Teachers & the Temple

Adjusting to the real world after a week at Montpelier can be challenging. There are real pressures to be ready for the next school year but an equally real mission to teach the substance of the ideas present in our curriculum. Several participants have shared their gratitude via e-mail or the Facebook group. I wanted to share those ideas here and invite you to add your own thoughts.

Whether you left Montpelier last week or two years ago, how will you use it to super charge your teaching?

Sherry Willis wrote this poem to commemorate our time together. I especially like that last line…

They came from everywhere all across this great land
…West coast, east coast, the north, and the south
Dark hair, light hair, young and mature
All thrown into the Madision melting pot
Scholar, teacher, and student
Listening, discussing, thinking, and learning
All in the Madision way
Laughing, walking, feasting, and fellowshiping
Honoring not only the man but the work he had done
Revived, renewed patriotism and passion
Diverse yet joined in the Spirit of the Union that is greater than themselves

The James Madison Workshop June 20-25, 2010

From the second week, Paige forwarded her thoughts on the week by e-mail:

I realized to an even greater extent than before that we really have to find the time to focus more on the founding using primary source documents.  Perhaps by empowering our students with that “maker’s knowledge” we can best fight the cynicism and lack of political efficacy that seem so prevalent today.

Works in progress are welcome too… so, alumni from previous years, tell us what you did and how it worked.

Sue Leeson shared this resource created by Gordon Lloyd. This is a day-by-day summary of the Constitutional Convention…

http://www.teachingamericanhistory.org/convention/summary.html

The Avalon Project at Yale Law School provides an incredible resource for primary documents. Look for the entire collection Federalist Papers under 18th Century documents…

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/avalon.htm

ConSource provides an impressive collection too. Look for Madison’s Notes, state ratification debates, and what they present as “Anti-Federalist and Pro-Federalist Papers”…

http://www.consource.org/index.asp?bid=530

Will shared this link to his speaking notes for a presentation at Princeton’s Conference on “Constitutionalism” last February. His presentation is titled “Constitution of Failure: The Architectonics of a Well-Founded Constitutional Order“…

http://www.princeton.edu/~uchv/constitutionalism/Harris.pdf

For his concluding remarks the second week, Will shared an assignment he often presented to his students at Penn. Read Douglas R. Hofstadter’s 12th chapter of Metamagical Themas, titled “Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity.” You can take a look at the table of contents and other excerpts using Google’s Book Search…

http://tinyurl.com/6gr5ue

And, here’s the National Constitution Center’s Interactive Constitution. Based on Linda R. Monk’s The Words We Live By, you can explore by topic, search by keyword, or searcy by Supreme Court Decisions…

http://www.constitutioncenter.org/constitution/

It’s a start…click on “comments” and share your favorites too!

–Shellee

1. To make a polity is more difficult than to live within one. (Jeff Tullis)

2. (Concerning federalist and anti-federalist perspectives) What is a better attitude toward the world: imagination or judgment? (Will Harris)

3. What would it take to say “yes” to the Constitution, to become a founder in mind and heart? (Harris)

4. Hearken not to the unnatural voice which tells you that the people of America…can no longer live together as members of the same family; can no longer continue the mutual guardians of their mutual happiness…. (Jay, Federalist No. 2)

5. Citizenship is not a right, but a power. (Harris)

6. The truest nature of the Constitution is change, creativity, innovation, transformation. (Harris)

7. There was no tyranny in America. Principle, not tyranny, precipitated the Revolution. (John Kaminski)

8. (About thinking constitutionally) What is the quality of a question that makes the world disclose itself? (Harris)

There are many more question fragments in my notes, but I couldn’t resurrect them into wholes. Maybe you can help with such things as Will’s notion of the mind and the Constitution being commensurate, and add stuff I didn’t have the presence of mind to write down from lectures by Noah Pickus, Sue Leeson, and Ralph Ketchum. There is certainly more Harris and Tullis stuff to add as well. And also the implied questions emanating from the Montpelier portrait of Pan and the Nymphs.

–Mutter

Noah Pickus, author of True Faith and Allegiance, asked participants to consider their role in creating a citizenry that rigorously interprets the Constitution by discussing it and making inquiries of it. Perhaps the biggest threat to our identity as one people has nothing to do with our immigration policy and everything to do with our tattered idea of who is a citizen.

Our efforts to make distinctions between natural born citizens who pledge their allegiance to the flag and naturalized citizens who take an oath to the constitution is missing the point. Noah suggested every citizen of the United States needs to take part in thinking constitutionally. We should each take part in a rigorous discussion of the constitution, interpret it and make inquiries of it.

So, this intrigued many of us and presented an important question to take back to the classroom, but this isn’t the post I sat down to write tonight. I started my instant messenger client to run alongside my browser as I worked. It generally leads to interruptions that keep me from getting anything done. This evening, however, there was an instant invitation to thinking constitutionally…

7:44 Pat

What is the rub for the Dems on drilling in ANWR? And drilling in the Gulf?

7:46 Shellee

On ANWR, it’s a 20th century solution to a 21st century problem and not even a good solution!

7:47 Pat

It’s not the solution but part of the solution

7:47 Shellee

Not part of the solution. It’s too little too late.

and maybe, just maybe if there was a bill for drilling responsibly in ANWR with an additional component of increasing fuel efficiency, funding research for alternatives…maybe it could get the votes it needs…maybe.

just drilling is just stupid

7:48 Pat

Well, they’ve been trying to drill there for over 10 years. They’ve now predicted twice the capacity of a few years ago.

7:49 Shellee

Saw a photography exhibit in Dallas with photos of ANWR. It’s an incredible space. Once you see it, and I can only imagine seeing it for real, I think it becomes a more difficult question.

7:50 Pat

How is it too late? We won’t be off fossil fuel for another 25 years.

So that’s it? Dependence on foreign oil for pictures in a remote place in Alaska?

7:51 Shellee

not about the pictures, it’s about the ecosystem. there are resources we need to be cognizant of other than oil
it’s not all about consumption…or shouldn’t be unless we’re simply a people of hedonistic gluttons. then there’s no problem

While it’s tempting to tell you I won this exchange with this question of who we are, the conversation continued. There were partisan accusations. He wanted to know if I believed in the global warming scam and I wanted to know if he was simply re-typing the transcript from Rush’s latest show. What broke through that, however, was this question of who we are and how to best use our resources to solve our problems. We were able to discuss what we agreed on: our dependence on foreign oil is a big problem; we have experts with specialized information about how much oil is available from ANWR; those individuals know more about the question than either of us.

A constitutional citizen doesn’t have to avoid a partisan dig (or two) but does need to see beyond them. There are often bigger questions at stake than the details we debate. Are we preparing citizens in our classrooms who will see and readily debate those bigger questions?

I wonder, however, if there’s more to this particular characteristic of the American people. Imagine you have just encountered the world’s greatest invention, what do you want to know about it?

What does it do?

How does it work?

Perhaps, where did the idea came from?

Now imagine the world’s greatest invention is the federal constitution proposed by James Madison. It may have looked like a Rube Goldberg machine to the AntiFederalists, unnecessarily complicated with too many opportunities for something to go wrong. As they review the many components of the system, the answer to “what does it do?” seems more and more obscure. The banner at the top of the Rube Goldberg page might even serve as a powerful AntiFederalist argument:

Imagine an AntiFederalist staring at this contraption. We know what we want it to do. We want it to protect our independence and protect our liberty. We know how to do this. We have several simple machines in our state constitutions doing exactly this. Why make it so complicated? It’s too much work and leaves the whole endeavor vulnerable with each new level of detail. It doesn’t have to be this hard!

Now, back to imagining the greatest invention in the world, would you be satisfied in simply knowing what it does? What almost always happens next? Someone makes a newer and better version. It is, after all, the iPhone 2.0 we’re all talking about and tech news regularly celebrates the next “iPhone killer.”

When acquainting ourselves with a new machine, few of us are ever satisfied with simply knowing what it does. We start there but next ask how it works and often inquire about the origin of the idea itself. We seek the “maker’s knowledge” Will referred to as he opened this week’s NEH seminar at Montpelier. The operating instructions often aren’t enough to satisfy our American ingenuity.

I’m thinking of a friend’s son who “pimped” his ride. An owner’s manual illustrating how to shift gears, turn dials, and light signals wasn’t useful for long. The Ford Explorer his parents had given him needed several improvements before he was willing to park it in the high school parking lot! He soon spent countless hours entangled in the car’s wiring, digging through the components of the engine, and super-sizing its performance in every way imaginable. If we know how an invention works and how it is constructed to do what it does, we have a system for evaluating its performance as well as a platform to improve upon it.

The American people aren’t simply interested in the invention. They’re a people interested in the ongoing progress of innovation and a people who believe we can all be a part of designing the next big thing.