No goals this week because I have too much to do.
No dissertation goals, that is. At least, not in getting anything written or researched. Most of this week has been devoted to wrangling a seventy one page chapter into a fourteen page conference paper. Not as easy as it sou… oh, it doesn’t sound easy, either. I haven’t had this experience yet, mainly because I haven’t ever had seventy one pages before, but you go on that long and an argument begins to be large and have many parts. Putting it in a short paper means you have to take it all apart, extract something pungent, and put some of it back together. Makes the surviving pages seem kind of naked. Whatever…the nice thing is that this is the first time I have gone back to read the chapter, and I think it’s still pretty good. Interesting to look back, see some good writing and sophisticated analysis and think… I did that?
Should I have any spare time this week, I’ll pitch back into Thomasson’s diary, looking for his social graces.
Still having fun with Glenn Beck Guy. What I mean to say is that our classroom discussion of history is civil. Now, I don’t think he’s rethinking what he knows, but that’s not my goal as a teacher. (Well, content-wise, it is. My goal is that ultimately, he—and everyone else in the class—will begin to think historically about things. It is a habit; not something that is going to happen after six classes.) I left class Tuesday night feeling good and expansive about history in the public. Hell, I saw Sam Wineburg speak last week about Howard Zinn’s history and I’m thinking to myself, why the hell not give Glenn Beck’s history books a similarly respectful review?
But I came home and saw this and now I’m thinking F*$^ that S*#@.
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