davidhildebrand.info

Reading is fundamental. Please.

I’ve really grown aware of the gaps in skill levels lately of the students I teach. In so many ways so many of them are pretty savvy. But less than 20% are reading at grade level for 11th grade, and to think that upwards of 60% I’ve had as students either in 9th, or 10th or both previous grades (**because I’ve used to teach both World History and Government previously, while now I’ve got only 11th grade). All three levels: Basic, Proficient, Advanced.

What they struggling with:

(1) Of course Social Studies vocabulary— many still are challenged with concepts such as “Aristocracy” or state-based vs. stateless society. Sometimes it is a vocabulary issue, sometimes it is contextual and dependent on other related reasoning skills such as economic or spatial (maps), or decision making, or empathy.

(2) They don’t get English vocabulary. Weak-Weak! They lack skills to decode using context, and frankly are either lazy to look it up (really, a Dictionary), or cannot retain, even after English gives them something like 250 vocabulary terms that they must master. Not yet! Examples: “superior” vs. “inferior” (antonyms— many I seem to remember learning in 2nd grade). Sustainable, gratuitous, implication, impact. And while I love how my High School offers (French-less) Modern Language program (including Chinese and Russian), I’m not always sure that we’re doing right to require it for FOUR years. Wait. Thinking, reading, writing skills first in the language they already must use! I know— wait, before someone says learning another language helps you understand your own and begin to master syntax and grammar, etc. “Muy bien muchacha, estoy comprehendo. Estoy afficianado de las lenguas de los chinos (or chinks if you’re Tom Taylor).”

(3) They don’t get the language of nature, the biosphere, the animal or vegetative kingdom. Today in analyzing #641 they variously did not understand “deciduous” (*and it was footnoted with a definition at the bottom), “marshy,” brush,” or “creek-bed.” One class did not know what the word “orchard” meant. This may not be surprising considering most all of the trees they’ve seen growing are surrounded by iron grates and concrete sidewalks, the real underside of “urban poverty,” right? Lack of opportunities to get to nature, let alone back to it.

So, you can imagine how amused I find it sometimes to explain aspects of animal husbandry in the context of American history— say, “why is south Baltimore called Pigtown?” No clue Mr. Hildebrand. Because the countryside within 100 miles drove their pigs into Baltimore through the streets (yikes, Bel Air Road??) to the stockyards which were next to the B&O Railroad siding also near the harbor wharves. Pigs would then be moved through the slaughterhouse and then canned and packed for transhipment, loaded onto the (after 1878 in “reefers” — “what Mr. Hildebrand! Reefer?” “No, refrigerated car.”) Next lesson: why animals driven on the hoof in the west was better than first slaughtering, but worse than loading at railheads because an animal like a cow lost so much weight during the upwards of 1200 mile journey.

Some of this makes teaching fun. Some of it is remedial and tedious. All of it usually adds up to kids not reading. Too difficult to encode what we give to them? Well…in this world of High School, not sure how else we should go towards college prep. Maybe the answer gets to the problem in lower grade levels, that we need to capture their attention earlier??

Don’t get me started on the many other distractions, electronic or other. The fundamental problem is that most kids are taking shortcuts and actually not reading.

One would suppose that Cotton led the antebellum agricultural sector in the South, but that is not the case.

While occupying an almost mythic place in the literature of the period, cotton was responsible for the dramatic rise in fortunes for many large and small planters, both the total yield and the number of acres was actually far subordinate to other staple crops: namely corn and wheat. Let’s draw some comparisons from the following: In 1849, acreage devoted to Corn was 18,000,000 in the South, while that planted to Cotton was only 5,000,000. In 1855, the value of the Corn crop was $209 million, while Cotton amounted to $136 million. (1)

Throughout the South in places where overcropping of tobacco had led to depletion of soil nutrients, Corn and Wheat had gradually replaced the “noxious weed.” This had only happened reluctantly, for while increased demand for American grain and rising prices had actually made these staples an attractive alternative to tobacco, labor productivity and costs had fallen sharply. Everywhere, the concern was the same: output per slave.

In many cases the solution had been the same as it always had been: transfer the slaves to the frontier, where fresh land made either tobacco more feasible (as in Kentucky), or a switch to cotton cultivation attractive. Because land was so abundant and cheap in the trans-Appalachian west, agriculture had constantly been shifting westward. Thomas Jefferson’s frequently quoted response that it was cheaper to purchase new land than manure an existing acre is revealing of the period. Paul Gates details the increasing frequency by which articles appear in various practical farm journals during the period urging wise land management, crop rotation and the use of soil amendments.

Cotton’s profitability was very high, so in this sense it can be referred to as “king.” Some historians have argued that Cotton is a singular factor in causing a “revival” of slavery.

(1) Source: Paul Wallace Gates. The Farmer’s Age. Agriculture from 1815 to 1860. Harper: 1968.