Tip for Teachers (School of Tomorrow)

Doing Homework

Cutting and pasting from Facebook:

My morning homework. I'm only an hour into it. I like to start my day with some geopolitics and coffee. I fed the dog at 3:30 AM, finished my dreams, then put on my study hat, figuratively (I can't find my main Stetson BTW, all beat up and worn out) and hit the "books" (except usually that means YouTubes).

I often watch the Neutrality Studies channel in particular, to help me keep up with the WILPF ladies (men allowed, I'm a member) on their listserv.

Lots of collective memories over there (these ladies go back, although not all the way back to Hull House at this point). I'm learning a lot about ethnicities that derive from countries no longer on the map, and they're a lot of them.

[ Nietzsche wasn't even German and wrote critically of the German psyche in Will to Power etc., most people don't know that.. He was born in Prussia. More about N in my blog post linked in the comments).]

Chicago is home to a lot of descendants from Bohemia and Yugoslavia as well. Nations come and go we should remember. I think of Tom Hanks in that movie The Terminal. Many live in a twilight zone transit lounge liminal space, as they've fallen through the very wide cracks in our geopolitical vista.

Many people don't possess any paperwork to prove their citizenship anywhere and therefore they're treated as entitled to no human rights (who would protect them?). For a while, the Americas were a kind of asylum for the undocumented, mainly because many of these undocumented were actually born here (they're native Americans).

More Historical Data

Jack F. Matlock, Jr, was the U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1987–1991, and had a key role in negotiating an end to the Cold War. 

Ambassador Matlock argues that Western leaders have been captured by ideology, forgotten about diplomacy, and "become war criminals".

Pep Talk

Debate Culture

From my outbox (to a team listserv earlier today): 

I bring this up [debate culture] because where I put my focus is on debates, versus gunplay or smear attack propaganda. For some time, the policy in the State Department, during Nuland's tenure, was to cut off all communication with the Russian diplomatic community and to ban their television in the USA. This was consistent with the Ukraine policy of demonizing Russia and outlawing Russian as a means of official or even informal communication.

However, nowadays the prospect of televised debates between US and Russian journalists is far more likely, or even high school debate teams.

A US team, if debating something about current affairs, say whether Portland should indeed become a sister city with Mariupol, would want to train on a lot of materials, as is standard. The team will have to master and argue both sides at different events.

Does anyone else watch Rick Sanchez ever? He was in a booth on Red Square with Scott Ritter during the Alaska Accords summit (what some of us Ruscadians call it); I watched him co-star with Manila Chan on RT America for years.

I was always an RT America fan, which I came to, as I explain in my journals, via Air America, the FM radio network that I'd tune in on the car radio while waiting for that same daughter to get out of middle school. When Air America broke up, a lot of the talent moved to either MSNBC or RT America. The latter had Abby Martin, Chris Hedges... folks I follow to this day.

Now that NATO has lost its proxy war (the way I see it), I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot more US high schoolers, debaters especially, put on the spot to bone up on what's been happening, and that's not going to mean mindlessly reciting gospel / dogma emanating from Washington, DC and it's Great Decisions program (or maybe the Methodists still get programmed that way?), it's going to mean finding the right YouTubes and starting from scratch in a lotta ways.

Pythonica from the School of Tomorrow

School of Tomorrow: A Summer of Activism