Category: Teaching

…Among the Courts’ cases, 240 of 375 recognized American Indian treaties have been cited 992 times in 342 opinions between the years 1884 and 2004.

Source

ARTICLE VI


This Constitution, and Laws of the United States which shall be made Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United Stated, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding
.

So, why is Pe Sla in the Black Hills likely to become a “Sea of Houses?”

The time has almost come.  By next week it will have passed.

While I should be performing other tasks and thinking about other things, my mind keeps wandering back to the fact that I was born 60 years ago on Thursday.  The number addict in me observes that 60 = 2² * 3 * 5 is a special number.  But we all knew that, didn’t we?

Sixty minutes in an hour, so a minute is minute (small).  And a second is called a second because it is 1/60² part of an hour…second power.  Magic number…as is 360 (=  2³ * 3² * 5) …perhaps because it can be divided so well into equal pieces in so many ways.  Anyway, the Sumerians thought a sexagesimal system was cool…and that gave us our timekeeping strategy and the way we measure angles.  Who knew…until much later, that 60 was also the number of elements in the smallest non-abelian simple group?

One could go back further than the Sumerians and discover that the Chinese use a calendar with a cycle of sixty years…the Jia-Zi system.  

each year within the 60-year cycle being named with two symbols, the first being base-10 (called Tian-Gan, ??  or heavenly stems) and the second symbol being base 12 (called Di-Zhi, ??  or earthly branches).

60 is the least common multiple of 12 and 10, of course.

Magic numbers are scarce, until you actively look for them.  Then you discover that all integers are magic.  

Proof: Let x be the smallest non-magic positive number. If x exists, x would be special…and so x would be magic from some perspective or other. If no such x exists, then all postive integers are magic by induction.

Sort of.  Not a real proof, of course.  The term “magic number” has not been defined here…as I purposely intended.

But I digress…

I am going to the Seeds of Compassion website today to see if I can sign up for some Dalai Lama events. I’m hoping he’ll show up, given that China is calling him a “monster with a human face,” given the uptick in the Tibetan liberation movement.

He is to come to Seattle for five days next month with a focus on compassion – at home, in school and in the community. There are events for children, parents, teachers and therapists. On Saturday there will be a city-wide rally and on Sunday, youth from all over the state will gather to show “What Compassion Looks Like.”

Parent Map had a substantial article on it and I happened to pick it up in the lobby of the hospital where I work. As a follower of Kwan Yin, Goddess of Compassion, I had to take a look when I say the title, “Teaching Empathy: Seattle Launches a Compassion Movement.”

If I have seemed preoccupied the last week or so, that has been because I had homework that required doing.  I mean, I got to choose whether or not to do the assignment, but it was still homework.  A student at the University of Central Arkansas asked if she could interview me via email as background for a paper she’s writing.  She’s an Honors College student there.

Anyway, answering the ten questions she sent me became a task.   I have completed that task and sent her my answers.  

But it was a bit more emotionally taxing than I expected it to be, so I have decided to share it here as well.

Pain shared is lessened.  Joy shared is increased.

It is also possibly the case that some of this is news to some of the membership here at Docudharma.  One never knows.  If you’ve not heard it before, it’s new to you.

What follows is what I sent her, with some html formatting added.

In 1856, the Republican Party met for the first time to put together a platform

http://alpha.furman.edu/~benso…

and ready itself for the first presidential run.  Chicago was chosen for the first convention.   The convention was held at the Wigwam,



a wooden structure built expressly for the convention.  The Republican Party appointed delegates at the state level.  These people were chosen to determine the best candidate to represent the party in the general election.

Cross posted at EENR

It was the fall quarter of 1974 at Portland State University.  I had transferred to PSU after three quarters at the Sylvania campus of Portland Community College.  I was enrolled in a class called Introduction to Algebraic Structures, along with Advanced Calculus, German, Differential Equations, Vector Analysis…and a class I can’t recall.  But this is a story about Algebraic Structures.

The class was taught by Marjorie Enneking.  It was in that class that a doorway opened, a doorway into a deeper meaning in life.  At the time, it was a doorway to the deeper meanings of mathematics.  Same thing.

Marjorie generated the thought (or maybe it was spontaneously generated) that mathematics was about words.  Up to that point I had foolishly been concentrating on the numbers.  The trees had been concealing the forest.  I had been focusing on How, when the real meat of mathematics was in the Why.

When last we looked in on the history of Iran, the dust of Battle of al-Quadissiyah was just settling, and Zoroastrian Persia had fallen under the dominion of the armies of Islam.  As she has done with every other of her would-be conquerors, however, the culture of the conquered soon became inexorably tied to that of the new overlords; from Persian minds sprang some of the greatest achievements of the Golden Age of Islam.  Even gold won’t glitter forever, though, and the forces of time and history exerted themselves on a succession of kingdoms and dynasties for several centuries before one proved strong enough to make the unification thing stick.

Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, for a whirlwind tour of nearly 1000 years of Iranian history, from the Abbasids to the Safavids, by way of the Ziyarids, if you will – plus an important announcement (he said grandiosely) from your resident historiorantologist.      

Once upon a time I took an idea from real life and tried to implement it online.

It seemed easy enough.  Provide a place for people to talk about education, teaching and learning.  To encourage discussion, provide an essay.  To provide a service, provide some links.  

It succeeded in some ways, but it also strayed away from what it’s intention was.  Naming it Teacher’s Lounge was probably the mistake.  I’m not very creative when it comes to titles.  That title apparently conveyed the impression that people who weren’t teachers weren’t welcome.  As if I have an exclusionary bone in my body.

Whatever the reason, people who weren’t teachers mostly stayed away…or apologized for not doing so.  I think that says a lot about the state of education at the present:  people actually apologize for being interested in it.

I wrote The Genocide of Matriarchal Societies in April of last year (2007), and there is some additional information I want to share along those general lines now. We’ll pick up where we left off and the answer to “Where Are All Your Women” will be made chillingly clear as to why they are “Missing In Action” after we recognize that a woman is set to be beheaded for “practicing witchcraft.” First however, we will reread the words of Archie Fire Lame Deer and relish in the scholarship of Barbara Alice Mann.

At the conclusion of our last historiorant, we left off with the Sassanids in pretty dire straits.  It was 636 CE, little more than a decade after they had had their sasses handed to them by the Byzantines in a series of battles across Mesopotamia, and only four years removed from the passing of the Prophet Muhammad.  Now fierce men bearing the star and crescent had appeared on the Euphrates; to Yazdgerd III, the last Zoroastrian king of the Persians, fell the task of defending Ctesiphon and the gateway to Iran.

So join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, for a look at the beginnings of a clash of civilizations that continues to the present day, as well as the many Iranian contributions to what would become known as Islam’s Golden Age.  Along the way, we’ll also be taking a contextual side-trip to the Founding of Islam – but only after pausing to read the sign about how, imho, we should be approaching historiographic minefields.

Originally posted as part of Teacher’s Lounge at Daily Kos

Habit took over again on Thursday.

For no apparent reason other than it has been done for the past 120 weeks in a row, I started preparing another Teacher’s Lounge.  I started gathering links.  Unlike most weeks, however, I read few of the diaries at those links beyond the point of determining their subject matter.  I suppose that means some of them may be misplaced.  Truth is that my threshold of caring has drastically diminished.

And that’s not a good state of mind to be in.  It is not conducive to a job well done.

Would-be imperialists beware: You gotta be careful when you go to pick a fight with a country possessed of a 5000-year history, for such a nation will inevitably have in its historical record an example of every kind of victory and every kind of loss, and every kind of human triumph and failing in between.  In these countries, ideas like a Declaration of Human Rights aren’t imports; they’re the original products of ancestors and fellow countrymen. Been through a few golden ages, followed by periods of decline and ruin?  Check.  Dealt with foreign aggressors and internal revolt?  Check. Been led by people that history remembers as “the Great,” as well as by guys so incompetent that they make George W. Bush look adequate?  Check.

Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we’ll take a look at Persia in the Classical Age – and find out that Iran’s willingness (and ability) to go toe-to-toe with the West’s greatest superpowers is not something that first emerged in the Era of Petroleum.  As a courtesy to the neo-imps among us, I should give fair warning: We may also find that the Iranian contemporaries of Rome influenced the makings of our modern world far more than might first seem apparent.