review

Editing is no fun, obviously; this is why I generally resort to printing things out in hard copy to go over so that there's a physical pile of papers shaming me into doing it ("You paid $2.20 to print me at the library just so you can sit there scrolling Twitter and listening to Gilmore Guys?" it hisses). Undergraduates also know that editing is hard and also no fun, which is why peer review is such a common and such a hated process in college classrooms. It's a good way to get everyone to try their hand at editing, but it's also a guaranteed groan-eliciter. The only thing I want to do less than edit someone else's paper is have them help me edit mine, which makes me feel both overwhelmed and tired! 

Peer review is cool and important and I do it all the time with other graduate students but I have to admit that I almost never incorporate it into my lesson plans because I remember getting nothing out of it when I was in college. The thing about peer review is that if you don't totally trust your peers expertise, you can easily dismiss very valid criticisms that you don't want to deal with by saying that they don't know what they're talking about. I know! I've done it! So, if people in my courses want to help each other edit, I encourage it but rarely arrange it. (Reacting classes, which make a bunch of people work together in factions to achieve goals, are good for encouraging this voluntary editing of one another.)  

Editing something to be not just better, but also shorter, is its own particular challenge. It is a bit better for peer interaction: you can quibble with "you should say 'barn' instead of 'rural horse hostel' because it sounds better," but it's hard to argue with "'barn' takes up only one word and 'rural horse hostel' takes up three and you're still twenty-three words over the limit, so kill your darlings, already."

So, with all this roiling around in my brain as I was falling asleep the other night, this activity idea popped into my head. It's called "Sudden Death Edit," and it's a little like the game of Telephone.

Sudden Death Edit

How this works:

1. Everyone contributes an assignment of moderate length. A typical five page paper is ideal. Students are asked to read the first paper they will edit in advance.  
2. At the beginning of class, each person has fifteen minutes to cut that paper down into a one page statement. 
3. At the end of fifteen minutes, original and one page papers are assigned to a new person. That person cuts the work down to 300 words. 
4. After fifteen minutes, the paper and all revisions are passed to a new person. That person must condense the statement to 200 words.  
5. Last round: new editor, fifteen minutes, 100 words. 
6. Postmortem: reflect on the progression of the pieces and ask people to share about their experience of editing others' pieces and of seeing the edits of their own writing.

Discussion Questions:

• Did the edits lose or gain coherence? 
• What choices were made in the summaries? Were there any you especially agreed/disagreed with?
• When you worked in your summaries, did you use the full piece more or the latest summary more? 
• Which round was the hardest?

Bonus Rounds:

• Sometimes you have to grow a statement rather than shrink it. Give everyone a paper and its 100 word description and ask them to make a 300 word description.
• How does the whole thing change if it's going to be spoken aloud instead of read? Have students transform short descriptions into brief presentations if you're formal, or descriptions to a friend if you like keeping it casual. 

Notes:

• If you have everything in an online space and get everyone to bring laptops to access it, this could be the easiest way to deal with counting words and accessing each other's writing-- each paper could be a separate post in a forum on Compass or Moodle or Blackboard, and then each round of revision could be a separate comment in that thread by the editor. This method also makes the trajectory of changes easily observable by all. 
• The base activity here is designed for an hour-fifteen class period, which I have never actually had the pleasure of teaching! To shorten this, you could eliminate a step, use shorter pieces to begin with and thus lose the first step, or really hot-seat it and make each round ten minutes. 
• If you want the original writers to have more involvement throughout, you could make this a pairs activity and have pairs hand their pieces back and forth. I love pairs! Pairs are the new groups, in my mind. More on that another day, I'm sure.
• This activity is obviously good for its stated purpose, learning to write short descriptions. But it's also a nice exercise for figuring out what exactly a piece is about, what the important elements are, and how to explain them in a briefer period.

Related Links:

• Did you know the U of I has recently switched to an annoying system in which you have to put $5 in your "Illini Cash" account just to print a goldurn ten cent page? Did you know that both Urbana and Champaign public libraries have more sensible systems that you can utilize for a mere 5 cents more, as well as the overpriced but convenient printers at Cafe Kopi and Hammerhead Coffee?
  

Take My Advice: Starting On Secondary Lit

 

Stacked books. Photo by Anthony from Pexels.

One thing that I still find intimidating is the vast amount of secondary literature in the world. How do you make sense of what historians have said about a field that is new to you? Getting a grip on historiography is something that hasn't come naturally to me, but it has been a continual process of discovery and false starts in my career as a student and teacher of history. In this post, I want to talk a little bit about one way in which I've approached getting to know the state of a field-- an activity I call the Fifteen-Minute Filter.

Why Bother?

The need to get a quick idea of a field is applicable to a variety of levels of study. You may be an instructor designing a new course or a graduate student studying for exams or a researcher writing an article, in which case you've likely had some experience with the concept of historiography. However, I first encountered this need while taking upper-level undergraduate classes. It can be a tough transition between papers for lower- and upper-level history courses. In the lower levels, the readings tend to be provided for you; papers are written based on sources you have covered in class or selected from a list provided by the instructor. As you progress to higher level courses, however, you may be expected to find your own secondary literature to reference in either a historiography paper (which focuses on what scholars have written on a topic, and you make an argument about their arguments) or a research paper (in which you use primary sources to make your own argument, and refer to the work of other scholars to suggest how your argument relates to theirs). I've tailored much of the advice in this post to students at the undergraduate level for whom research might be somewhat new, but the method can be useful for a variety of tasks.

I came up with my method in my senior year of undergrad, when I needed to evaluate the historiography on Japanese-American concentration camps for my final project in a course on race in the US and was surrounded by a stack of books on the topic. I needed to figure out which books to concentrate on for my project, I wasn't sure where to start, and I wanted to figure out which books I should invest time in reading closely and which ones would not make the cut.

Before You Begin

To do the Fifteen-Minute Filter, you'll need a stack of possible candidates, preferably more of them than you actually need for your project. You can identify possibilities in a few different ways. Your course materials or your syllabus might have some suggestions in footnotes or suggested reading lists. You can use your university library catalog to search related topics; you'll likely find a few possibilities. Once you've identified a number of options, go into the stacks and find them. Wait! Don't leave just yet. Look around on the shelf near the books you've already chosen. Anything look interesting or relevant? Grab it. 

So now you're sitting on your couch with a bunch of books, probably all bound in that uninformative library binding. See how many books you have? Multiply that number by fifteen. That's how many minutes this will take you. You don't have to do all of them at once, but I find it easier to figure out how they might relate to each other if I do, so block out some time if you have it.

 

 Fifteen-Minute Filter

1.  Grab book number one. Set a timer for fifteen minutes. 
2. Quickly skim the intro-- I'm talking five seconds per page. Once you've seen them all, go back and look at the pages that seemed like they told you what the overall argument of the book is. Ignore the detailed arguments about each chapter for now.
3. When you feel time is getting short, make sure to glance at the table of contents, which will tell you a bit more about how the argument will unfold. Any chapters that look especially fruitful? Go back to that intro and see if there's a description of that chapter, probably toward the end of the intro.
4. Put the book in a pile. You have three piles: Yes, Maybe, No Way. Don't think too hard about this. Timer rang before you feel like you have a handle on it? No worries, just go with your gut.
5. Grab the next book and repeat.
6. If you feel confident that a book is not useful to you before the timer has sounded, feel free to plop it into the No Way pile. More time for you! 

 

Optional Variations

• Make your timer alarm a song you can dance to for a minute at the end of each book to keep your energy up.
• Fast reader, or too little time? Try ten minutes per book.
• Skim for ten minutes per book, and spend the last five writing down the most pertinent information gathered. This can help remind you of what you read later if you don't have a chance to come back to the project for a while and/or are forgetful, as I am. 
• For instructors: Try the ten minute skimming/five minute writing variation in class with some short articles or introductions on a topic.

 

Next Steps 

This process can help you narrow down your options and get a quick idea of what your paper might look like. It's easy to see in fifteen minutes if a book is a political screed or a hagiography rather than a critical analysis, or if it is actually less applicable to your topic than the title would suggest. More than likely you'll come out with a couple hard nos, a few yeses, and a big stack of "eh, maybe." Following the Fifteen-Minute Filter, you can take a closer look at the yeses and the maybes with benefit of the larger context you've already gathered.

Still don't have enough books?

• Look at books being cited in the texts you have found. Do any of those seem relevant? 
• Don't be afraid to use interlibrary loan, even if just to see if a book is useful. Start early though! It can take some time.
• You can also get some good leads with a journal search. Every school is different, but on the UIUC library website, click on the "Journals" tab and then do a search for your topic or a book you want to know more about. It could lead you to useful articles or reviews of books that should be on your radar.

Do you have any techniques for approaching a huge stack of secondary literature?

 

Related Links:

Related to this method: strategies for getting the gist of a single book quickly. I love this post from Northwest History on "How to Read a Book in One Hour."

Current Project: Syllabizing Salem

I'll be teaching a course next fall under the shell "Fiction and Historical Imagination," which I am using to explore American historical mythologies from Puritan witch trials to the passing of the 19th Amendment. Since I've last written about this project, the title has evolved to "Fictionalizing US History, 1630-1920" and I've begun to try and tackle turning my Course Rationale into a functional syllabus. Today, I want to talk about my process of figuring out where to start and what to start with.

Hopefully this will provide a few items of interest-- to students who might be thinking about taking the course and would like a sneak peek; to anyone looking for readings to assign for courses on Salem or just for their own reading pleasure; or to any instructors wondering, "How do other people find things to assign?" These are not the definitive selections-- I may in the end need to add or subtract based on time, availability, or content-- but this is where I am for now.

Beginnings: A Reaction to Reacting

To set the stage: When I first conceptualized teaching my Reacting to the Past course, Conflict and Unity in American History, the early American setting of the first game we were to play was daunting. I had not previously had much interest in

• Colonial America
• The history of religion
• New England in general
• Anything involving reading documents with "f"s instead of "s"s*

So, Trial of Anne Hutchinson was an odd match. But I wanted to assign Greenwich Village, 1913, which I had played as part of my Reacting to the Past training, and I wanted to emphasize an aspect of the game that I thought could be easily overlooked in a course that attempted to focus on a narrow time period: the struggle for group definition that occasioned the conflict of the game. The players in Greenwich Village are ultimately struggling not only to decide whether they will support suffragists or labor activists with their time and art; they are also trying to determine what they as a community value. Trial of Anne Hutchinson, set in a vastly different time (the 1620s) and with far different consequences for winners and losers (various implied possibilities including: banishment, divine punishment, social censure), represents at its heart a similar attempt to figure out what parameters defined their group.

To truly appreciate this element of the trial, it was necessary for both the players and I to understand what, precisely, the debate was all about (who is really "saved" by God, and how do we know?), and what motivated the drive to ensure the Massachusetts Bay Colony was spiritually unified. The game materials were handy for providing context about religious debates that preceded the trial, the insecurities about the colony's survival, and the Calvinist convictions which made the unity of the colony a critical matter. In the end, these served their purpose well, and I left both semesters confident that students had, in addition to improving their argumentation skills, gained a greater understanding of some very unfamiliar points of view.

However, Anne Hutchinson and Puritan New England has stuck in my head, partially because I noticed an interesting trend when I discussed the course with people. Whether students on the first day of class or other graduate students, most only dimly recalled Hutchinson (I was unfamiliar with her when I first heard of the game) and thought that perhaps she had been tried for witchcraft. I was intrigued by how the complexity of Puritan religious thought, well expressed by my students in their roles as Governors, Pastors, and Teachers in the colony, has been widely translated to "those witch-burners."

Starting from Fiction 

 

The family from The Witch (2015), kneeling.

When I began conceptualizing this course, I knew I wanted to build upon the complications we had explored in Trial of Anne Hutchinson. I also knew that I wanted to assign The Witch (2015) as one of our fictional treatments of history. I had wanted to screen clips of the film as part of my Reacting course the previous year, but couldn't quite justify its incorporation. Yet I found the film very reflective of the spritual anxieties articulated by the major players in the Massachusetts Bay Colony: not just a censure of powerful womanhood (although, sure, that) but also a genuine belief that one's community must reflect compliance with divine will and a certainty that the devil did, in fact, exist. I now needed two things:

•  A secondary source which could provide the context to appreciate this aspect of the film
• A reading which could provide a more traditional view of the witchcraft myth

I cast about for options, using the UIUC library catalog to seek out titles related to the history of witches, witch trials, and colonial America. I found Elizabeth Reis's book Damned Women, contemplated assigning it, and realized that her collection Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America not only contained an abbreviated chapter of her book but also additional readings that might come in handy.

My second task was more obvious: I quickly opted for the quintessential treatment of the witchcraft myth, Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953). Not only is it frequently cited in any discussion of real or figurative "witchhunts," it also represented a different form of fiction, and I wanted to be able to potentially incorporate a discussion of form and performance into the course. I decided to start the course, after introductory materials on source analysis, by delving into this text together.

From here, I wanted to provide some complicating counterpoints to the Salem presented by Miller. First, I knew that I wanted to include discussion of Tituba and the role of race in the Salem mythology.  I plan to assign selections of Tituba, Reluctant Witch Of Salem, which attempts to use the sparse historical record to trace Tituba's life story and argue for rethinking both her racial identity and her role in the story of Salem.

Upon doing a little digging, it becomes fairly obvious that Salem's witchcraft trials were far afield of what most witchcraft trials looked like. Paradoxically, because the Salem incident was so unusual, they have been remembered; yet in being the only ones remembered, they have passed as the only available example and thus defined popular understanding of American witch trials. I chose Richard Godbeer's Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 to call attention to this discrepancy. Godbeer focuses on a Connecticut incident which occurred in the same yea, but which unfolded very dissimilarly: if Salem was a "panic," officials' treatment of witch claims in Stamford could best be described as "cautious" (7).

Conclusions

So, below is the current list in order-- next step, assigning each reading to a date!

•  The Crucible (1953)
• Tituba, Reluctant Witch Of Salem (selections)
  
• Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 
• The Witch (2015) 
• Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America (selections)

As you can see, the final order is very different than the order in which I conceived of the sources to use. Obviously, there are tons of other things that one could assign to talk about the American mythology of Salem-- these are just a few of my frontrunners, and not the final word (and I suspect I may need to cut this down a bit!). Likewise, there are other great approaches to figuring out what to assign-- I'd love to hear about yours.


* Yes, I know it's not really an f. No, I won't stop pronouncing it "Congrefs."


Related Links:
An interesting guide to the proper use of the long and short s. 
Quite an extensive online archive of Salem sources exists at the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project. 
A Smithsonian Magazine article on Tituba. 
I'm also considering using Veta Smith Tucker's article Purloined Identity: The Racial Metamorphosis of Tituba of Salem Village, from the Journal of Black Studies. 

What's History: Seeing It IRL

As I've mentioned, I'm currently on my research year, making a lot of short trips to different archives in order to look at materials (mostly old pieces of paper in various formats) that will inform my dissertation. Everyone's approach to research is different-- some people spend an entire year in one place at one archive; some projects are more heavily tied to a particular location than others. The process has inspired a great deal of reflection for me about the way that history is written-- no surprise there-- and about how to incorporate an appreciation of that complicated fact into classroom discussions of the discipline.

Types of sources are a common source of conversation and frustration in a history classroom. We can identify primary and secondary sources when they are clearly packaged (A Civil War letter! A recently published monograph!), but struggle to make the difference evident in more complex materials (A documentary created in the time period under study?). Reliability of sources is another point of challenge and is often dealt with by rigidly controlling the sources that students are allowed to use for a paper (only this book and the articles we've used in class, select two readings from this curated list, etcetera). So often we tell students to cite things not-the-internet simply because we're scared of letting it in with all of the confusion it presents. For a brief period, instructors could get away with saying that nothing on the Internet is a reliable source, but in the age of digital humanities such a proclamation is not just inaccurate but downright misleading. And when eventually these students choose individual topics on which to write research papers, they have no experience in choosing a good source. It is more difficult than we let on to explain the gentle nuances of why one thing is a good source for a history paper; another is not; another you can get away with, but only for certain projects. And then you go to a Very Nice Archive for your own research and find folders full of printed out emails and websites from the 1990s, and you chuckle quietly to yourself.

In short, there's a lot to be said about what can be done on the internet as far as research goes. But what I want to explore for a minute is the kind of things that can't-- the reasons why many travel to do historical research. This is not always a need that seems apparent to those outside of the discipline, a fact hammered home to me recently while staying at an Airbnb for research on the East Coast. I met several friends of the host, and as we sat around chatting over wine and the skeletal remains of dinner, I described my trajectory of travel-- Ohio to Buffalo to Northampton to Hartford to Boston to New York to Washington and then, who knew? I hadn't nailed down anything after that point. "But why do you have to go to all those places?" one asked. "This stuff isn't available online?"

From Vimeo. 

The conversation stuck with me-- both for the crystal-clear image of this scene in Hail Caesar! that it brought to my mind and as an instigator for a series of thoughts about explaining why, exactly, one might still need to go somewhere else to learn something about the past.

There's the obvious, of course-- there are a lot of things in the world that haven't been digitized, and if you're interested in writing about people who have not traditionally been favored subjects of historical study, sources about them are often the things that haven't been digitized. There's also a material culture element. As I've alluded to in talking about scrapbooks, some sources provide rich information that needs to be seen and touched in person. Many scrapbooks include greeting cards with manipulable or removable elements, letters which have to be unfolded or turned to read them in their entirety, or photos attached by tape on one side with a caption on the back-- all features which are difficult to make available in a digital format.

There's also a sense of obligation which informs the practice of traveling for research, based on the idea that it seems dishonest to write about a place without having been there. There's an idea that the "realness" of the place, the culture, will rub off on you a bit and will give you insight into the topic. I have to admit that this is not a super strong motivator for my own travels, as quite often the materials I am looking at are not necessarily local to the repository which holds them, and as its all US there's only so much you can argue about local cultures before it becomes a little too wildly specific (I'll defend to the death my argument that OKCians and Tulsans breathe entirely different air! My own south side of Wichita is so unlike the east or west sides as to constitute its own planet! Urbana? I don't know her). In fact, my research is more focused on tracing a common experience than it is on defining regional differences.

Perhaps more useful is a reason I didn't fully appreciate until recently-- a visit to a place can show you the way people remember its history. I visited Warm Springs, Georgia this month to look at that materials still held by the Roosevelt Warm Springs Vocational Rehabilitation Campus (previously the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, a leading treatment center for polio patients from the late 1920s to the 1960s). I was able to see the pools used for hydrotherapy and read a bit about the people who used them-- I even fully embraced the tourist experience and bought a bottle to fill with water from the famous Warm Springs. I walked around the still functional campus, which features pictures of former residents and a walking tour of notable buildings. Being there in person gave me an idea of the physical space occupied by people who have reflected on their experiences at Warm Springs in memoirs and periodicals. 

Although all of this is available for one to see and do at the Rehabilitation Campus, it is not the main historical attraction in town, and indeed I did not even discover that the walking tour was available until I arrived on the campus to check in. The average person passing through would be most likely to see Roosevelt's Little White House State Historic Site, which focuses heavily on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's life and presidency.

The Little White House. 

In addition to the Little White House itself, where FDR lived when he was in the area, and its associated guesthouse and servants' quarters, a small museum introduces visitors to the president and his time in the area. The exhibits there emphasize what role Warm Springs played in FDR's life and work, not just in terms of his physical rehabilitation and dedication to polio-related causes but also how rural life impacted his ideas about electrification and other New Deal programs. This is most dramatically demonstrated by the presence of a full-size electrical pole within the exhibit, with wires extending to a small replica cabin representative of that found in the area during his tenure in Warm Springs.

The pole, next to a wall reading "New Deal" and in front of one reading "Rural Electrification." 

The memory here of FDR the president is selective-- I found a single reference to Japanese-American internment, which appears on the timeline at the front of the museum and seems to be doing its best to make it appear to be an unrelated happenstance that occurred during Roosevelt's presidency rather than an executive order he personally signed.

The "World War II" section of the timeline with entry at top: "Japanese-American internment camps are created." 

More attention is paid to Roosevelt's experience of disability and the mobility aids he used. His adapted car appears in the center of the exhibit, and one of the last sights before you exit the building (onto a path with scooters available to ride to the Little White House itself) is a long row of display cases filled with the ornately carved canes that FDR received as gifts.

Roosevelt's last car at Warm Springs. 

The cane collection (and, naturally, my finger. Oops!)

So, this is a lot of travel talk-- how can we hope to make any of this useful in the classroom? Yes, I would love to send my students on trips around the country to see the current iterations of the ideas and people we've talked about in class (part of my impetus for starting this blog was, in fact, my desire to share things related to RTTP that I've seen while traveling with former students). 


Descriptions and photos of places can add modern relevance to a historical discussion. If you want to emphasize how history is made, an acknowledgment of travel for your own research can also be helpful-- how is the history we know and read shaped by the sources that happened to be available where the researcher was and the time they were there? For some topics, sharing photos of associated places can be useful-- when teaching the Four Freedoms in the US survey, I like to talk about the prominent role the Four Freedoms play in Washington D.C.'s FDR Memorial, and now I can supplement that with their appearance at the end of the Little White House Museum as well. 

The Four Freedoms wall at the Little White House Historical Site, including the Norman Rockwell prints of each.

Why did these words not only matter in the 1940s but also maintain staying power as part of the legacies of FDR and World War II? Why would curators choose to end this museum with this display (just before, of course, the gift shop)? What relationship do these words have with those of Executive Order 9066? Posing such questions can emphasize the continuing relevance of particular interpretations and sources to the neglect of others in public and local history.

But photos and stories can only be illustrative up to a point, and run the risk of feeling a little "look at my vacation slides." There are also more interactive ways to approximate the benefits of travel in the classroom. One option is to use local resources, like museums on campus with exhibits or objects related to the course. I was able to do this during Greenwich Village, 1913 last year when a professor teaching the game in another course set up a visit to the Krannert Art Museum to examine art from the period and suggested I come look at the same materials with my class. 

Another thing I like to do is encourage students to reflect on the landscapes they grew up in, have visited, or travel through daily. What echoes of the past surround them-- a street named after a local Klan member (or maybe a photographer)? A campus building named for a state governor friendly to late nineteenth century labor movements? How was the suburb they grew up in or the city they vacationed in over spring break shaped by economic boom and bust, struggles of race and class, or changing trends in transit, entertainment, tourism? Looking at the familiar in a newly thoughtful way brings benefits similar to those of traveling. 

Has travel changed the way you think about history or informed the way you teach? 

Related Links:

Would that it were so simple on Youtube.
If you like the Four Freedoms, you may also enjoy the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park in New York City.
For more on FDR and Japanese-American internment, check out this collection of primary sources from the FDR library. (Note particularly the mention of "various special interests" that would welcome the removal of Japanese-Americans from their land in Document 4, a frequently overlooked factor in discussions of internment, and Document 7, the text of Executive Order 9066.) You may also enjoy the innovative monograph Concentration Camps on the Home Front: Japanese Americans in the House of Jim Crow. 

For a non-FDR perspective on Warm Springs, have a look at the incredibly readable memoir Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR's Polio Haven (available as an ebook with a Champaign Public Library card!)

Current Project: Paragraph Structure and the History of Intelligence Testing

I recently prepared a lesson plan for an application and thought I'd share an abbreviated version of it here. I really enjoyed coming up with this activity because it focuses on developing a skill that I myself continue to struggle with: forming writing into coherent paragraphs. This version uses early intelligence tests from the 1920s as a primary source for students to experience in different ways and encourage them to shape the evidence gained from their approach to the sources into a well-structured paragraph.

Below are the objectives of the lesson, a description of the activity itself, and the materials needed for the lesson. 

Objectives

Primary: Practice proper paragraph structure; understand the three critical parts of a paragraph (topic sentence, evidence, and analysis).

Secondary: Develop facility with forming thoughts into a structured argument quickly; understand that different levels of access to information can lead to different styles of writing or arguments; gain a greater appreciation of the history of intelligence testing and issues culture presents in measuring innate intelligence

Activity

Part 1 (10 min.): The class will split into three sections. Section 1 will be given the Alpha exam (App. A). Section 2 will be given the Beta exam (App. B). These sections, the “testers,” will take the exams they have been given. Section 3, the “analysts” will be given both exams and instructions not to take the exams, but to annotate them analytically (App. C).

Part 2 (15 min): Each student will use the paragraph structure worksheet (App. D) to formulate their thoughts about the exam(s).

Part 3 (15 min): Discussion and debriefing. Students from each group will share the paragraphs they created and consider the following questions together:

• What arguments did you make about the material? Did the three groups tend to have differing interpretations?
• What section of the paragraph was easiest/hardest to write?
• How did you use the evidence you had at your disposal to argue your point?
• Does the revelation of information from other groups change your interpretation?

Part 4 (flexible):  Students receive answer sheets (App. E). These can be explored by students individually as their curiosity leads. However, if time allows and if instructor wishes to extend secondary objectives, lead a discussion about what the context adds to their interpretations.

• Did you find any of these questions difficult to answer?
• Why do you think these tests are different? Is one of them harder than the other?
• These tests are clearly culturally biased, which we can see in part because of the ways US culture has changed since the 1920s. Do modern intelligence tests have similar problems? Is that more difficult for us to see because we are enmeshed in the culture?

Materials

Appendix A: Alpha test (courtesy of archive.org).

Appendix B: Beta test (from Gould, 241)

Appendix C: Instructions for Sections 1, 2, and 3

Appendix D: Paragraph Structure Worksheet

Appendix E: Answer keys for Alpha and Beta exams (archive.org; Gould, 240) 

Appendices

Appendix A

Appendix B

Draw in what is missing.

Appendix C:

Sections 1 and 2:

Take this exam. You will write a paragraph based on your experience of taking the exam in part 2.

Section 3:

Analyze these two exams. What stands out to you about each? How do they compare? Annotate each exam with your thoughts—circling, marginal notes, etcetera. You will write a paragraph based on your analysis of the exams in part 2.

Appendix D

Paragraph Structure Worksheet

Use this worksheet to help you construct a paragraph about your material. You can work on the sections in whatever order makes sense to you. You will probably have false starts that don’t make it into your final paragraph. When you finish, you may copy the entire paragraph on the back of this worksheet, or just indicate which sentences should be incorporated into the final product by underlining them.

Use the following question as a jumping off point:

These tests were designed to measure intelligence. Do they succeed?

1. Topic Sentence: The thesis of your paragraph. What arguments could you make on this topic?

2. Evidence: This is a selection from the materials you have. What aspects of the materials stood out to you? Describe them.

3. Analysis: Take a look at the evidence you’ve identified. How does that evidence prove your argument? Explain why.

Optional: Is there anything else that a reader might need to know to understand your paragraph? Write that here, and indicate where that sentence should go with an arrow or a description.

Appendix E

Easier to read here. 

Note: The worksheet and materials could also be used in other ways: for writing-focused courses, the worksheet could be reframed to reflect on different primary sources or used as a template to organize thoughts for a final paper. If one wanted to emphasize intelligence testing instead of writing skills, Part 1 and Part 4 could be undertaken without incorporating the writing focus of Parts 2 and 3.

Current Project: Because You're Mine, I Walk the Line

Photo by Jeff Putney.

As you may know, the Graduate Employees' Organization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is currently on strike (at eight days and counting, the longest in UIUC history). There have been a lot of beautiful letters and posts floating around about the strike, making articulate and reasonable arguments in favor of protecting tuition waivers, raising graduate wages, and making clear to the administration their dissatisfaction with their unwillingness to bargain with graduate employees. I myself did the opposite last week, canceling my usual weekly post both in solidarity with the strike and to give myself more time to participate in pickets and rallies. This week, I want to jot down just a few messy reflections on the possibilities for learning that the strike has presented (while encouraging you to also read some of the cogent arguments in favor of the GEO presented in a variety of places like the Undergraduate-Graduate Alliance and the fine folks on Twitter.)

Most obviously, the GEO strike has presented a lot of opportunities to reevaluate the value of graduate labor for people at all levels, even surprising graduate workers themselves. I know the value of my own labor, but did I know about the ESL courses that every international student is required to take under the guidance of graduate workers? Not before last week. Undergraduate allies of the GEO are reflecting on the role that TAs and GAs have played in their own coursework and highlighting these experiences in letters to the provost.

For me, the strike has also sparked thoughts about labor history and the way we teach it. US history courses often cover the labor movement, and for good reason-- as we are wont to say, their efforts in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries changed the landscape of work in this country (at least, I am wont to say so). An eight hour day, a weekend, restrictions on child labor, a living wage, workplace safety-- all things that the labor movement envisioned and made real. We do a lot of activities designed to highlight this contrast-- reading John Spargo's observations of child laborers and their dismal working conditions. We emphasize the differences in various union ideologies, bringing up a lot of unions with a lot of acronyms, like the IWW and the AFL and the WTUL and maybe even the ILGWU if we get really rowdy.

What most of us haven't explored so fruitfully-- what is hard to approximate in the classroom-- is the mixed emotional bag of labor activism. The strike has brought on for me an appreciation of how complex the decision to strike is-- both dreaded and celebrated. It has highlighted the spirit of joyfulness that the strike brings, and that as it goes on, you become closer to those around you. When teaching strikes and unions, I had been painting a picture of iron-jawed determination, but what I've seen in the past week has been more lighthearted-- a determination to win, yes, but also a celebration of community. I've heard this newfound appreciation of community from many people this week, and I've said it myself-- "This might sounds cheesy, but all that solidarity stuff-- I get it now."

It also takes you outside of yourself a bit. I saw a pretty apt sign last week that said something to the effect of, "Things are so bad even the introverts are out here!" The person that you are on the picket line, shouting chants and encouraging strangers, is not the person that you are every other time of your life, when you fear talking to other people or just wish you could go to your office without seeing anyone. Most weeks, I avoid campus when I don't have to be there-- last week, I was there every day.

I have never been able to get this sort of worldview-altering enthusiasm into my discussions of labor history, because I didn't really know it myself. The discussion is about that iron-jawed determination I mentioned above-- the ideals of Marxism, the rational reasons why one would want to work a manageable number of hours or have their children attend school instead of picking coal. I've never focused on the community building of unions and strikes, the human motivations of union leaders or members. Even the Greenwich Village game, which approximates so many lived experiences and ideas well, also fails to get across this experience of the labor faction-- its focus is on ideals among bohemians, not engagement in actual labor activism. How much more sense do the various enthusiasms of Leah Schwartz, Big Bill Haywood, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn make when you've actually seen a strike in action?

So, one of the nice things about this strike, in addition to the solidarity it has fostered, is the insight it can offer not only into our present but into labor history for teachers and students alike. I like to think that the next time I walk into a classroom on this campus to talk about unions and labor, there will be a great deal more familiarity with these concepts among my students, and more appreciation of who exactly it is who organizes, strikes, pickets, and makes change throughout history-- people very much like us.


Related Links:

Title Talk-- I Walk the Line
A few links on the GEO strike: News-Gazette, Socialist Worker, Chicago Tribune, Daily Illini.
For the monetarily inclined, a link to the GEO Strike Fund.