Concord Hymn

By the rude bridge that arched the flood.
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, are sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heros dare
To die and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

This poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson is inscribed on a monument that stands near the Old North Bridge just outside of Concord, Massachusetts. “The shot heard ’round the world” was the one that began the Revolutionary War and eventually led to American independence. (The good people of Pittsfield take exception to the claim that the Revolutionary War started at Concord, saying that the first armed resistance against the British actually took place in their town. I will leave that for historians to confirm.)

The original Old North Bridge, as Emerson wrote in his poem, has long since been replaced. The current bridge, however, keeps the style and spirit of the original. It is simple and wooden, strong enough for foot traffic and maybe some horses pulling a wagon, arching gracefully over the Concord River in what is now Minuteman National Historical Park.

When the Minutemen gathered to face the British troops, they were not conscious of being part of a Great Moment in History. They were ordinary guys doing what they thought was best for their homes and their community. They knew they were taking a tremendous risk, and they found the courage to do it.

Three monuments nearby reflect the judgement of history: one honors the day, one honors the Minutemen, and one respects the memory of the British who died there in the service of their country.

The Old North Bridge reminds us that sometimes we can do no more than to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. We don’t always realize when we are accomplishing something great when we serve our communities. And sometimes there is a resolution that goes beyond winning and losing. History determines our legacy.

Special thanks to Sally!

Before I came to NECC this year, I read a plea from someone who was planning to attend for the first time. “Mac people, please don’t smirk at those of us who have PCs,” she wrote, approximately. I smiled when I read it, because NECC isn’t like that. With the possible exception this year of name tag ribbons, what matters here isn’t status. Even the Big Names on the Conference Circuit are just guys swapping stories in the Bloggers Cafe. What matters here is what you bring to the conversation. What are your questions? Hey, we are all learners. What can you share? We all teach.

NECC is the time when the social network comes off the grid — more or less — and meets face to face. We shake hands with people we follow on Twitter and whose blogs and books we read. We also connect with new people we meet in workshops and over dinner.

Information and ideas we get in workshops feed the brain. Conversations taking place at EduBloggerCon, NECC Unplugged, and over dinner are good for the soul. After a year of acting locally, at NECC we can think globally. This is where we spend time with other people who have embraced the possibilities that technology makes available to our students, people who help us move to the next level.

No one cares whether you’re PC, Mac, or Open Source. Besides, this year it was all about handhelds.

The 30th NECC came to a formal close on Wednesday, July 1. Beginning next year in Denver, it will be known as the ISTE Conference.

Mark this date on your calendar now, if you haven’t already: October 20, 2009 is the National Day on Writing.

Kathleen Blake Yancey, NCTE past president and Kellogg W. Hunt Professor of English at Florida State University, spoke at NECC Tuesday with Kent Williamson, Executive Director of the National Council of Teachers of English. She talked about trends in American writing since the 1940s, when writing tended to be personal, directed to someone specific, and written with expectation of a personal response. In the 21st century, she said, writing is also about connection, just as it was in the 40s, but technology enables creating those connections in a variety of ways.

Technology enables three kinds of participation, according to Yancey:

• Both experts and laypeople compose knowledge.
• Citizens compose power.
• Citizens compose culture.

NCTE has announced its own participation in composing culture. In support of the National Day on Writing, NCTE is sponsoring the National Gallery of Writing. According to Williamson, the purpose of the National Gallery is to serve as a repository for one piece of writing from everyone in the United States by June of 2010.

Users can create galleries within the National Gallery so that a small group might contribute together. This makes it a great project for book clubs, fraternities, garden clubs, Kiwanis clubs, families, and football teams — each member can submit a piece of writing that is meaningful to them. The writing could be a poem, a letter, a text message, even a video — the emphasis is on “meaningful.” Yancey said she plans to submit a recipe that was her grandmother’s along with an explanation of what made it important to her.

This is a very ambitious project. Is it something your school might participate in?

I’m blogging from NECC 2009 in Washington, D. C.

You will look long and hard online before you find a site that does more for teachers than the Library of Congress. Late last week the Library announced a redesign of its site for teachers. All of the old lesson materials are still there, but there may be some redirecting until all the pages are finished.

In addition, the Library of Congress is working on an ambitious Professional Development section called TPS Direct. These materials will be available for school-wide inservice or for personal professional development.

And in conjunction with UNESCO and national libraries around the world, they have launched the World Digital Library. This resource makes available “significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.” This includes both graphics and text in 7 different languages.

And they are here at NECC. As one of the representatives remarked, “You already paid for it on April 15. You might as well use it.”

I’m blogging from NECC 2009 in Washington, D. C.

What does the history of the 70s rock band Fleetwood Mac have to do with the future of American education?

According to Malcolm Gladwell, at least 3 things. Gladwell, author of Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, gave the opening keynote address at the NECC conference Sunday night. He used the band as a case study in what he called “meaningful learning.”

Many people don’t know that Rumours, one of the best-selling albums of all time, was actually Fleetwood Mac’s 16th record. The band had been together 10 years by that time, long enough to complete an apprenticeship period and gain some maturity. They had seen good times and bad, had seen 16 members come and go. They kept working at their music, and finally they were successful.

Gladwell used that idea to illustrate his first point: “When it comes to learning, what you get is a simple function of what you put in.” A big indicator of future success is the willingness to sit still and focus on the task at hand. The belief that talent is more important than effort is, he said, “a terrible approach to learning.”

His second point focused on how people deal with failure. The first 14 albums, he said, were a rocky road for Fleetwood Mac. They indicate, however, that there are 2 ways to achieve success. In the first way, which he called “capitalization,” people become successful by building on their strengths. The second way, which he called “compensation,” is when people compensate for their weaknesses. Gladwell said that compensation is harder and it yields more failures, but when someone who compensates achieves success, it is a more powerful success.

Trying harder, he reiterated, is more important than innate ability. Compensation builds self-reliance. He encouraged the audience to have respect for the difficulties people overcome and wondered, “How can we create constructive disadvantages” in order to help students learn.

For his third point, Gladwell encouraged the audience not to confuse failing and learning. During the early years of Fleetwood Mac, not only were they improving as a band, but they were also experimenting with different styles of music. They began as a blues band and tried a couple of other styles before they came to California and developed the sound that lead to their success. A lot of trial and error was involved, but it wasn’t wasted: they were learning. “Sometimes,” he said, “the struggle to learn is where the actual learning lies.”

He closed with a challenge to educators to use their energy, enthusiasm, and creativity to make learning meaningful for students everywhere.

I’m blogging from the National Educational Computing Conference in Washington, D. C.

“George Washington slept here.”

The statement was once so widespread throughout New England that it became a joke, but in the case of Craigie House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it’s true. General Washington used the house as his military headquarters from July of 1775 to March of 1776. It’s an impressive house, spacious and grand, with a view of the Charles River.

In 1837 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow rented rooms at the top of the stairs in Craigie House while he was a professor of modern languages at Harvard. When he married his second wife, Fanny, however, his father-in-law bought the house and presented it to the couple as a wedding gift.

Longfellow had a sense of history. He displayed a bust of Washington at the foot of the stairwell, and portraits of Washington, Lincoln, and other famous people were also displayed throughout the house.

For the next 18 years the Longfellows lived in the house they called “Craigie Castle” and raised their children. (One son, Frances, died in childhood.) They were active in the community and welcomed many noteworthy visitors into their home, including Charles Dickens, Jenny Lind, and William Makepeace Thackery.

Longfellow’s study was the same room Washington had used to consult with his officers. Longfellow decorated it with rich red drapes and worked at a round table in the middle of the room. In the late afternoon he would open the door to spend time with his children, an experience he wrote about in “The Children’s Hour.”

Longfellow continued as a professor of modern languages at Harvard, but his passion was for writing. In 1854 he resigned his professorship, and the following year he published Hiawatha. Its success eclipsed anything he had written before; at one point it was selling 300 copies a day. Longfellow was able to devote himself to writing without fear from then on.

In 1861 Fanny was severely burned when her dress caught on fire, and she died. The two had been very close, and Longfellow mourned her loss for years. He left her portrait on the wall in the bedroom where he could see it as he went to sleep. When he died, this poem was discovered among his papers:

In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face–the face of one long dead–
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died, and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

Note: Next week I’ll be blogging from the NECC conference in Washington, DC.

No one is sure what started the hysteria that resulted in what today is called the Salem Witch Trials. It would be nice to find one cause, say, mold in the rye that caused hallucinations. (That theory has been discredited.) Probably multiple factors were at stake, with some people taking advantage of the situation to further personal agendas, resulting in a more complex situation for historians to sort through.

We are sure that very early in 1692, Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, cousins, began to scream uncontrollably and do other things that frightened Betty’s father, Reverend Samuel Parris. Unable to find a scientific cause for their behavior, the community looked for a spiritual one. The girls began to accuse other people of sending “familiar spirits” to torture them, and things snowballed from there.

By the time it was over in March of 1693, 25 people were dead, 19 of them executed for witchcraft and 1 pressed with stones in an attempt to extract a confession. More than 100 had “confessed” in order to stay alive. The community was severely damaged.

One of those hanged for witchcraft was Rebecca Nurse, age 71. She and her husband Francis were respected in Salem Village. Rebecca especially was considered a virtuous, pious woman. When she was arrested for witchcraft, several neighbors took the very risky step of signing a document attesting to her Christian character. At her first trial she was acquitted, but then the accusing girls had another fit of hysteria. The case was re-opened, and she was condemned to death. Her refusal to “confess” and her execution are credited with helping to change public opinion about the trials, and, eventually, to help put an end to them.

The Nurse family honors Rebecca’s memory to this day. The Rebecca Nurse Homestead sits on the edge of Danvers, Massachusetts, once known as Salem Village. The house has been preserved, and other buildings suggest what life might have been like at the time. The grounds still serve as a community gathering place — the day I was there, families enjoyed a strawberry festival, with shortcake and whipped cream, sunshine, a breeze, and laughter.

Down a path to the back of the grounds is the cemetery, including monuments to Rebecca, the neighbors who publicly supported her, and others.

It’s easy to say that Rebecca Nurse did the right thing. She maintained her personal integrity, but at tremendous cost. A more difficult question: did her neighbors, who had families to think of, do the wrong thing when they “confessed”? And the third question, one that gets harder to answer as I get older: what would I have done?

Rebecca Nurse Homestead

Rebecca Nurse Homestead Garden

Memorial to neighbors who bravely supported Rebecca Nurse

Monument to Rebecca Nurse, including these lines from Whittier:
O Christian Martyr who for Truth could die
When all about thee owned the hideous lie!
The world redeemed from Superstition’s sway
Is breathing freer for thy sake today.

In 1836 John Greenleaf Whittier had a decision to make. His father had died, his brother had married and moved away, and Greenleaf was having trouble managing the family farm at Haverhill. His solution was to encourage his mother to sell the house that had been in family for five generations. They moved to the town of Amesbury, just up the road and closer to the Quaker meeting house. Whittier shared the house with his mother, his sister Elizabeth, and his Aunt Mercy. In later years his niece Lizzie joined the household and helped take care of Whittier.

At first the house was a little crowded, but Whittier added some rooms, including what he called his Garden Room, where he wrote and entertained. Visitors to the house today can see Whittier’s black hat, which he kept handy in the Garden Room. The guide explains that Whittier could see guests approaching. If he didn’t really want to visit with them, he would grab his hat, head out the door and say to the surprised visitor, “I’m so sorry, but I was just leaving for a walk.”

And there was no shortage of visitors. Whittier was well known as a writer, editor, and abolitionist. He often traveled as part of his job, and he was acquainted with contemporaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mark Twain. Because he was also active in politics, people often stopped by to ask for advice or help.

In addition to his other writing, Whittier worked on his poetry here. He wrote with a quill pen, but later he incorporated the technology of the day to help: a printer produced galley proofs, and Whittier used them to help with revision.

Lizzie lived in the house after his death. The Whittier Home Association bought it in 1918. It is open for tours 2 days a week, during special events like Tea in the Garden, or by appointment.

The Emerson House sits on the north edge of Concord, a large white house across from the Concord Museum. Emerson bought the house and moved there in 1835 after marrying Lydian, his second wife. (His first wife, Ellen, had died of tuberculosis four years earlier.)

In this comfortable home Emerson wrote Nature, other essays, speeches, and poems. His speeches were well received, and Emerson often traveled on lecture tours. As he became increasingly well known and respected, visitors came to the home to discuss ideas and events.

In 1872 the house was badly damaged by fire. The family had to move out while the house was being rebuilt, and Emerson had difficulty adjusting to the change. Friends raised funds to help rebuild the house and to send Emerson to Europe during construction. Lydian decided to remain in Concord, so Emerson’s oldest daughter Ellen went with him. When he returned, the house was finished, better than ever. A crowd met him at the train station, a brass band played “Home Sweet Home,” and school was canceled for the day. Concord understood that Emerson was someone very special during his lifetime.

Ellen Emerson cared for her parents until their deaths, Emerson in 1882 and Lydian in 1892. She continued to live in the home until her own death.

The Emerson family still owns the home, and it has been preserved. The public is welcome to tour. The day I visited, preparations were underway for a family wedding on the site that weekend. I thought it was cool that such an important historical place would also play a role in the lives of people who planned to build a future together.