Hyping myself up for the start of the year, here are the books I’ll be reading with my students in History of US Popular Culture, We The People: Constitutional Studies, AP Government, and Political Philosophy (actually, Pol Phil is next year)! Shorter readings and packets are not pictured.

Goodness, I've lived here in the South basically my whole life and even for here, this is an unusually bad heat wave. Sheesh.

God, Justice Jackson's concurrence is so good. These footnotes are the equivalent of 'stop, stop, he's already dead,' really the shining example of how to do history for the court well, which we need as long as we're tied to a historicist model of interpretation:

Fifteen years of teaching in the books, annual cheers and hurrah! With bonus picture of me in high school, preparing to participate in the same We The People civic and constitutional thought competition which I now send my own students to each year!

Happy Caturday from Lafayette!

None of the big names, put a favorite sci fi franchise out there! I felt like going with two!

Reorganizing and prepping the classroom bookshelf that I’ve curated just for my special class of seniors each year is so much fun. It fills me with a little bit of joy every time as I look at each book and think about next years seniors who will get to encounter these ideas for the first time.

Did my roughly once-a-week login to Facebook and these were two of the top things served to me, truly what an insane platform it has become. Scrolling is like psychosocial dissociation, howling madness mere clicks away.

One of many possibilities wit the below-quoted, very-fun little tool!

Lees book here tackles a bunch of these specific questions (weaponized procedures, majority leaders and speakers, unstable majorities) and does so very well. Great book, even if a lot of folks would consider her too conservative these days.

Post an alien that’s not from Star Wars or Star Wars or Star Trek! (These books may not have been good exactly, but the way the Kzinti are presented in them has had a lot of near and distant echoes in other sci fi properties, making them quite an influential sci fi alien species)

the civics program I teach in puts out 36 new big thematic questions for students to wrestle with each year, one of this years was bang on the money for our moment and had lots of people under 18 learning what ship money was:

Economic and commuter based megaregions have always seemed like an under-appreciated way of understanding US governance, identity affinities, and economic opportunity in the post-Cold War era....

Today is full of a lot of angst for all kinds of good reasons, but cats are always a good thing to help with such anxious moments, so here are Mariner and Boimler, in pictures which capture perfectly their personalities.

For example, AP US History reccomends 17 45 minute class periods for 1844-1877, embracing all the following topics. Demands like this mean that often even well-meaning teachers can't drive clear narratives about things like structural racism's roots and branches into place clearly for busy students.

The kids are alright! Fascinating diversity of responses on an anonymous post-course survey from them about which thinkers they enjoyed the most in my experimental attempt to teach a broad intro to political theory & political philosophy to high schoolers/

Hark a Vagrant remains one of my 100% reliable cures for being in a bad mood, a few random refreshes and something will provoke a smile

front page of NYT website right now basically amounts to "no one knows what the fuck is going on for real, everyone is lying and bluffing, America's global rivals and the investor class are using our totally discombobulated state to gain all kinds of advantages over the US/ordinary people whoops.

I have vanishingly few sports opinions but hot damn, the Montreal Victoire have the most amazing logo I have seen for a sports team in a while, this thing deserves to be logo of an alt-history Anglo-French alliance or some kind of space opera faction.

The Chronicle of Higher Education really aiming to convince me to throw my computer at the wall with this particular promo email. Who thought this particular angle was a good idea?

It’s Election Day in Virginia, and what kind of American history and civics teacher would I be if I didn’t take great joy in snagging my sticker?

Average bao can be eaten by lifting with chopsticks but are usually eaten by hand, so I suppose they are definitely sandwiches under that rubric.

I have seen some odd stuff on Steam over the years, but this is definitely one of the oddest. I don't know that it's actually BAD or that I disapprove of it...but...a "play through the life of Jesus as interactive fiction" is just not something I'd have ever contemplated.

I love watching my students rediscover the oldest, lamest constitutional law jokes in the world on their own

Running when it’s nice out vs running in the worst winter in decades.

"We need to get a Khrushchev" "We have Khrushchev at home!" Khrushchev at home:

Lafayette giving me the most intense look as I dare to disturb the deserved lap time.

I do kinda think they are going to continue having a very hard time getting universities to take them seriously in an admissions context. I mean, here's the 7 through 12 course of study at Veritas, I really am not sure how a university can make heads or tails of this student profile:

I agree with all your sentiments, and to reinforce your argument, these two screenshots represent the total of WW1 in the Advanced Placement US History curriculum, one of the most rigorous available to high schoolers. If this is anything to go by, our Great War illiteracy isn't getting better soon.:

Codpiece not a feature of comics in the decade preceding the Stallone film, no (1986, 1982, 1987)