School's OUT!

Yesterday 's was LBA's last day of school.  It was a half day and we added to the celebrating last night with a pizza party for LBA and his baseball buddies at the pool.  LBA is now officially a "rising third grader."  Next week he will start his "camp run" with British Soccer Camp, followed by a three-day canoe camp, courtesy of my MIL.

As some of you, my faithful readers, know, I used to be a school teacher.  Despite what some people say - Summer Vacation is not all it's cracked up to be.  You still have to work and a lot of kids head to summer school or camp.  I was lucky enough to have a stay at home mother so I had a lot of free time during the summer - but that is not the case for most kids anymore.

All totaled, I was a school teacher for about six years.  My brother has been a teacher for many years and one of my sisters has recently gotten into teaching. I was not a teacher for too long (as described in this post from BuzzFeed), but I may have made some of the jokes.

Happy Summer!

Where will you be when the Revolution Comes?

Today is Friday November 11. It is Veteran's Day in the United States. A day to remember all those who have served our nation.

As I have indicated here before, I had a previous career as a Social Studies teacher, teaching American History. I was also an American History major in college. Now, much has been made this year to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the US Civil War, but let us not forget the first real war that made a difference for Americans, the Revolutionary War.

Here's a list of myths regarding the American Revolution. There might be a quiz later. There is more information at the link (from Smithsonian Magazine).

1. Great Britain Did Not Know What It Was Getting Into - the British Government was prepared to counter the colonies actions with military force as early as January 1774, when word of the Boston Tea Party reached London. A secondary question was also considered: Could Britain win such a war? The passage of the Coercive Acts — or Intolerable Acts, as Americans called them sought to punish the colony of Massachusetts for the Tea Party. Parliament also installed Gen. Thomas Gage, commander of the British Army in America, as governor of the colony. This was a huge miscalculation. In September 1774, colonists convened the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia and planned to embargo British commerce until all British taxes and the Coercive Acts were repealed. The British government (under Prime Minister Lord North) still believed the Americans would pose little challenge in the event of war. Government leaders and King George decided that backing down meant losing the colonies.
2. Americans Of All Stripes Took Up Arms Out Of Patriotism - While the term “Spirit of ‘76” referred to the colonists’ patriotic zeal it is not entirely true. Soon enough the colonists discovered how difficult and dangerous military service could be and enthusiasm waned. It required an Act of Congress in 1777 that mandated men who enlisted must sign on for three years or the duration of the conflict, whichever came first.
3. Continental Soldiers Were Always Ragged And Hungry - Accounts of shoeless continental army soldiers leaving bloody footprints in the snow or going hungry in a land of abundance are all too accurate. The Army’s supply system, imperfect at best, at times broke down altogether; the result was misery and want. But it, too, was not altogether accurate. American forces received shipments of heavy clothing arrived from France at the beginning of the winter in 1779. Conditions faced by the troops varied widely.
4. The Militia Was Useless - America's first settlers adopted the British militia system, which required all able-bodied men between 16 and 60 to bear arms. Some 100,000 men served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. However, some Americans emerged from the war convinced that the militia had been largely ineffective. Militiamen were older, on average, than the Continental soldiers and received only perfunctory training; few had experienced combat. This was demonstrated at Camden, South Carolina, in August 1780, when militiamen panicked in the face of advancing redcoats. Throwing down their weapons and running for safety, they were responsible for one of the worst defeats of the war. However, in 1775, militiamen had fought with surpassing bravery along the Concord Road and at Bunker Hill. Nearly 40 percent of soldiers serving under Washington in his crucial Christmas night victory at Trenton in 1776 were militiamen. In New York state, half the American force in the vital Saratoga campaign of 1777 consisted of militiamen. The militia had its shortcomings, to be sure, but America could not have won the war without it.
   
5. Saratoga Was The War’s Turning Point - On October 17, 1777, British Gen. John Burgoyne surrendered 5,895 men to American forces outside Saratoga, New York. It was a loss of nearly one-quarter of those serving under the British flag in America in 1777. It resulted in persuading France to form a military alliance with the United States. But Saratoga was not the turning point of the war. There are four other key moments during the several years the Revolution was fought that can be identified. First was the combined effect of victories in the fighting at Concord in April 1775 and later at Bunker Hill near Boston. After the bitter defeat of Washington at Long Island, the second turning point came with Washington's sneak attack at Trenton in late December 1776, he achieved a great victory, destroying a Hessian force of nearly 1,000 men; a week later, on January 3, he defeated a British force at Princeton, New Jersey. The third event did not take place on a battlefield, when Congress abandoned one-year enlistments and transformed the Continental Army into a standing army, made up of regulars who volunteered—or were conscripted—for long-term service. Finally, the campaign that unfolded in the South during 1780 and 1781 marks the final turning point of the conflict. Unable to quell the rebellion in New England and the mid-Atlantic states, the British turned their attention in 1778 to the South, hoping to retake Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. Although the British enjoyed several early successes, the colonists were not broken. In April 1781, unable to crush the insurgency in the Carolinas, Lord Cornwallis took his army into Virginia, where he hoped to sever supply routes linking the upper and lower South, but ultimately led to his surrender to Washington at Yorktown.
6. General Washington Was A Brilliant Tactician And Strategist - It is a generally accepted idea that the American Revolution could not have been won without the leadership of George Washington. In fact, Washington’s missteps revealed failings as a strategist. In August 1776, the Continental Army was routed in its first test on Long Island in part because Washington failed to properly reconnoiter and he attempted to defend too large an area for the size of his army. In the fall of 1777, when Gen. William Howe invaded Pennsylvania, Washington committed his entire army in an attempt to prevent the loss of Philadelphia. During the Battle of Brandywine, in September, he once again froze with indecision. Later, Washington was painfully slow to grasp the significance of the war in the Southern states. For the most part, he committed troops to that theater only when Congress ordered him to do so. Washington also failed to see the potential of a campaign against the British in Virginia in 1780 and 1781, prompting Comte de Rochambeau, commander of the French Army in America, to write despairingly that the American general “did not conceive the affair of the south to be such urgency.” Indeed, Rochambeau, who took action without Washington’s knowledge, conceived the Virginia campaign that resulted in the war’s decisive encounter, the siege of Yorktown in the autumn of 1781.
7. Great Britain Could Never Have Won The War - Once the revolutionary war was lost, some in Britain argued that it had been unwinnable. In reality, Britain might well have won the war. The battle for New York in 1776 gave England an excellent opportunity for a decisive victory, but General Howe let Washington and his army slip away. Britain still might have prevailed in 1777, when London ordered Howe to advance up the Hudson River and rendezvous at Albany with General Burgoyne, who was to invade New York from Canada. Though the operation offered the prospect of decisive victory, Howe scuttled it. Believing that Burgoyne needed no assistance and obsessed by a desire to capture Philadelphia—home of the Continental Congress—Howe opted to move against Pennsylvania instead. He took Philadelphia, but he accomplished little by his action. Meanwhile, Burgoyne suffered total defeat at Saratoga. After 1777, both Washington and John Adams assumed that unless the United States and France scored a decisive victory in 1781, the outcome of the war would be determined at a conference of Europe’s great powers. It was only by Cornwallis’ stunning defeat at Yorktown in October that cost Britain everything but Canada.
   

A Call I Already Answered

Just in case you were wondering, I am not running for Governor of New York State. Not right now anyway. But in a previous era, before I became an archivist, I was a teacher. I was one of those rare few who went off to college knowing what they wanted to be. I started my teaching career in the district where I went to school, which was a bit of a surreal experience.

One of my best teaching stories was when I was student teaching and was talking about the French and Indian War. To illustrate how the British forces scaled the cliffs from the St. Lawrence River to attack Quebec, I went from the floor, to a chair, and then stood on a desk, while I talked about the battle. When I announced that General Wolfe is killed during the heat of the battle on the Plains of Abraham, I jumped off the desk.

The following year, I served as a chaperon on a school trip with some of these same students to Quebec. As we toured the city and stopped at the Plains of Abraham, I had several students come up to me (mind you a year later, now), saying, "This is what you were talking about, wasn't it?" I nearly wept with joy.

While my teaching career never really panned out, I always enjoy watching movies about teaching. Just the other day I tuned in and watched "Stand and Deliver," starring Edward James Olmos as Jaime Escalante. I was sad to see that Escalante lost a battle with cancer this week. He was one of those teachers that I always wanted to be.

In no particular order, along with Stand and Deliver, a few of my favorite teaching movies are:

• Dead Poets Society
• Lean on Me - for a time, I taught in an inner city high school, though not quite like Mr. Clark's school
• Mr. Holland's Opus - possibly my favorite
  

Toygers - The New Cat Breed

When I was a Social Studies teacher in Poughkeepsie, New York, one of the successful "techniques" that I used with my students was that I had them believing that I was a cop, specifically, narcotics. Hey, you got do what you got to do. At the time I also had a cat at home that would get a little too frisky with me at times and would bite or scratch my hands on occasion. As a result, my hands would sometimes be scratched up and my students would ask about them. I would tell them I kept a tiger in my home as a special burglar alarm.

Now it seems I might be able to have something similar before long. There was an article in the recent "issue" of Life Magazine (a new insert to the newspaper, if you haven't seen it, don't bother, Henry Luce and Margaret Bourke-White are spinning in their graves). about the Toyger, a new breed of cat being developed.

I like cats. Do I really want one that reminds me of their close cousins that would eat me if given the chance? Probably not. But they are cute.

Benching "Tag"

I read an item in the paper today, one that I had heard on the radio earlier this week. I didn't believe it. It seems that according to administrators at the Willett Elementary School, south of Boston, recess is dangerous. As a result, the school has cracked down on tag and other "chasing games." The district superintendent, quoted in the Attleboro Sun Chronicle, said "children's energies should be better directed toward good, sound, supervised play."

Outraged parents have risen in protest to the anti-tag policy. One mother suggested she might send her son to school wrapped in bubble wrap and sporting a helmet. Another mother has launched a "Keep Tag in Attleboro" petition drive.

The story has caught national attention and one wonders why the laser focus on such a subject. The problems in the American educational system have little to do if children expend excess energy on the playground at lunchtime. Of course, we have become such a litigious society that the rule enforcement comes up now as the district is afraid of a lawsuit.

As a former teacher, I really object to this. There are more than enough problems IN the classrooms of America that worrying about a half hour on a playground should be far, far down the list. In the wake of so much recent school violence, I am sure there are those that believe that "tag" is surely the first step toward something worse. Please.

Let's try paying our teachers a little more, lower class size, and hey, here's a novel concept, stop letting parents use our schools as depots for their kids. Their responsibilities don't end when the parents drop them at the door. Stay in contact with your kid's teachers, get involved in their educations, make it a priority. Perhaps kids will start to do better if the parents make the effort as well.

I am an Archivist

That's what I do. If you have visited this blog, you have noticed two of the links that I have placed under the links section. The first is a link to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference, a regional professional organization of approximately 1000 members stretching from New York to Virginia. The second link is for the Society of American Archivists, the national professional organization of which I am a member.

This is Archives Week in the USA. Today to commemorate Archives Week in New York City, members of the Archivists Roundtable of New York got to ring the Opening Bell on the Stock Exchange. Tomorrow, here in Washington, DC, the 10th Annual Washington, DC Archives Fair will be held at the National Archives.

Archives are great things. I used to be a Social Studies teacher and when I was in college, I had a professor who offered us a cryptic piece of advice. He told us (a group of students learning how to be teachers), "As a teacher, you must decide whether to teach history to students or teach students history." He didn't elaborate on his words, only to give us the caveat to decide which way we wanted to teach. When we figured out the right way, we would be successful. I have often thought of those words as I taught, deciding the right way was to teach history to students by involving them in the process.

There is no greater joy for a teacher than when a student "gets it." As an archivist, I have "it" and there are lots of people out there "looking for it." The best part of my job now is when I have the opportunity to share the knowledge of history with those who seek it.

In a few weeks, I will attend the Fall meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference in Morristown, New Jersey. I will be sure to let everyone know about the meeting, because what I do is fun and everyone should have a fun job.