Monday, May 23, 2011
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Homework- 5/19/11
"No amount of rationalization or blaming can preempt the moment of choice each of us brings to our situation here on this planet. The lesson of the 60's is that people who cared enough to do right could change history.
We didn't end racism but we ended legal segregation.
We ended the idea that you could send half-a-million soldiers around the world to fight a war that people do not support.
We ended the idea that women are second-class citizens.
We made the environment an issue that couldn't be avoided.
The big battles that we won cannot be reversed. We were young, self-righteous, reckless, hypocritical, brave,silly, headstrong and scared half to death.
And we were right."
- Abbie Hoffman
1. Why would Abbie Hoffman write a book called "Steal this Book" ?
2. Do you agree with Hoffman's quote or is he exaggerating? Explain
2. Do you agree with Hoffman's quote or is he exaggerating? Explain
Monday, May 16, 2011
Homework- 5/18/11
The Counterculture
In the 1960's, young people questioned America's materialism and cultural and political norms, much as they've always done. Seeking a better world, some used music, politics, and alternative lifestyles to create what came to be known as the counterculture. Americans in that era faced many controversial issues-from civil rights, the Vietnam War, nuclear arms, and the environment to drug use, sexual freedom, and nonconformity.The counterculture lifestyle integrated many of the ideals and indulgences of the time: peace, love, harmony, music, mysticism, and religions outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. Meditation, yoga, and psychedelic drugs were embraced as routes to expanding one's consciousness.
The movement, greeted with enormous publicity and popular interest, contributed to changes in American culture. A willingness to challenge authority, greater social tolerance, the sense that politics is personal, environmental awareness, and changes in attitudes about gender roles, marriage, and child rearing are legacies of the era.
Some children of the sixties counterculture dropped out and left the cities for the countryside to experiment with utopian lifestyles. Away from urban problems and suburban sameness, they built new lives structured around shared political goals, organic farming, community service, and the longing to live simply with one's peers.As part of a spiritual reawakening, some members of the counterculture rejected drug use in favor of mind and spiritual expansion through yoga, meditation, and chanting.
The Woodstock Music and Art Fair made history. It was, depending on one's point of view, four days of generosity, peace, great music, liberation, and expanding consciousness, or four days of self-indulgence, noise, promiscuity, and illegal drug use.
Woodstock enabled thousands of middle-class young people to experience the communal spirit. For the first time, these young people felt empowered by their numbers. Politicians and manufacturers in the music and clothing industries took note of the potential of a growing youth market.
Americans were moved by the Vietnam War, racial injustice, fear of nuclear annihilation, and the rampant materialism of capitalist society. Many were inspired by leaders such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Small groups staged sit-ins at schools, local lunch counters, and other public facilities. Masses gathered in the nation's cities to protest what they saw as America's shortcomings.Many members of the counterculture saw their own lives as ways to express political and social beliefs. Personal appearance, song lyrics, and the arts were some of the methods used to make both individual and communal statements. Though the specifics of the debates were new, arguments for personal freedom, free speech, and political reform go back to the foundations of American society.
1. What were some common values that were shared among members of the counterculture?
2. How did the counterculture represent a change compared to American life during the 1950s?
Monday, May 9, 2011
Homework- 5/12/11
Civil Rights Music
- Find and listen to a song from the Civil Rights Movement.
- Post the lyrics.
- Explain the meaning of the song (at least 2 paragraphs).
- Find and listen to a song from the Civil Rights Movement.
- Post the lyrics.
- Explain the meaning of the song (at least 2 paragraphs).
Homework- 510/11
Eyewitness to Jim Crow
Annie Zachery Remembers
I was born June 10, 1916 in Murfreesboro, Rutherford County, Tennessee, the fifth of nine children, five girls and four boys. My parents, Council Prince Rucker and Fannie Lawrence Rucker were sharecroppers and resided on Lover's Lane, now known as Twin Oak Drive. Our family unit was a very stable one. Everyone in the family shared in the planting, cultivating and the harvesting of the crop. My parents were not educated beyond the sixth grade, nevertheless, they had a lot of common sense. My mother encouraged education. Even when she was pregnant, she worked in the fields in place of her children so we could go to school. She did not want her children to have to work like she had. Being the child of a sharecropper, I was not a stranger to hard work. At the age of eight years, I was responsible for the family meals. By age twelve, I was doing the washing for the entire family on a scrub board.
The community I grew up in was very close knit. Everybody knew everybody. When we were children and if we did something that was not right or becoming, it was reported to our parents and there was no explaining. When we arrived home, we were chastised for whatever was reported.
There were three churches in the community, one Baptist and two Methodist, and our family attended them all. The reason being is that the churches did not meet every Sunday, but on different Sundays during the month, and the families went to all of them. We were all Baptist except for my father, but no one could tell the difference. The women in the churches sang and prayed just like the men. We had homecoming activities and the women would be responsible for cooking the dinner, serving it on the grounds, outside, and taking care of the children.
We had few recreation activities. There was no radio or television. We played ball as children and went to ballgames on Saturdays. On Saturday nights, we would go to church and march around and sing Christian songs. Later, there was the introduction of debate during the Saturday night gatherings, as for the subjects, I am not sure. During the debates, I would say the welcome. Other activities I remember were plating the maypole and Bible study, where we learned the books of the Bible.
When I was three, I lost my right eye in an accident, but I could not let this deter me from accomplishment. I did not get to start school until I was eight years old because of illness. My older sisters and brothers would help us younger ones with our school work if we had trouble with it. My elementary school was a one-room school with all grades, one through eight. There were about thirty students. We would walk two and a half miles to school by cutting through the woods. On rainy days, my father would load us up in the wagon and carry us to school. Elementary school was split up during the year due to sharecropping, and it took two years to complete one grade. The county was so poor that our parents would have to pay the teacher to teach straight through cotton-picking time. I was almost disenchanted with school in the seventh grade. There were two students in my class, myself, and a young man. The young man did not go during the pay period and at the end of the year, he passed to the eighth grade right along with me, and I had continued in school all year. I thought this was very unfair.
I started working outside the home when I was in the eighth grade. I worked in private homes for three dollars and fifty cents per week. While working, I started Holloway High School. Due to lack of transportation, I boarded with a woman in the city, close to the school, during the week, for one dollar and twenty-five cents per week. On weekends, I went home. It sometimes meant walking three and a half miles when there was no one to pick me up. During my high school years, I had to work to maintain myself in order to obtain my education. I served at parties given by whites. At school social gatherings, I helped with the refreshments. I also babysat for money to help pay my way. I also substitute taught in the elementary schools, for experience, not for pay. I maintained the highest average in my class and received an academic award for best all-around student in 1937 from Holloway High School. My senior year, the honor was given to a male student whose family had more money than my family.
I graduated from Holloway High School in 1939, and started on a new journey in my life. I enrolled at Tennessee Agriculture and Industrial State College in Nashville, Tennessee, now Tennessee State University. Tuition was ten dollars. I lived with a cousin the first year in college; this was a real adjustment. As I recall, the morals were not as high as I expected. The fact that some of the girls were slipping out of the dorms to go drinking with the guys from Meharry was not what I expected to see or not at all what I was used to. The same things were happening then as now, except then, they were hidden. Getting oriented into college life was difficult at first. My grades were not the best, but after the first year, my grades began to improve. The curriculum consisted of subjects such as English, science, geography, home economics. I remember only one course on blacks or Negroes. My major, home economics, was what most of the girls majored in. Otherwise, they studied some related teaching subject, but no professions such as medicine or law. One requirement for Home Economics majors was home management. The students, ten girls, would stay on campus for three months and take care of a house, including bringing a real child in for them to care for. This was in preparation for them to know how to manage a home.
My second year in college, I boarded with a Ms. Porter on Eighteenth Avenue in Nashville, which was closer to school. I either walked to school or caught a Jitney, an illegal taxi. Ms. Porter took good care of me. Some nights, I studied until four in the morning after working until twelve midnight, serving parties. Ms Porter would knock on my door and tell me to go to bed because I had studied long enough and I needed my rest. During my junior year at college, I worked for this real nice white lady. I cooked, cleaned and kept a little boy who was very fond of me. The white lady would buy clothes and wear them one time and then give them to me. I recalled having been given an evening dress which I shared with my sisters. My bust was always bigger than theirs, so I added a piece in the dress and when my sisters would wear it, I would take the piece out.
In 1943, four years after beginning, I graduated from A and I College with a degree in home economics, which was unusual because I carried eighteen hours a semester and finished my curriculum in four years.
After college, I could not find a job, so I went to Monteagle, Tennessee, and worked as a cook. In September 1943, I got a job as a teacher in Decaterville, Tennessee, where I stayed until Christmas. I then got a job in a two-teacher school in Celina, Tennessee. Celina is located near Cookeville, Tennessee. It was a little town about six miles in the hills with nothing but black people and no social outlet. There, I taught the upper four grades. The teachers were responsible for taking care of the school building and building their own fires. The towns surrounding the school were very prejudiced, and I was told not to get caught in them after dark. I stayed in Celina until an opening in my field became available in Winchester, Tennessee, at the high school there. I taught in Winchester about two years. From Winchester, I went to Vienna, Georgia, a plantation town. There, I actually lived on a plantation. This was during the late 1940s. I remember that a bell was rung for everything that the blacks did on that plantation including eating. My father wanted me to move back closer to home, so I returned to Celina, Tennessee, the closest position I could get to Murfreesboro. I returned home in 1952, when my father became ill and died. A game warden named Mr. Walter Taylor was influential in getting me a job teaching in the Rutherford County area. I started teaching at the Dillard School located in the Barfield area. I also went back to school and received an Elementary Teaching Certificate in 1952. I stayed at Dillard School until getting a job at Emery School. The position at Emery was based on the number of students enrolled, so I picked up students and brought them to school so I could meet the attendance requirement. I taught there until the Shiloh Elementary School opened where I taught second grade.
I enjoyed teaching very much, but was highly disappointed when integration of schools came about. Integration was hard on the black children, because the white teachers categorized the black children as being hard to learn and having bad behavioral problems. The black students were not pushed to perform to the best of their abilities because of low expectations from the white teachers. Integration also dampened my enthusiasm. When I was placed a Walter Hill Elementary School, a result of integration, I was the only black teacher there for one year. Upon my arrival there, the principal, a poorly educated white man, gave me nothing to do for the first two weeks. After two weeks, I was given a position team teaching; then given thirteen of the worst students they could find, perhaps to discourage me. I stayed with it and after two years, I was assigned the second grade. I am proud of the fact that I stayed in the teaching profession for thirty-five years. I am also very proud of the fact that three of my family members finished college by helping each other. Only the girls finished because the boys were pulled out of school to help in the fields. Today I reside in Rutherford County at the family home place, as a retired school teacher. I delayed marriage until age forty-nine, and have been widowed for over twenty years. I am a member of the Retired Teachers Association, Better Living F.E.A.(Family Education Association), Smithfork District Women Association, Senior Women Missionary of the Tennessee State Missionary Baptist Convention, Trustee and Mothers Board of Walnut Grove Missionary Baptist Church.
1. How would you describe Ms. Zachery's childhood in the South?
2. Why was integration difficult, according to Ms. Zachery ?
Annie Zachery Remembers
I was born June 10, 1916 in Murfreesboro, Rutherford County, Tennessee, the fifth of nine children, five girls and four boys. My parents, Council Prince Rucker and Fannie Lawrence Rucker were sharecroppers and resided on Lover's Lane, now known as Twin Oak Drive. Our family unit was a very stable one. Everyone in the family shared in the planting, cultivating and the harvesting of the crop. My parents were not educated beyond the sixth grade, nevertheless, they had a lot of common sense. My mother encouraged education. Even when she was pregnant, she worked in the fields in place of her children so we could go to school. She did not want her children to have to work like she had. Being the child of a sharecropper, I was not a stranger to hard work. At the age of eight years, I was responsible for the family meals. By age twelve, I was doing the washing for the entire family on a scrub board.
The community I grew up in was very close knit. Everybody knew everybody. When we were children and if we did something that was not right or becoming, it was reported to our parents and there was no explaining. When we arrived home, we were chastised for whatever was reported.
There were three churches in the community, one Baptist and two Methodist, and our family attended them all. The reason being is that the churches did not meet every Sunday, but on different Sundays during the month, and the families went to all of them. We were all Baptist except for my father, but no one could tell the difference. The women in the churches sang and prayed just like the men. We had homecoming activities and the women would be responsible for cooking the dinner, serving it on the grounds, outside, and taking care of the children.
We had few recreation activities. There was no radio or television. We played ball as children and went to ballgames on Saturdays. On Saturday nights, we would go to church and march around and sing Christian songs. Later, there was the introduction of debate during the Saturday night gatherings, as for the subjects, I am not sure. During the debates, I would say the welcome. Other activities I remember were plating the maypole and Bible study, where we learned the books of the Bible.
When I was three, I lost my right eye in an accident, but I could not let this deter me from accomplishment. I did not get to start school until I was eight years old because of illness. My older sisters and brothers would help us younger ones with our school work if we had trouble with it. My elementary school was a one-room school with all grades, one through eight. There were about thirty students. We would walk two and a half miles to school by cutting through the woods. On rainy days, my father would load us up in the wagon and carry us to school. Elementary school was split up during the year due to sharecropping, and it took two years to complete one grade. The county was so poor that our parents would have to pay the teacher to teach straight through cotton-picking time. I was almost disenchanted with school in the seventh grade. There were two students in my class, myself, and a young man. The young man did not go during the pay period and at the end of the year, he passed to the eighth grade right along with me, and I had continued in school all year. I thought this was very unfair.
I started working outside the home when I was in the eighth grade. I worked in private homes for three dollars and fifty cents per week. While working, I started Holloway High School. Due to lack of transportation, I boarded with a woman in the city, close to the school, during the week, for one dollar and twenty-five cents per week. On weekends, I went home. It sometimes meant walking three and a half miles when there was no one to pick me up. During my high school years, I had to work to maintain myself in order to obtain my education. I served at parties given by whites. At school social gatherings, I helped with the refreshments. I also babysat for money to help pay my way. I also substitute taught in the elementary schools, for experience, not for pay. I maintained the highest average in my class and received an academic award for best all-around student in 1937 from Holloway High School. My senior year, the honor was given to a male student whose family had more money than my family.
I graduated from Holloway High School in 1939, and started on a new journey in my life. I enrolled at Tennessee Agriculture and Industrial State College in Nashville, Tennessee, now Tennessee State University. Tuition was ten dollars. I lived with a cousin the first year in college; this was a real adjustment. As I recall, the morals were not as high as I expected. The fact that some of the girls were slipping out of the dorms to go drinking with the guys from Meharry was not what I expected to see or not at all what I was used to. The same things were happening then as now, except then, they were hidden. Getting oriented into college life was difficult at first. My grades were not the best, but after the first year, my grades began to improve. The curriculum consisted of subjects such as English, science, geography, home economics. I remember only one course on blacks or Negroes. My major, home economics, was what most of the girls majored in. Otherwise, they studied some related teaching subject, but no professions such as medicine or law. One requirement for Home Economics majors was home management. The students, ten girls, would stay on campus for three months and take care of a house, including bringing a real child in for them to care for. This was in preparation for them to know how to manage a home.
My second year in college, I boarded with a Ms. Porter on Eighteenth Avenue in Nashville, which was closer to school. I either walked to school or caught a Jitney, an illegal taxi. Ms. Porter took good care of me. Some nights, I studied until four in the morning after working until twelve midnight, serving parties. Ms Porter would knock on my door and tell me to go to bed because I had studied long enough and I needed my rest. During my junior year at college, I worked for this real nice white lady. I cooked, cleaned and kept a little boy who was very fond of me. The white lady would buy clothes and wear them one time and then give them to me. I recalled having been given an evening dress which I shared with my sisters. My bust was always bigger than theirs, so I added a piece in the dress and when my sisters would wear it, I would take the piece out.
In 1943, four years after beginning, I graduated from A and I College with a degree in home economics, which was unusual because I carried eighteen hours a semester and finished my curriculum in four years.
After college, I could not find a job, so I went to Monteagle, Tennessee, and worked as a cook. In September 1943, I got a job as a teacher in Decaterville, Tennessee, where I stayed until Christmas. I then got a job in a two-teacher school in Celina, Tennessee. Celina is located near Cookeville, Tennessee. It was a little town about six miles in the hills with nothing but black people and no social outlet. There, I taught the upper four grades. The teachers were responsible for taking care of the school building and building their own fires. The towns surrounding the school were very prejudiced, and I was told not to get caught in them after dark. I stayed in Celina until an opening in my field became available in Winchester, Tennessee, at the high school there. I taught in Winchester about two years. From Winchester, I went to Vienna, Georgia, a plantation town. There, I actually lived on a plantation. This was during the late 1940s. I remember that a bell was rung for everything that the blacks did on that plantation including eating. My father wanted me to move back closer to home, so I returned to Celina, Tennessee, the closest position I could get to Murfreesboro. I returned home in 1952, when my father became ill and died. A game warden named Mr. Walter Taylor was influential in getting me a job teaching in the Rutherford County area. I started teaching at the Dillard School located in the Barfield area. I also went back to school and received an Elementary Teaching Certificate in 1952. I stayed at Dillard School until getting a job at Emery School. The position at Emery was based on the number of students enrolled, so I picked up students and brought them to school so I could meet the attendance requirement. I taught there until the Shiloh Elementary School opened where I taught second grade.
I enjoyed teaching very much, but was highly disappointed when integration of schools came about. Integration was hard on the black children, because the white teachers categorized the black children as being hard to learn and having bad behavioral problems. The black students were not pushed to perform to the best of their abilities because of low expectations from the white teachers. Integration also dampened my enthusiasm. When I was placed a Walter Hill Elementary School, a result of integration, I was the only black teacher there for one year. Upon my arrival there, the principal, a poorly educated white man, gave me nothing to do for the first two weeks. After two weeks, I was given a position team teaching; then given thirteen of the worst students they could find, perhaps to discourage me. I stayed with it and after two years, I was assigned the second grade. I am proud of the fact that I stayed in the teaching profession for thirty-five years. I am also very proud of the fact that three of my family members finished college by helping each other. Only the girls finished because the boys were pulled out of school to help in the fields. Today I reside in Rutherford County at the family home place, as a retired school teacher. I delayed marriage until age forty-nine, and have been widowed for over twenty years. I am a member of the Retired Teachers Association, Better Living F.E.A.(Family Education Association), Smithfork District Women Association, Senior Women Missionary of the Tennessee State Missionary Baptist Convention, Trustee and Mothers Board of Walnut Grove Missionary Baptist Church.
1. How would you describe Ms. Zachery's childhood in the South?
2. Why was integration difficult, according to Ms. Zachery ?
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Homework- 5/5/11
Vietnam Revisited
Twenty-five years after the end of the American War, as they call it, Vietnamese don't mind all the US veterans coming back and reliving memories, but they'd rather move forward than remain stuck in the past
Still, there remains an invigorating sense of excitement about Vietnam. We feel it the second we touch down in Ho Chi Minh City. That's the official name of the nation's largest city and financial hub, but nobody, except perhaps high-level government officials, calls it that. To residents, whether street sweepers, sales clerks or company presidents, this city is as it always was, Saigon.
Nowadays, it's a crowded, teeming place, populated by, depending upon where you draw the lines, four to six million people. Who are in constant motion. On bikes and cyclos, in cars and buses, and, mainly, by motorbike. On Sunday nights, they roar relentlessly in a circle down Dong Khai boulevard then spin on either side of Dai Lo Le Loi. Inside the tree-lined walkway, kids kick footballs, and families pose for pictures in front of fountains. Vendors sell tiny toys, like the cheap plastic hopping frogs popular with western kids decades ago. The main action is on the street, on the saddle of a Honda Dream, the motorbike of choice. Traffic is so thick in front of the Rex Hotel, a garish relic of Vietnam war fame, that thousands of motorcycles simply inch along. Still, nobody is in a hurry. Dressed in club clothes, young couples make the scene, revving engines and yelling to friends in a mesmerizing weekly ritual of coolness and cruising.
There aren't many other outlets for Vietnam's baby boomers - another legacy of the wars. A third of the population is under 15 years of age, and 60 percent are 30 or under. It's the future consumer base that brand managers dream about, but nobody is cashing in yet. "My dream? It's to study at night and get a job with a foreign company," says a slick-dressed 25-year-old employee of Saigon Tourist Holding Company. He speaks perfect English, and is studying Japanese and Chinese. His motivation? "I could make $200, maybe even $250 a month," he says dreamily. His monthly salary is $150.
Prospects are even grimmer outside Saigon, where wages are double Hanoi's average. At the capital's Phan Thai Hotel, the day manager has an English degree and earns $50 monthly. Nights are spent in a graduate program in international relations. "Getting a new job, working with a foreign company," he says, "is all anyone thinks about."
Low wages aren't the only hitch facing upwardly-motivated youths in a nation with a literacy rate of 94 percent. The labor market is stagnant, and swamped by 1.2 million new job seekers every year. Part of the flood stems from the painful transformation of state-run firms into viable enterprises - the same battle that faced old socialist allies in Eastern Europe. The other drag is new investment. Much poured in at the launch of doi moi, but as reforms moved slowly, if at all, the cash flows stalled. Numerous abandoned hotel towers - the Marriot in Ho Chi Minh and Sheraton in Hanoi - are shell-like monuments to the grand ambitions of investors and the failure of follow-through that plagues Vietnam.
However there are hopes on the horizon. The brightest involve investments from well-heeled Vietnamese - from overseas. Turned into refugees at the war's end, many flourished in America, Europe and Australia. Some have returned, bringing money and, equally important, new ideas and western management skills. It's a tenuous alliance, marked more by failure than success. Returnees - known as Viet Kieu - relate a litany of grievances.
"There has been a general sense of distrust in Vietnam for all of us who left and are coming back," admits one. "But it's improving." He credits this to improving relations on both sides. As more Viet Kieu come back and stay, they ease the carpetbagger image. And Vietnam seems gradually to be grasping the value of its returnee talent pool. Still, it has proven to be a turbulent partnership.
2. How would Vietnam be different if it remained communist like North Korea?
Homework- 5/4/11
How to Survive an Atomic Bomb
Click on the link for the image. If you have trouble with the link, type in "how to survive an atomic bomb" in Google Images.
1. Why would an insurance company (Mutual of Omaha) create this poster?
2. How would Americans in 2011 respond to this poster? Would they take it seriously? Explain
Each answer must be at least 1 paragraph (total: 2 paragraphs).
Click on the link for the image. If you have trouble with the link, type in "how to survive an atomic bomb" in Google Images.
1. Why would an insurance company (Mutual of Omaha) create this poster?
2. How would Americans in 2011 respond to this poster? Would they take it seriously? Explain
Each answer must be at least 1 paragraph (total: 2 paragraphs).
Homework- 5/2/11
Cold War Cartoon
- Find a Cold War political cartoon (use Google Images to search).
- Post the link to the cartoon and explain the message of the cartoon in at least 2 paragraphs.
If you have any trouble posting the HW, you can email it to: dstrk@flhs.us
- Find a Cold War political cartoon (use Google Images to search).
- Post the link to the cartoon and explain the message of the cartoon in at least 2 paragraphs.
If you have any trouble posting the HW, you can email it to: dstrk@flhs.us
Monday, January 31, 2011
American Issues-Student Blog Project
What issues affecting the U.S.
The Task:
Blog Posts: Each week, you will have to find an article about the issue you have selected to blog about. Link the article to your blog and write a 3 paragraph reaction.
Comments: Each week, you will have to leave a comment on at least 2 blogs. Your comments must be at least 1 paragraph long and refer directly to a blog post. You can visit the same blogs or explore different ones.
Disclaimer: Respect yourself and your classmates. Any inappropriate postings or comments will result in a failing grade.
Enjoy!
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