Missives from Samsara

I got a text an hour ago from my student teacher from last year. He was in a box at Madison Square Garden about to see his first Rush show. Lucky dog!

That got me thinking about teacher ed programs, which led me to recall the many chats I’ve had over the years with young teachers earning their M.A.T.s about what they are being assigned to read by their professors. I was often shocked that books I thought would be de rigueur were not on the syllabus.

Here are 5 books I think any future high school social studies teacher should read.

1. Jill Lepore’s beautiful American history book These Truths. Forget Howard Zinn, read this wonderful, comprehensive, narrative history instead.

2. John Hattie’s Visible Learning for Teachers. I first heard about Hattie from a friend and took a deep dive into his oeuvre, especially as it relates to social studies. What Hattie does so well is explain, based on all the research, what actually works to produce actual learning.

3. Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking by a gaggle of experts, including John Hattie. This wonderful, short book about the importance of knowledge (aka, facts) should be mandatory reading for future and current educators. The argument isn’t trendy, but I agree with it completely: higher order thinking is not possible if people don’t have a strong foundational base of knowledge.

4. How Teaching Happens, by Paul A. Kirschner (one of the co-authors of the book mentioned above), Carl Hendrick, and Jim Heal. This book is a review of 30 seminal books and papers that teachers should know about. It is a follow up to their similarly styled book, How Learning Happens.

5. Make History: A Practical Guide for Middle and High School History Instruction by Art Worrell and Paul Bambrick-Santoyo. As the title emphasizes, this book is practical and contains a ton of easy to implement ideas for any high school social studies class.

I recently finished James Traub’s excellent book The Cradle of Citizenship. Traub spends a year visiting classrooms throughout the United States, trying to understand how schools promote and teach our young people how to be citizens. As an AP US History and AP Government teacher in a majority minority public high school, with a large immigrant population, this topic is important to me. Along the way, Traub exposes the follies of both the right and the left, with Florida and Minnesota playing lead roles.Traub makes clear there are some stupid practices and ideas on both sides of the political spectrum when it comes to education. I certainly see this in my job here in Portland.

Traub defines himself as being center-left, which is how I see myself. Not surprisingly, I agree with many of his conclusions. With regards to one current debate in education, he makes the point that knowledge is the foundation of higher-order thinking and thereby citizenship. One can’t form an educated opinion on tariffs, for instance, if one doesn’t know what a tariff is. However, focusing on facts, and chronology (as opposed to thematic learning in history), and often, ‘dead white guys’, are practices associated with the conservative view of education. However, I agree whole-heartedly that Traub’s conclusion about this debate is correct; in this case, the conservatives are mostly right. For more on this topic, see this free pdf titled Developing Thinking for Deep Thinking.

I enjoyed the book as well because it gave me a peak inside other classrooms. One of the problems with teaching is that we work in a bit of a bubble. It is often difficult to see what is happening outside one’s own classroom walls, not to mention in other buildings, in other states.

Unfortunately, the book did not lessen my worries about the intellectual (and spiritual) rot of Christian Nationalism. There are some very ignorant people in this country that would turn our schools into madrasses. That is no bueno and is a reminder that there is a culture war being waged in our nation, one that is tied to the class war that continues to be waged by the Epstein class in this country. And schools are increasingly a battle ground in those wars.

If you’re at all interested in the relationship between schools and democracy, read this short gem of a book.

I grew up in California, and always believed Cali had the coolest state flag. I still do. However, there is only one state flag that has images on both sides, and of course it is Oregon’s. Up until yesterday, I did not know this about our state flag.

What I did know was the following. First, Oregon became the 33rd state on Valentine’s Day, 1859, which is why there are 33 stars on the front. The front of the flag also has the year 1859 on it, as well as the words The Union. This checks out of course, because the Civil War was just two years away, and threats of disunion by traitorous southern fire-eaters were near peak levels. (John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry and then Lincoln’s election in 1860 continued the insanity and lead to the terrible rupture that eventually killed close to 700,00 people.)

The back of the flag shows a beaver, the animal that brought the first Europeans and Americans to the region. Portland may be the alpha city of Oregon today, but Fort Vancouver, across the Columbia in what is now Washington, was the fur trading outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company and was founded well before Portland, back in 1825.

This sort of thing is neither here nor there, but good to know if you’re an Oregonian.

As a social studies educator, perhaps I should have already known this; but it was news to me. I’m talking about the etymology of the word ‘ballot.’ While watching an episode from the Great Courses class on Turning Points in American History (#15 Expanding Universal Suffrage), the instructor mentioned that the word ‘ballot’ comes from the Italian word meaning small ball. In that time and place people voted with small colored balls, often white or black. I had never connected the word ‘ball’ with the word ‘ballot’, despite their obvious similarity.

In the United States, up until the early 20th century, people voted publicly, though usually with colored paper, not small balls. The wisdom of the Australian Ballot eventually became clear and states learned to make voting private. Good move. Thanks, Australia!

Thinking about all this, it occurred to me that perhaps the word ‘bullet’ also derived from the same root, since bullets used to essentially be small balls. The word ‘bullet’ apparently comes from the Middle French word boulette, also meaning “small ball” or “small pellet.” This was a diminutive of boule (ball). So, same original meaning, but different language. Digging further, it appears they do both have the same root, descending from the Vulgar Latin word balla, which means ‘ball’. Makes sense.

Did Boss Tweed know any of this? Not likely.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is visiting my school in the coming days. I decided to read one of her dissent’s to help my students prepare for her visit. I decided to take a look at her dissent in Trump v. CASA (June 2025). I really enjoyed it and am going to do my best to work more SCOTUS opinions (both majority and dissents) into my regular reading.

I have discovered a few websites where one can access decisions and learn more about the Court. They are listed below. Now, more than ever, I believe active citizenship and defense of democracy requires ‘doing your homework’ on the issues that our judicial branch is wrestling with.

1. The Official Supreme Court Website

2. Oyez (The Best for Context & Audio) A key feature of this site is that It offers a “synchronized” audio player where you can listen to the oral arguments while the transcript scrolls, highlighting which Justice or lawyer is speaking.

3. Cornell Legal Information Institute (LII) This collection includes a curated section for Landmark Decisions organized by topic (e.g., “Powers of the Presidency” or “Civil Rights”)

4. Scotus Blog Another great resource!

Given the current state of affairs between the press and the schmucks in power, it feels like a good time to revisit a lesser-known episode from the 19th century Senate that makes today’s press-versus-politics drama look relatively polite. I came across this in my daily meanderings as an American history and government teacher.

In 1841, during a time of broadening interest in politics, Henry Clay (the bane of my APUSH students’ existence) engineered the creation of the first official Senate Reporters' Gallery: ten front-row seats directly above the presiding officer’s rostrum. It was a small but meaningful acknowledgment that the press had a role to play in a functioning democracy. Progress, right?

Not exactly. The Senate’s relationship with journalists remained deeply adversarial. Leaks were a constant headache for members, and at one point the Senate’s response to a reporter publishing confidential information wasn’t a strongly worded letter or a suspension of credentials — it was confinement. A journalist named Nugent was apparently locked in a committee room for several weeks after refusing to reveal his sources (though they let him out for meals). The Senate’s approach was essentially: sit in there and think about what you’ve done. To his credit, he apparently never gave up his source.

It was, as Senate historians note, not the last time Congress tried to dry up leaks by placing a reporter under a form of house arrest. Meanwhile, earlier in 1839, Democratic-Republican Senator John Niles of Connecticut was doing his best to block reporters from the chamber altogether, denouncing them as “miserable scribblers” making a “miserable subsistence from their vile and dirty misrepresentations” of the Senate’s work. You’ve got to appreciate a good 19th century insult.

The press prevailed, obviously…thankfully. But it has never been easy.

Screenshot below taken from www.dailypress.senate.gov/about/history/