the short people stand together
My students have started their reports on US Presidents. This is a big part of our year since this is when fourth graders learn to do research papers. They are not happy about all the work that goes into writing a report; their prior experience so far is copying the encyclopedia, or book reports. Today, they picked the Presidents that they would use in their reports by lottery.
Each student is writing about a different president and had to read short biographies of the presidents yesterday to be prepared to choose today. I weeded out the presidents who served less than a year as well as President Clinton and our current President Bush. I think that since they are either serving or have served so recently that I am not comfortable with the information available. The Big Book of Presidents in our Library stops with Richard Nixon; my students are at a disadvantage without current books or the internet. They can still write a great report about Theodore Roosevelt or James Monroe.
They complained about the amount of work they were expected to do but in the end, they really enjoyed themselves. They were pouring over books, searching around on the computer encyclopedias, and planning a group trip to the Public Library tomorrow if there is a snow day. All day I heard them say, �Did you know�� as they learned new things and explored new ideas. Despite the ugliness of yesterday, I remembered that I really do love this job and I am better at it than I think.
I watched Napoleon Dynamite and I will be brave enough to admit that: I didn�t like it, maybe I didn�t get it, I don�t like how they represented Kipp.
Today is Alexander Hamilton�s Birthday. You may remember him from the ten-dollar bill. You have to love a man who has a part of the Constitution dedicated to them because they had such poor people skills. Personally, I am more of a fan of John Adams, neurotic New England School teacher turned political radical/revolutionary. Most of us forget that the ideals that our republic is founded upon � the ideas of Benjamin (Already) Franklin and Adams were radical at the time.
James Madison was another who I admired, and as the uber nerd I even dressed as him once for Halloween. It was a George Washington costume I had worn the year before and was claiming to be someone new the next year. James Madison had intellect, shrewd political skills, a huge fortune, and a beautiful wife who loved him. You have to respect a President who served two terms, compared to not being allowed to serve at all and the short me of the world must stand together. Who would not want to be James Madison and who would want to be Alexander Hamilton?
