Black History Month Curriculum Resource: The Harlem Renaissance

Black History Month is coming up, and it happens to coincide with the time we are studying the history of the 1920's and 1930's.  So what better topic to combine the two than the Harlem Renaissance?

We have already been working on it some, but I recently found what I think is a fantastic resource.  John Carroll University has created the Harlem Renaissance Multimedia Resource, which pulls so much information about this fascinating period of modern American history into a central site.

What I love about this website--beside the fact that it is FREE--is that it includes not only the aspects of the Harlem Renaissance that most of us tend to think about, such as the music and the literature, but also the politics, the philosophy, the education, and even the international connections.  There is a whole section on religion as well; in fact, throughout the entire site I saw the predecessors of Martin Luther King Jr's thoughts, philosophies, actions, and words.  It not only has multimedia resources--pictures, audio, and a little video (all that I found was Billie Holiday)--but also lots of links to other websites with even more comprehensive information on that particular topic.

Particularly helpful to me were the timelines included and the map of Harlem itself.  It has a general timeline of the political and artistic events during that period, which helps me put things in order.  Even more interesting to us right now, however, was the timeline of the music.  My son has been getting more interested in jazz, about which I am not that knowledgable (confessional--even though two of my brothers were performers, students, and aficionados of that musical genre, and my father is at least a long-time fan).  The timeline helped me understand how ragtime gradually morphed into swing, with dates, different jazz styles, artist bios, and short audios of outstanding pieces along the way.

So if you are looking for resources about black musicians, writers, thinkers, educators, or politicians, this  website is a great place to look.

Curriculum Resource: US Debt Ceiling Issue

It is hard to teach our middle schoolers what the big debate over raising the debt ceiling is about, in part because it can be hard to understand it ourselves.  But I think the Washington Post has some great resources to help explain the debt problem in a way that even we, I mean, middle schoolers, can understand.

A great place to start is their "Five Myths and Five Truths about the Debt Ceiling" piece.

Here are two great graphics that help explain what has created such a debt crisis (in terms of budget expenditures and economic conditions):

Yellow is Bush Tax Cuts, Blue is Economic Recovery Act,
and Green is cost of  Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
(from The Washington Post)

The Washington Post also has a wonderful interactive graphic that shows which US Senators and Representatives voted for the three programs that are driving the big increase in our national deficit.  That Venn Diagram that is is almost exclusively the Democrats who voted for the combination of the wars and the stimulus package, and almost exclusively the Republicans who voted for the wars and the tax cuts.

Another graphic demonstrates that the debt has continued to rise, regardless of which parties controlled either the White House or the Congress: