Pardon the Interruption

So it’s May. The school year is winding down and it’s full on testing season, which means I haven’t done a great job keeping up with the newsletter. I’m also starting to reflect on the past year, as well as looking ahead and doing some light planning for enxt year. Note to self for next year - get drafts done ahead of time.

I have several posts in the works, however so I wanted to just take a second to one, thank everyone for subscribing and two, give you an idea on what’s coming next.

1. Inspired by my post on the Articles of Confederation, a slightly-batshit starting point for how I would try to address some of our current issues. Not realistic, not a bit, but you’ve gotta shoot for the stars with your opening bid, right???

2. A summary post for the Revolutionary Era in US history. This’ll pull together all the little threads and disparate topics into a coherent narrative. A jumping off point, if you will. This is very close to being ready to go.

3. My end of the year speech for my AP US History students. I don’t usually write out my end of the year thoughts, but this year it feels like I should. There will be some Star Wars content here. Go watch Andor.

4. My summer reading goals - a set of books covering topics that I feel like I want to reinforce before next school year. There are definitely some things I’d like to teach better, and there’s nothing better than doing a little reading to give me ideas and help me make connections that I can use in class. Since several of the books were purchased for me last summer as classroom gifts, I also want to shout out the mix of high school, college, and post-college friends and fam who contributed. It’s long over due!

5. My hatred of the Electoral College knows no bounds. It’s not necessarily the EC’s fault, but I think we should understand the process of its creation a little better. Bring a beverage, the creators of the EC sure did!

6. There’s a series of posts in the works about a “theme” across time periods of US history. First I’ll introduce the way we use themes in US history to connect processes and threads across eras, and then the first series will talk about the way we’ve cycled between periods of higher or lower federal government involvement in the economy, and the way it has played out in the past. This has been the most apparent through-line while teaching this class for the first time. It even showed up as the DBQ essay this year for my kids.

There are some other things vaguely floating around, but I want to wrap up the whole period from about 1754-1800 before completely moving on. That means we’ve got a summer of Washington, Adams, the Constitutional Convention, and of course that sore loser Jefferson ahead of us. This is probably my favorite time period to talk about, and I hope that it helps plants some seeds that turn into food for thought and discussion.

OH!

Also, once its summer time, I might even try to schedule a couple of Zoom sessions for folks who might want a live “class” sort of thing? That was kind of the starting point for the whole newsletter, and I’d be totally down for it. Please feel free to let me know if you’re interested in the comments, and if there’s a topic you might be interested in diving into a bit more. Thanks again for reading and subscribing - more to come soon!