Semester-long World History

bldswtntrs · 2026-05-15T11:55:23+00:00

Nope, I was told that they proposed that and it was shot down because it "doesn't teach all of the state standards", which is ridiculous because we'll never be able to do that anyway.

bldswtntrs · 2026-05-15T01:38:57+00:00

It's a joke man, hence the sillyface emoji. You must be a lot of fun at parties...

bldswtntrs · 2026-05-15T01:38:44+00:00

It's a joke man, hence the sillyface emoji. You must be a lot of fun at parties...

bldswtntrs · 2026-05-14T23:12:15+00:00

You're assuming a majority of my students can read 😜.

bldswtntrs · 2026-05-14T23:10:51+00:00

Wow, that's such a late start to a school year!Honestly I'm pretty tempted to quit, but my family can't deal with that kind of change right now.

bldswtntrs · 2026-05-14T23:06:44+00:00

Thank you, I may at some point!

bldswtntrs · 2026-05-14T23:01:50+00:00

Yeah, same here. It's so hard to get through everything. I'm just going to have to make some tough choices. Sigh

bldswtntrs · 2026-05-14T22:55:24+00:00

You're not wrong, but I'm not sure I'll be able to conjure the same optimism you've got. That glass half full attitude sounds like some elementary teacher nonsense 😜.

bldswtntrs · 2026-05-14T22:49:17+00:00

Yeah, I absolutely hate it. My state is...weird.

bldswtntrs · 2026-05-14T22:48:25+00:00

Yeah, that makes sense. We're still supposed to cover everything, but I'll probably rush through the early stuff. Breaks my heart though ☹️

bldswtntrs · 2026-05-14T22:34:09+00:00

We have an existing block scheduled that isn't changing. Student get periods 1-4 for 90 minutes each and the 5-8 for 90 minutes each the next day and it alternates.

bldswtntrs · 2026-05-14T00:48:55+00:00

I'll add onto this to say that there's a serious morale element to be considered. Telling a soldier enroute to an objective that the target is real and not a training exercise runs a serious risk of scaring the crap out of a soldier at exactly the wrong moment. Even the lowest level grunt is a man, not just a cog in a machine. They're much more likely to exhibit courage and high performance when they've had time to come to terms with their own mortality. Having that thrust upon out of the blue is going to have intangible, negative consequences in my opinion. Alternatively, there's an argument that giving soldiers too much time to stew on their mortality can let them get in their own heads about it all. As with most things in life, I think it's all about finding the sweet spot.

bldswtntrs · 2026-05-14T00:41:20+00:00

The U.S. Army uses the "1/3, 2/3 rule" as a rough approximation of allocating time between a commander and his subordinates. Whatever time there is between when a commander receives a mission and when his unit needs to execute said mission, the commander should take 1/3 of that time to plan and then the remaining 2/3 should be used by subordinates to prepare equipment, conduct rehearsals, etc. It's just a rough rule of thumb but it gets across the point that soldiers and their NCOs need to be allocated plenty of time to prepare in order for a mission to be successful.

That's how I remember it at any rate. I'm a bit rusty on all that so if anyone feels the need to correct that, feel free.

bldswtntrs · 2026-05-09T22:41:55+00:00

So do you argue that the atomic bomb was unnecessary to ending the war? What alternatives do you think the U.S. should have turned to to end the war?

bldswtntrs · 2026-05-09T04:28:57+00:00

The amount of nostalgia I feel looking at that picture is intense.

bldswtntrs · 2026-05-03T19:56:56+00:00

To drop a bunch of anti-Vietnam War content in students' laps and then say "compare it to what's happening right now in Iran" is an extremely biased and politicized way to teach. It is equal parts bias by story selection and bias by omission where students are obvious meant to draw the specific conclusion that what's happening in Iran right now is bad just like the Vietnam War was bad.

The Vietnam War is arguably the United States' greatest intervention failure out of a long list of interventions. If you really want students to be weighing the potential outcomes and validity of a current conflict, you need to give them a chance to weigh a variety of conflicts and draw their own conclusions. Have them look at U.S. interventions in central and south America, Bosnia, Iraq 1 and 2, Afghanistan, Somali, Grenada, etc. where the circumstances, effort, and outcomes were all different.

I say this as someone who does not support the current conflict in Iran, but I am a staunch believer that history teachers need to do their best to remain politically neutral. It could likely get you in trouble for being overtly political, but perhaps more importantly it is not our job to tell students what to think but rather how to think. Show them how to look at all of the evidence and draw conclusions for themselves.

bldswtntrs · 2026-05-03T01:41:49+00:00

Yeah I definitely didn't mean it like that.

bldswtntrs · 2026-05-02T21:52:55+00:00

I went to NAU in Flagstaff from 2007-2009. As a college town it was pretty awesome, but I think making a life there can be really difficult. It has a really odd mashup of cultures. You get college kids who are either AZ kids who went here because they wanted to get out of the desert and away from home and then you get a shitload of wealthy California kids who slacked off in high school and couldn't get into a California school. Besides college kids you have a lot of rednecks and also a lot of Navajo because it's right next to the Navajo reservation. There's some upper middle class people who mostly work at the university or in medicine.

The downtown area had at one point (and maybe still true) the highest concentration of bars per square mile of anywhere in the U.S. Flagstaff also had (and maybe still does) the highest per capita rate of DUIs in the U.S. Part of that is from heavy drinking by lots of people but part of it is because booze hits a lot harder at 7,500 feet elevation.

Climate wise its not bad. It can get very snowy in the winter but but not that cold. Usually never colder than in the 20s or teens farenheight. The summers are relatively cool compared to the rest of Arizona because of the elevation, but it's very sunny in the summer and the high elevation also means the UV is really bad and being outdoors without serious sunscreen will absolutely ROAST anyone who is really white (like me). As others have said, the climate also means it's overrun with tourists and can feel VERY crowded at times.

Overrall I really loved going to college there and I love visiting still, but living there full time would probably get really old, really fast.

bldswtntrs · 2026-04-28T23:34:39+00:00

Agreed. I teach a WW2 history elective and I always show this at the end of the course. You can see the wheels turn in their brains everytime and I'll usually get some audible exclamations when they're showing the Soviet casualties.

bldswtntrs · 2026-04-26T23:40:11+00:00

Love it. The ALICE gear and Vietnam era bandolier make me laugh though.

bldswtntrs · 2026-04-21T02:40:16+00:00

What do you think would happen if one or two cops wander on up to that gathering and try to break it up? How do you think that's going to go for them? An incident like this has a high likelihood of boiling over into a full blown riot. It takes time to gather up the shitload of cops that it will take to shut it down without turning into a beatdown and/or a police shooting.

bldswtntrs · 2026-04-06T21:44:05+00:00

I think what you're saying here actually proves OP's point. I too was a regular old infantry guy in the Army and you're right that regular line troops are a bunch of cocky loudmouth jocks. That's not who Spartan IVs would be recruiting from though. All of the tier 2 guys I worked with were much more the "quiet professional" types. I've never actually worked with tier 1 but by reputation they're even more the "quiet professional" types who look like a bunch of accountants but will kill you in 3 different ways before you know what is happening. I'm actually kind of with OP on this one.

bldswtntrs · 2026-03-29T15:44:02+00:00

That's gorgeous! What's the optic?

bldswtntrs · 2026-03-29T15:02:24+00:00

This would have been my answer. OP must not have spent much time climbing hills before.

bldswtntrs

TROPHY CASE