Today’s blog post comes from Dr. Robert Scott Kellner, who speaks so eloquently that I will not modify his words. This is a good companion to a unit on the Holocaust:

Two weeks ago, a young lady in Holon, Israel, with the nickname of “Ilanushkah,” created a YouTube video about my German grandfather, Friedrich Kellner, who was a justice inspector during the time of the Third Reich. As a Social Democrat, Friedrich Kellner campaigned against the Nazis in the 1920’s and 30’s. During the war, he kept a diary to record Nazi crimes. His diary will be on exhibit at the Dwight Eisenhower Presidential Library in May. In November, a Canadian documentary about the diary, “My Opposition - the Diaries of Friedrich Kellner,” will be shown at the United Nations to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht.

The Israeli girl did a wonderful job creating the video, and it is getting a lot of praise, yet it is also attracting some neo-Nazi types and Holocaust deniers. YouTube has deleted some of the vile posts. I am hoping that you, and perhaps some of your friends, would take a few minutes to view the video. The increased number of views will help to keep the hostile views in perspective, to dilute the percentage of such views. At present, about 1,800 people have looked at the video — which is a rather modest number. This is the link to the Kellner diary video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kJLE9zvo44

At the YouTube site, you will find links to Wikipedia articles about Friedrich Kellner. A very dramatic story about my courageous grandfather is online at Jewish World Review, which has reprinted an article that appeared in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0507/holo_diary.php3

Thank you,

Dr. Robert Scott Kellner
College Station, Texas

“I can’t get my kids to use capital letters,” the young teacher mourned. “It’s because of computers. The kids expect the word processor to fix it for them.”

Sometimes students really don’t see any value in pesky capital letters. I had a class that was cured very quickly, though, by a simple exercise.

• Which one are you more likely to see on the pace lap at the Daytona 500: a mustang or a Mustang?
• Which one do you sing into: a mike or a Mike?
• Which would you rather receive for Christmas: an apple or an Apple?

Boom! They got it.

Once students understand that the capital letter actually conveys meaning, our insistence on correct usage makes more sense to them.

This doesn’t mean they automatically remember to do it every time — just that, when we point out the lapse, they don’t roll their eyes quite as much.

Good enough.

I was presenting at a workshop, and the teacher was having trouble with her mouse. “Do a Control A,” I said, getting ready to show her how to copy and paste without her mouse. She stared at me as if I’d suddenly started speaking gibberish. I tried again, “Hold down the Control key and then type A.” She did and was astonished to see her entire page highlighted.

“I didn’t know you could do that!” she said.

Keyboard shortcuts are a surprisingly little-known feature. I use them because they’re faster and less distracting than stopping my typing, reaching for a mouse, pulling down a menu, and clicking. Here are some I use often:

Control + A - selects all text in a document
Control + C - copies highlighted text
Control + X - cuts highlighted text
Control + V - pastes copied or cut text wherever the cursor is

Control + B - boldfaces highlighted text
Control + I - italicizes highlighted text
Control + U - underlines highlighted text

Control + F - opens a search box. Type in a word and click “next” — the cursor moves to that word on the page. Works in PDFs, Web pages, and word processing. Very useful when you are searching for something specific.
Shift + arrow key - highlights text as the arrow moves
Alt + Tab - moves between open windows

(For my friends with Macs, I think the same commands work with Apple instead of Control. Let me know.)

Probably the shortcut I have been most grateful for is the Undo shortcut, Control + Z. Whatever you accidentally just deleted, Control + Z will undelete. If you realized your sentence was better before you changed it, Control + Z will restore the original version. It will even go back a few versions if necessary.

Control + Z is the “do over!” cry from our childhood days. If only we had it for some of the other mistakes we made along the way …

It’s that time of year: the faculty meetings have begun to blur together, a swirl of data, assessments, and strategies. You think you’re doing OK until the morning your principal turns to you in mid-meeting and says, “What do YOU think?”

You can’t answer, “Well, actually I was wondering how I was going to grade those 90 essays that the kids are handing in tomorrow without ignoring my husband and kids for another weekend.” Bad form. The principal will think you consider the meeting unimportant.

To the rescue — the Educational Jargon Generator! Choose one from column A, one from column B, and one from column C. Keep ‘em handy! When the principal asks what you think, you can say,

We need to optimize our cross-curricular differentiated lessons.
We might consider triangulating our technology-enhanced schemas.
Could we repurpose our dynamic curriculum integration?
This is a good time to morph our discipline-based decision-making.
How can we grow more holistic experiences for our students?
We need to empower our hands-on business partnerships.

Or make up your own. It beats “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!”

In what part of a traditional school would you NEVER expect to hear laughter?

I heard you! You said “the principal’s office,” didn’t you?

OK, so what is the SECOND place you’d never hear laughter? Right! The library!

Once the domain of stereotypically stern men and women who only knew two words (”Shush!” and “Overdue!”), the library of old has been transformed to the modern media center, with banks of computers supplementing the traditional stacks; and with somewhat less concern about noise levels and more concern about information literacy.

Carnegie Mellon University is beta-testing a couple of online games they’re calling Library Arcade. The first one helps students choose the best resource: book, magazine, or database. The second one offers practice with the Library of Congress Classification System. They are engaging even if the graphics aren’t quite up to Halo standards (they’re more like Pac-Man, to tell the truth).

Try the games out! Let CMU know what you think! Have fun and contribute to an online learning community at the same time!

Special thanks to Nancy for this one!

It’s time to start thinking about your summer. I don’t mean “thinking” in the sense of gazing out the window and longing for a warm, sunny beach and no papers to grade; but “thinking” in the sense of planning how you’ll make the most of those weeks between mid-June and early August.

• Would you like to travel to Spain to study the Spanish literary tradition for a month?
• Perhaps a few weeks in England to study Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales would be more to your liking?
• Closer to home, perhaps you’d like to spend time in Pittsburgh studying “Voices across Time: Teaching American History through Song.”
• You could travel to Fargo, North Dakota, to explore the literature of “The Great Plains from Texas to Saskatchewan: Place, Memory, Identity.”
• Or you could visit Eugene, Oregon, to study “From the Yucatan to ‘The Halls of Montezuma’—Mesoamerican Cultures and Their Histories.”

All of these projects represent U. S. tax dollars very well spent: they are among the offerings from the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars and Institutes. According to the Website, “[f]ull-time teachers in American K-12 schools, whether public, private, or church-affiliated, as well as home-schooling parents, are eligible to apply to seminars and institutes. Americans teaching abroad are also eligible if a majority of the students they teach are American citizens. Librarians and school administrators may also be eligible.”

I’ve been lucky enough to be selected for a couple of these experiences, and I consider them among the best professional development experiences of my career, even better than some of my university classes. If you are interested any of the wide variety of topics, apply!

Admission to these seminars and institutes is highly competitive, so don’t wait. Get information, line up your references, and start drafting your essay now. The deadline is March 3.

Today we celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, and most of us will focus on his “I Have a Dream” speech in the classroom. Of all the things Dr. King said and wrote during his lifetime, that speech has proven to be the most enduring. It is powerful and certainly deserves this annual attention.

Dr. King taught that justice and equality were noble goals and that the best way to work toward them was nonviolently. He adopted the concept of civil disobedience that Henry David Thoreau had written about a hundred years earlier, a concept implemented during World War II in Europe, during the civil rights movement in Africa, and against the British in India.

Every student of Bloom’s Taxonomy knows that knowledge and comprehension are fundamental to learning. We also know that being able to apply learning to specific situations demonstrates a more sophisticated understanding of the ideas.

When Dr. King was assassinated, Bobby Kennedy was campaigning for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He was in my hometown, Indianapolis; and it fell to him to announce Dr. King’s death to a large group of predominantly African-American supporters downtown. Everyone there knew and understood what Dr. King stood for. Would they take it to the next level and respond nonviolently to this crisis?

Unfortunately my blog software won’t allow me to embed this YouTube video of Kennedy’s speech which has been enhanced with a graphic montage. I hope you will take 6 minutes to watch and listen.

There were riots in several American cities the night Dr. King was killed, but there was calm in Indianapolis.

People applied what they had learned. It was a fitting tribute.

For many years now, there has been circulating a continuously expanding poem. Its leaping-off place is the first verse of “That’s Amore” - the song by Harry Warren and Jack Brooks made famous by singer Dean Martin:

When the moon hits your eye
Like a big pizza pie,
That’s amore.

Here are 6 of the 36 verses of “That’s Amore” from “The Ants Are My Friends” by Richard Lederer & Stan Kegel.

When a Japanese knight
Draws a sword for a fight,
That’s Samurai.

Ray Charles gained so much fame
That his fans screamed his name:
“Sing some more, Ray!”

A New Zealander man
With a permanent tan:
That’s a Maori

When you might make a feast
For some alien beast,
That’s Sigourney.

When Ms. Stewart tops weeds
With gold sesame seeds,
That’s potpourri.

When two patterns combine
In a way serpentine,
That’s a moire.