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Teaching With Documents: Lesson Plans

This section contains reproducible copies of primary documents from the holdings of the National Archives of the United States, teaching activities correlated to the National History Standards and National Standards for Civics and Government, and cross-curricular connections.

We use new technologies in innovative ways to solve problems. The bigger the problem, the more creative and innovative we need to be. It’s like the United State space program in the 1960’s and 70’s. The huge advancements in fuel cells, integrated circuits, or even freeze-dried foods were not the results of research units considering how space travel might work; rather, they were the results of a national imperative to put a person on the moon within a decade.

When we have a working, effective systems – like liberal education – new technologies like mobile computing find less context for innovation.

Taxing all foreign goods, to boost the sales of US products and protect manufacturers from cheap British goods

● Introducing a protective Tariff to enable the nation to raise money from these taxes and at the same time protect the nation's goods from cheaper priced foreign items

The American System helped to fuel the belief in the Manifest Destiny of the United States

He argued that sovereignty, or ultimate political power in a state, derives not from the monarch but from the ‘people’ or ‘nation’, that it must be exercised in their interest and for their benefit, that it should be controlled and circumscribed by laws, and that the ruler's tenure of office is in the nature of a trust exercised for the people's benefit and with their consent, underpinned by an implicit agreement or ‘social contract’

additional boost, first from the success of the American Revolution and the summoning of a constitutional convention by the United States in 1787, and now in France by the summoning of the Estates-General.

there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

“Creativity can be taught,”

it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children

Indirect elections are “in use between 1840 and 1872.  Indirect elections enhanced the political power of the hacendados, because voting districts often coincided directly with the boundaries of haciendas.  The first stage of an indirect election, when voters gathered to choose electors, occurred in the cantones, the administrative sub-units of a municipality.  Cantones often were made up of nothing more than one or two haciendas, giving landowners a clear advantage to control the selection of electores.  Above and beyond all other aspects of the electoral system, the oral vote [in use until 1950] insured the predominance of patron-client relations” (pages 65-66).  Describes process for recording oral votes.  “Throughout the nineteenth century, national politics followed to a great extent the rise and fall of alliances between departmental networks.  For instance, in the mid 1840s San Vicente and San Miguel were allied against Sonsonate and San Salvador” (page 163).

o Vasconcelos “al término de su gestión promovió su reelección, para lo cual reformó la Constitución el 9 de marzo de 1849.  Deseaba otro mandato constitucional de dos años para reconstruir Centroamérica.  Francisco Dueñas y el Coronel Nicolás Angulo se opusieron a esta reforma, alegando que se quebrantaba el ordenamiento constitucional” (page 140). Figeac 1938:  “Don Doroteo Vasconcelos se portó a la altura del deber patriótico en el primer período de su Administración, pero cometió un grave e imperdonable error:  permitió que lo reeligieran para un segundo período presidencial.  La Constitución Política entonces vigente, prohibía en su artículo 44 la reelección del presidente de la República, y para dar el paso apuntado se dispuso la reforma [de 9 de marzo de 1849 de la Cámara de Senadores]” (page 171). Leistenschneider 1980:  “En marzo de 1849 la Asamblea Legislativa reforma el Art. 44 de la Constitución Nacional, el cual fijaba el período presidencial para dos años, prohibiendo la reelección; la reforma permite la reelección de Presidente por una sola vez” (page 88). Monterey 1978:  Marzo 17, 1849—“La Asamblea Legislativa…convoca a los pueblos a elecciones de Presidente del Estado, Diputados y Senadores” (page 85). December Monterey 1978:  Diciembre 1849—“Se efectúan en el Estado de El Salvador las elecciones de Autoridades Superiores; fué reelecto el Presidente don Doroteo Vasconcelos” (page 93).  “Se presentaron como principales candidatos a la Presidencia de la República, los señores Doroteo Vasconcelos y Lic. Francisco Dueñas” (page 94). El SalvadorAcronyms1811-18491850-18991900-19341935-19691970-19791980-19891990-19992000-2009More than one electionSources UC San Diego 9500 Gilman Dr. La Jolla,

Teachers — many of them — will continue to resent efforts to use standardized tests to measure their ability to teach.

Tucker, 72, a former senior education official in Washington, is the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, which he founded in 1988. Since then he has focused much of his research on comparing public education in the United States with that of places that have far better results than we do — places like Finland, Japan, Shanghai and Ontario, Canada. His essential conclusion is that the best education systems share common traits — almost none of which are embodied in either the current American system or in the reform ideas that have gained sway over the last decade or so.

His starting point is not the public schools themselves but the universities that educate teachers. Teacher education in America is vastly inferior to many other countries; we neither emphasize pedagogy — i.e., how to teach — nor demand mastery of the subject matter. Both are a given in the top-performing countries. (Indeed, it is striking how many nonprofit education programs in the U.S. are aimed at helping working teachers do a better job — because they’ve never learned the right techniques.)

And yet the machines have made hardly any impact.

To justify their campaign, ed reformers repeat, mantra-like, that U.S. students are trailing far behind their peers in other nations, that U.S. public schools are failing. The claims are specious. Two of the three major international tests—the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Trends in International Math and Science Study—break down student scores according to the poverty rate in each school. The tests are given every five years. The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in U.S. schools where the poverty rate was less than 10 percent ranked first in reading, first in science, and third in math. When the poverty rate was 10 percent to 25 percent, U.S. students still ranked first in reading and science. But as the poverty rate rose still higher, students ranked lower and lower. Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average ranking of American students reflects this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty. And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three.

Drilling students on sample questions for weeks before a state test will not improve their education. The truly excellent charter schools depend on foundation money and their prerogative to send low-performing students back to traditional public schools. They cannot be replicated to serve millions of low-income children. Yet the reform movement, led by Gates, Broad, and Walton, has convinced most Americans who have an opinion about education (including most liberals) that their agenda deserves support.

THE COST of K–12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year

When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle south-west, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle—varies a few degrees, and does not always point due south-west, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always settles between west and south-south-west. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks, would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits, which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide for the thousandth time, that I will walk into the south-west or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.

I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west.