London on November 11th 1919 – a two minute silence at 11 o’clock to observe the first anniversary of the end great war. This photograph by an unknown artist conveys the collective grief of a people. To stand in that crowd in the stillness and silence for two minutes – the individual weight of personal loss and mourning magnified beyond…
Here’s something terrific for free: It’s an E-book of great articles from the always useful Educating Modern Learners, an online source with which I am proud to be associated. I’m still working my way through the content – and in some cases re-reading – but no disappointments. These people write well about important and useful topics. See the list below.…
This well outfitted German trench has a lighted Christmas tree and soldiers celebrating with music and sausages! It’s true – there was a truce in parts of the line along the western front in 1914. The official diarist of the 3rd Battalion Rifle Brigade reported: “Christmas in the trenches will always be remembered by the Battalion as a day of…
I’ve been researching grit – the way one does on a snowy day. In the process I discovered an Australian newspaper archive with tens of thousand of instructive stories about grit and who has it. It seems grit frenzy has been with us for a while and this latest round in grit mania in education is just the latest version.…
For anyone with even a passing interest in the First World War here is an unparalleled opportunity: Operation War Diary. The National Archive (UK) has digitized 1.5 million pages of British Army unit diaries, signals, operations orders and messages from the war. They are releasing them to an army of citizen historians to read, classify, and tag. Moving through the…
BBC’s Radio 4 first tweet for 2014 was a thrush with a bright blue sky background and a quotation from The Darkling Thrush – a poem that Thomas Hardy dated December 31st, 1900. It’s all rather grim and gloomy. The poem records the desolation of winter, the dregs of the day and the end of the century. This is no…
“The necessary supply of heroes must be maintained at all costs.” (Siegfried Sassoon 24 February. 1917, quoting Sir Edward Carson in a speech in Dublin. I have been unable to confirm the details of that speech.) Each night at 8 pm the traffic is stopped at the Menin Gate and The Last Post is sounded. This is the gate over…
What 60 schools can tell us about teaching 21st century skills. Here’s the TEDx Denver version of the talk Grant Lichtman gave at #naisac13 in Philadelphia. I take my title from an extraordinary compliment that Grant paid Poughkeepsie Day School on his blog where he wrote: “…Poughkeepsie Day School, a school that has preserved the fires of the Progressive Era, un-extinguished, for decades,…
If there’s any doubt that we are living in an age of marvels just read these accounts of what happened when school was closed last Friday: Snow Day and Teaching Is Never Boring and Snow Day . With the forecasters predicting apocalyptic snowfalls, school was closed but the learning did not stop. Online tools available to teachers are astonishing and…
In Memory of Lance Corporal Frank Herbert Sims. Royal Army Medical Corps who died on 28 January 1919 Age 34 Son of Albert John and Rosa Sims, of Streatham, London; husband of Frances Sims, of 115, Strathyre Avenue, Norbury, London. Father of Edith and Kathleen. With the a brief two hour exception last Friday, I have never worn a poppy. This…
Thanks to my Twitter feed I saw this short BBC news piece about recently discover aerial photographs of the battlefields of the western front. Watch it if you can. Taken from an airship in 1919, the scale of the devastation is revealed in new and astonishing ways: Shattered towns and villages, the shell-holes and the thousands of miles of trenches…
With school closed for the day there was time for a walk. Buttercup Farm Sanctuary off Route 82 just north of Stanfordville has one path that tracks along Wappingers Creek as it runs down from the head waters at Thompson Pond south toward the Hudson. It was quiet except for the rustle of squirrels, a few birds – juncos, jays…
Ninety years since the end of the First World War. Passengers at Paddington station on Armistice Day, 11 November 1919. stopped for two minutes silence to remember those who never returned. Most of the men have taken their hats off out of respect. Over 25,000 Great Western Railway workers were killed in the war. Railway companies commemorated the end of…
And they smell good and feel good too! In a fascinating article in the current New York Review of Books the historian Robert Darnton provides some good historical context to the hand-wringing over the instability of texts and the unreliability of information in the age of information overload. Darnton argues that texts have always been unstable and that news and…
This July marks the ninetieth anniversary of the start of third Ypres – better known as the battle of Passchendaele . It was an offensive designed to break out of the stalemate of the salient – the bump in the line that bulged around the Flemish town of Ieper, known in French as Ypres and to the thousands of English…