Two of my favorite digital humanities blogs, Profhacker and Gradhacker, are collaborating on a series of posts highlighting strategies and tools for using technology smartly. I highly recommend that my students take a look as they begin work on their research projects.
Category: Teaching
Half of Recent College Graduates Can’t Find Full Time Jobs
In the course of my morning blog and news reading, I come across this devastating fact via Ezra Klein. Half of recent college graduates can’t find full time jobs. This is a major failure at many different levels of government and higher education, puts what scan only be deemed a student loan crisis in perspective, and will have major ramifications far into the future.
Use Scrible to Grade Web Based Assignments
I wish I had known about this when one of my classes was putting up their Wikipedia pages this semester, but in the course of searching for a better way of grading my blogging assignment for Modern Europe, I came across a nifty tool called Scrible. Scrible allows you to annotate webpages without converting them to a clunky pdf version (I tried to do this using Adobe Acrobat Pro and the resulting file was just huge). Basic annotation tools — notes, highlights, you can even change the text formatting — are all I need for grading, though the alignment between a note and its relevant text on the page could use some work. Scrible is in beta and comes with a free library of 125 MB for storing marked up pages, which is perfect for saving graded blogs to e-mail to students once they’re all done (which you can do straight from the Scrible toolbar). For any more research-oriented needs, Instapaper (for ease of access on the go) and Evernote (for keeping everything in one place) are clearly better solutions, but for this particular purpose it’s everything I could ask for.
Lessons of the Holocaust
Two of my courses are in the midst of World War II, a moment I mostly hate teaching, but will almost certainly find myself doing so for the rest of my life. I hate teaching it not simply because of the morbid fascination it always seems to evoke in people — and certainly not just in undergraduates — but because it’s so often cited as the reason to study history in the first place. Learn from the past, so we never repeat it. The Holocaust has come to stand in for the lessons of the past as a whole.
This conviction, propagated by memorials and memoirs, is one I try to challenge as I lecture and as we talk about the Holocaust. And it’s why I’ve assigned Ruth Kluger’s absolutely brutal Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered
When I tell people…that I feel no compunction about citing examples of my mother’s petty cruelties towards me, my hearers act surprised, assume a stance of virtuous indignation, and tell me that, given the hardships we had to endure during the Hitler period, the victims should have come closer together and formed strong bonds. Particularly young people should have done so, say the elderly. But this is sentimental rubbish and depends on a false concept of suffering as a source of moral education (52).
I hate teaching the Holocaust because every time I return to this beautifully, scandalously, brutal book, I can’t help but agree. Primo Levi depicted Auschwitz as a giant laboratory in which one could see how men and women functioned when placed in the most dire of situations. In doing so, he assumes that there is something, however, horrible to learn there. Kluger implies, as Lore Segal’s wonderful introduction notes, that in fact Levi “died of his knowledge” (10). I don’t think that the student of the Holocaust should come away with a newfound appreciation of the resiliency of the human spirit because doing so simply fits the event into a preconceived narrative that allows us to forget what the Holocaust actually was. Instead, the study of the Holocaust is an opportunity to question received ideas and ask whether we’ve been listening effectively to the voices of the past in the first place.
Blogging History
My Modern Europe students begin blogging history using historical newspapers and periodicals today. A list of topics and links to their pseudonymous blogs can be found here: http://aiross.wordpress.com/teaching/modern-europe-winter-2012/modern-europe-winter-2012-student-blogs/.
Adam Smith on the Social Contract
Although they had read the exact same text I had, my students in Modern Europe seemed skeptical about my interpretation of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Smith’s notion of the “Invisible Hand” of the market may be his most famous contribution to modern economic thought, but he also elaborates a role for the state in providing the necessary conditions for those free markets to emerge. In order to bring the point to our own time, I related what he said in our excerpt (from our primary source reader Perspectives from the Past
Smith:
The expence [sic] of defending the society, and that of supporting the dignity of the chief magistrate, are both laid out for the general benefit of the whole society. It is reasonable, therefore, that they should be defrayed by the general contribution of the whole society, all the different members contributing, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities (425).
Warren:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there – good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea – God Bless! Keep a Big Hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
Smith actually mentions everything Warren does, but, then again, Adam Smith was a well known socialist.
P.S. Students, by the by, should feel free to comment.