Monthly Archives: July 2013

July 24, 2013 · 12:18 pm

David Letterman – Top Ten Reasons I’ve Decided to Become a Teacher

I’m knee deep in LearnZillion work as I came back from my long break.

The Gilder Lehrman conference at USC was great–wonderful professors, cool colleagues, and a special shout out to the folks at Tiki Ti’s for making things just a little bit better on Wednesday night.

My stopover in Colorado was even better. So much fun to be with my western kin. It was a blast, and the mile-high altitude didn’t faze me one bit.

I saw this video of David Letterman’s Top Ten List on my Facebook feed and wanted to share it for two reasons:

A. the satirical reasons Letterman comes up with may be fresh and new to his juvenile audience, but we teachers have heard enough of it.

B. Isn’t it a tad insulting when TFAers, especially those who HAVEN’T EVEN STARTED THEIR TERM YET, are brought out for this little stunt? If Letterman really wanted to thank teachers he would’ve included some veterans who know there way around the classroom.

Personally, I want to see those ten kids in two years…all glassy eyed, strung out and ready for their Morgan Stanley/McKinsey/CitiGroup/PWC/etc. job they really wanted in the first place.

Comments are always welcome.

Mr. D will be at USC until the 13th and in Colorado until the 18th

English: University of Southern California campus building in 2007. Photo taken by Padsquad. Please observe license and properly cite in use outside Wikipedia. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Lots happening in the Neighborhood this week, and most of it west of the Mississippi.

I’ll be at a Gilder Lehrman Summer Seminar at the University of Southern California this week, focusing on early American colonization pre-Plymouth. I’ll be sharing lots of fun material with the Neighborhood.

Next, I’ll be doing some genealogical history of my own. I’ll be visiting my relatives in Colorado, the first wave of my family to arrive here in America. They came to the coal mines of southern Colorado and stayed, while my dad made up the second wave of Italians to America in the years after World War II. I’ve never met them, and my dad hasn’t seen them in 40 years. I’m EXTREMELY excited to meet them…

(even though the TSA opened my luggage which contained their gifts…I wonder why?)

Anyway, I’ll be very busy and pretty scarce this week. If you need to email me, you still can, though I might not get back to you quickly.

Video for the Classroom: A Tour through Ancient Rome, courtesy of Khan Academy and Rome Reborn

This is the type of history video Khan Academy needs!

A Tour Through Ancient Rome is a collaboration between Khan and the Rome Reborn project, an initiative to create digital models of Rome from its foundation settlements to its depopulated self during the 6th century CE. This tour is narrated mostly by Rome Reborn director and University of Virginia professor Dr. Bernard Frischer.

The video juxtaposes a magnificent digital rendering of ancient Rome around the year 320 to various modern and ancient images of artifacts, buildings and ruins. Dr. Frischer’s narrative contains none of the boring, linear, rote stock pedantics of other Khan humanities videos. In fact, for a 14-minute video lecture, it’s surprisingly fun to watch.

Khan Academy had better take note: if it wants its history and humanities videos to get the same hits as its math and science films, it had better quit the light-pen Chinese takeout menu-look that it thrives upon and make the videos actually ENGAGING.

…I mean, God forbid kids actually ENJOY learning about history.