Mike Tribe

Excellent point. And, of course, it applies to almost all areas of education, not just MFL!

I agree with John Simkin. We're not trying to discourage you. It's clear that you have already done some thorough research and have amassed a considerable amount of material. The problem is that the questions you are suggesting lack sufficient focus. Examiners are always saying that candidates must be encouraged to narrow down their research questions. Remember that you have a fairly strict word limit to which you must adhere. Can you really say anything useful about either of those questions within those limits? John Simkin and I just don't think so... So, what can you do? Here are a couple of suggestions: 1. Pick a specific aspect of the Geneva Agreement which you believe may have had consequences leading to a renewal of the war and analyze a. why this item was included in the agreement b. the consequences you think it had c. the logical connections between the cause and effect All, of course, backed up by evidence... 2. Look at the "policy drift" which led to the increasing US commitment to the French in Indo-China. 3. You seem to have collected a lot of evidence about the non-Communist political opposition in South Vietnam. Perhaps something about that might make a good topic. (If you do decide on that one, I'd love a copy -- it's a hole in my knowledge about the war) As John said, once you've narrowed things down a bit, re-post to the forum and I'm sure you'll get some useful help and advice.

I think there are several linked issues here: 1. Does ADHD exist? I don't think there really any doubt here. It does. There is a minority of students who are simply incapable of operating in a "normal" classroom environment without some sort of help, be it in the form of drugs like Ritalin, or through carefully planned behaviour modification programs properly staffed. As someone observed (sorry I can't say who, but I haven't learned how to move backwards and forwards from what I'm writing and the posts I'm writing about!), these students used to be labelled as "naughty" and "treated" through the application of more or les draconian discipline. When I was teaching 10-12-year-olds 25 years ago, it used to worry me that our school's only response to inappropriate classroom behaviour was some form of punishment. Sometimes, of course, this was both appropriate and effective, but on other occasions, it was more or less totally useless -- the students concerned simply couldn't modify their behaviour without help. 2. Has the "problem" been exaggerated? I think it has. Parents and counsellors have tended to label increasingly minor behaviours as evidence of ADHD, and many misguided parents have strong-armed doctors to prescribe Ritalin inappropriately. There are students who behave inappropriately from choice, and treating the symptoms without attempting to look at the underlying causes is most counterproductive. And, on some occasions, traditional methods of "negative reinforcement" may, indeed be appropriate. I once talked to a teacher from a prestigious private school in the New York area. Some years earlier, the school had netered into an agreement with a top local university dept of educational psychology to come in and do a survey to see the extent of ADHD "problems" in the school. They were shocked to find that there were around 8% of students who were judged in need of help. They immediately set up a programme with the university to deeal with these students. All went well for a couple of years, until an in-coming headmaster reviewed the programme and discovered that 30% of the student body were now being "treated" in the programme. He cancelled it... 3. Is Ritalin a solution or part of the problem? You have to understand that Ritalin isn't a "quick fix". That is part of the problem. Sometimes parents (who have the excuse of being emotionally involved and often desperate) and teachers (who ought to know better) think of Ritalin as a "magic bullet" which will make all the problems go away. It isn't, and it doesn't. What it can do, sometimes, is provide a window of opportunity during which the student is given sufficient self-control to be able to benefit from a serious and carefully thought out behaviour modification programme. When it is used that way, the effects can be dramatic. I have seen 11-year-olds go from being virtually uneducatable, to being intelligent, hardworking students in a few months. But only if it's done properly. And doing it properly can be very time-consuming. I had to fill out detailed hour-by-hour observation checklists and be interviewed by the prescribing doctor. Our (very small in those days) support team had to design appropriate behaviour modification goals and teachers all had to sign-on to curriculum modifications and changes in classroom practice. On the other hand, I had another student who wasn't doing very well because he just seemed disconnected from his surroundings. He seemed to spend most of his time in his own dream world. When I mentioned this to his mother, she told me that that would probably be the Ritalin. That was the first time I'd even heard that the child was on medication. She'd apparently been to her doctor and insisted that her child needed it because on of her friend's children was on it and it had work for him... The specialist she was sent to prescribed the drug with minimal initial evaluation and no follow-up whatsoever... We mananged to persuade her to drop the medication and the improvement was, again, dramatic... So, basically, Ritalin can be a useful tool in addressing ADHD, but it is never enough on its own, and over- or inappropriate use can be very counter-productive...

I've never lived in or even visited a communist country, except for a couple of overnight stays in disgusting Soviet hotels on the way between London and Tehran in the 70s, so anything I write here is based only on what I have read. First of all, I agree strongly with what Dalibor wrote: it depended a lot on where you mean and, indeed when you mean... Anyone who claims, as does right-wing historian Richard Pipes, that the average Russian gained nothing from the Revolution is clearly allowing his political convictions to outweigh his historian's objectivity. Compare, for example, the near 100% literacy rate of the late Soviet Union with the 10-20% at the time of the revolution. Or the universal health care provision. Or cheap and plentiful (if crowded and jerry-built) housing. Or virtually full employment. All these were obvious improvements over conditions is tsarist Russia. And it's difficult to say that this was purchased at the cost of democracy and individual liberties, since there weren't any in tsarist Russia to lose! Yes, the Stalinist terror was inhuman and brought suffering to millions of innocent Russians. Yes, even under the comparatively "liberal" regimes that followed him, the Soviet Union continued to repress freedom both at home and throughout Eastern Europe, but it just isn't true to say that there were no gains at all to counterbalance this suffering. On the other hand, the people of Poland had communism imposed on them after 20 years of independence. They "had something to lose" and they lost it. The people of Czechoslovakia had one of the most advanced democracies in Central Europe. They also had a well-developed bourgeoisie and a carefully won sense of national consciousness. They had something to lose. But did the Cubans, I wonder? Did Castro take away their freedom in any meaningful sense given that they had been ruled since independence by corrupt oligarchies dominated by US interests. Living conditions were poor to appalling and social and educational provisions virtually non-existent. Now Cuba, despite more than 40 years of US economic blockade, has universal elementary education, a free and widely available higher education system, and what is widely accepted as the best health care system in Latin America. This is not to say that Cuba is some sort of socialist paradise. Thousands of Cubans risked their lives attempting to reach Florida in homemade "balsas". They obviously thought they were missing something important! I suppose the basis of the question is actually more philosophical than historical. Marxists interpreted "freedom" in a different way from the Western Liberal tradition. Marxists would agree with Rousseau that true freedom resides in obedience to the General Will, a General Will that the ordinary citizen may be unable to discern without the assistance of an elite to guide him, to "force" him "to be free". Individual liberties must be subordinated in the interests of society as a whole. Liberals, on the other hand, give precedence to the liberty of the individual. JS Mill said that if all the world save one man were of one opinion they would have no more right to coerce him than he would have to coerce them. That is one of the foundations of our democracy, and it's not a concept that would mean anything to the sincere Marxist.

I searched through the boxes of old books and found the economics texts we used before we switched to Business and Management! Economics by Alain Anderton, Causeway Press, Ormskirk (!) 1991 ISBN 1 902796 10 1 Essentials of Economics by John Sloman, Prentice Hall, London 1998 ISBN 0 273 65162 5 PPR Economics: Student Workbook and Reader by John Sloman & Mark Sutcliffe, Prentice Hall, London 1991 ISBN 0 13 016605 7 Hope some of this is helpful...

If you get the chance, watch the film "The Fog of War" in which Robert McNamara talks for around two hours about his experiences during and before his time as Secretary of Defense. It's very interesting regarding this point. One of the problems with the "we're all reasonable men and wouldn't destroy humanity" theory is that: (1) People didn't always behave rationally during the Cold War (2) ExComm based some of its decisions on inadequate intelligence. The second point is significant. McNamara says they didn't know that the Soviet Union had many operative missiles in Cuba at the time of the crisis, including, crucially, tactical (theatre) weapons. There is other evidence which indicates that the Soviet commander had approval to use tactical nuclear weapons in the event of a US invasion without needing to consult further with Moscow. So you can see that ExComm came close to ordering a land invasion of Cuba bassed on inaccurate evidence. They thought they could do so with an immediate repsonse from the USSR. They would be able to rely on the MAD doctrine which would stop any Soviet "first use" -- they would use massive force to invade Cuba quickly and crush Castro and then sit back and hope Khruschev didn't respond. But that's not what would have happened. A US invasion would have been repulsed through the use of tactical nuclear weapons... unleashing... Scary!

I only just ran into your posting while I was looking for something else. We're nearly neighbors! Here's the email address of our SL Business teacher. He's fairly new at it as well, but maybe you can help each other... danielgrzywacz@amerschmad.org As far as economics is concerned, I taught that a couple of years ago and was given that awful yellow book which is supposed to be the only one designed specifically for the IB... It was useless. It would be better to look for an English A Level book. I found one by posting for help on the IB OCC Forum. The people there were very helpful... I wrote at some length to CRISTINA JOFRE at your school last month and made some suggestions about books for history. We find the Access to History series especially useful, although the standard is quite variable (the one on China is rubbish...) Please feel free to drop me a line if there's anything I can do, or if you're planning on being in Madrid at all...

John asked me to write what I thought I could bring to the E-HELP project. I always find this sort of thing difficult because whatever I write will undoubtedly sound immodest or silly, but here goes: 1. I've been teaching for 35 years. I know that's true of lots of other teachers and that mere length of service is evidence of nothing other than stamina, but I do think it serves for something: (i) I've learned quite a lot about kids and about teachers during that time, simply by meeting so many of them! (ii) I've seen lots of "educational initiatives" come and go. My observations lead me to believe that, in general, that's what happens to them: they come, and a few years later, they've gone... I taught for many years in primary school, where this was particularly prevalent. I've been around long enough to have seen the rise and demise of the Initial Teaching Alphabet, the Phonics Revolution, the Real Language Movement, the New Maths, etc, etc.. This doesn't mean I'm any more proficient than anyone else in distinguishing between the truly useful innovations from the passing fads, but perhaps a healthy sceptism might be useful... (iii) I've been around since the beginning of the "IT Revolution"; I remember buying one of those little Sinclair ZX toys and laboriously programming it Basic so that my students could learn arithmetic facts by driving little buses across the screen; I remember the day the school took delivery of its first Apple II computers and we started teaching the primary school classes how to program in Basic; I remember paying out of my own pocket for the school's first internet connection -- and having to persuade a very sceptical headmaster to provide a telephone connection to my classroom so that we could use it; I remember our first attempts to write IT curriculum aims -- and still blush at how incompetently we did it... Perhaps this may provide some sort of historical context to current practice... 2. Despite all of the above, I'm still technologically challenged! Not to the degree of some of my colleagues -- I don't need help switching on the computer or accessing my email like my HoD, for example -- but I constantly have the feeling that I'm running to just stay in the same place. I put all my lessons on to PowerPoint slides, burn them on to overheads and the following year, the school buys projectors; I finally work out how to connect everything so I can use the projector and they buy an interactive whiteboard; I have the kids develop their own PowerPoint presentations, and then I check out Richard's website and see the videos his students have produced... I know this might sound like a disqualification from useful participation, but I would bring to the project the perspective of the teacher with a genuine interest in introducing information technology, but with very limited skills in the area. And I really think teachers in this category might be a majority, especially in my age group. 3. I'm fortunate in that my school is rare among international schools and makes very generous provision for in-service professional development. This means I've been able to develop a fairly wide circle of "email acquaintances" with an interest in this area. For example, I've attended the JOSTI technology workshop organized by the US State Dept. Office of Overseas Schools, a Summer Seminar organized by the Gilder-Lehrman Institute from New York, a couple of IB teachers' workshops and several technology workshops by people from Fairfax County School District offered by the Mediterranean Association of International Schools. Perhaps some of these contacts may be useful. 4. My teaching experience in history is, to say the least, varied. I've taught CSE and GCE O and A Level Social and Economic History, OND Economic History, A Level European History, IB 20th Century, European, and American History, as well as lower level history classes from Yr 6-Yr 13... I also have some experience in courses preparing students for the Spanish Selectividad university entrance exam in contemporary world history, although I can't really say even after 5 years trying that I understand exactly what the examiners are looking for! I wouldn't say I was an "expert" in any particular area. I haven't done any post-graduate courses in history -- never had the time or the money! -- and my MA is in q completely unrelated area (Counseling and Guidance). However, I do know quite a bit about (in order of competence) (i) the Cold War (ii) Mussolini and Fascist Italy (iii) the French Revolution (iv) Nazi Germany (v) China since 1945 (vi) Soviet Russia and can "defend myself" as we say in Spain, in most other areas of 19th and 20th Century European history...

Oh, dear. I'm about to sound horribly old, reactionary and "unerudite" compared with everyone else who's posted in this thread... Well, here goes... When I was very young, my dad used to haunt house sales and auctions in search of "bargains" which he would buy for a few shillings (yes, I am that old) and which would then clutter up the house until they were thrown out a couple of years later having proved more or less totally useless... I remember a box full of bound copies of the Gentleman's Magazine from the 1850s which he decided he simply couldn't resist, and an encyclopedia set published in 1896... One day, he came home with a box full of novels by GA Henty. Now, for the benefit of you young chaps (and chapesses), Henty was the author of adventure stories in which daring young Englishmen went forth into foreign or colonial parts and triumphed due entirely to their sterling English virtues. In the process, they invariably killed numerous foreigners, traitors, ungrateful natives, jews, mohammedans, hindus, etc, etc. At the age of 8 or 9, I thought these were wonderful! I think I read the whole boxful in a couple of months and then demanded more... Looking back on it, I can see that the books were terribly propagandistic, racist, imperialistic, etc, etc, but, at the time, they swept me up. The stories were so good that I absorbed all the history without noticing. And, despite their obvious bias, the books were well-researched... I learned, for example, in Through Russian Snows the exact number of soldiers who accompanied Napoleon on his Moscow Campaign (did you know that more than half the army wasn't French at all but contributed by various allied nations?). I learned from With Lee in Virginia what the weather was like during the Battle of Bull Run, and so on... I think it was reading this sort of stuff which first awakened a deep interest in history which eventually led to my studying it at college, and then teaching it... I'm sure the novels -- if you could even dignify them with the name -- don't stand comparison with all the literature that appeared earlier in the thread, but there it goes...

Just anecdote: I left England for foreign parts 30 years ago because of the foreign languages provision at the school at which I was teaching at the time. I was teaching history and French at a comprehensive school in Hampshire. The school was strictly streamed -- 2A1 was the top stream, followed by 2A2, 2A3, 2B1, 2B2, and 2B3 (the "special ed" class). I'd been teaching 2B1 French for the whole year. We'd worked hard, the kids and I, and they'd really made progress and had begun to develop some quite good communication skills. I was quite proud, and, as we all know, pride comes before a fall! At the beginning of June, we had a staff meeting to discuss the timetable for the following year. I looked at it and raised my hand to ask a question: "Excuse me, Headmaster, but there appears to be a mistake. I can't find the French class for 3B1." "No, that's right. They're going to do Gardening instead." "Oh, you mean that they'll choose between French and Gardening?" "No, that's a B stream. They don't have the intellectual capacity to learn a foreign language. They will do Gardening instead." "But if they don't have the intellectual capacity to learn a foreign language on 3rd Year, what have I been doing teaching them French all this year?" "Mr Tribe, you obviously don't understand the Comprehensive Idea." "Well, clearly not, Headmaster. Perhaps you could explain." "It's all about equality of educational opportunity. We gave them the opportunity to learn FRench for two years. Now they're going to do Gardening. If they want to learn more French, they can go to the Technical College after they finish here." I went home that night, took out my trusty TES and applied for 36 jobs. The first firm offer I got was from an international school in Tehran, and I've been overseas ever since... I trust things have improved since I left...

I suppose that your response to the gentleman concerned would depend rather on your aims in mounting the event in the first place. It would seem that one of the important aims should be a celebration of shared community experience rather than of "separateness", in which case you would be seeking out points of similarity between the histories of the two groups and between them and the host -- white -- culture. If this is one of your aims, then lumping everyone together as "black" would seem counter-productive, while excluding the non-Afro-Carribean minorities would be, perhaps, discriminatory. Stick to your white liberal guns, young man!

I am reminded of a story Alasdair Cook told of a celebrity invited to address the graduation ceremony at Syracuse University who objected to being referred to in the program as a "Native American" on the grounds that the term, correctly used, applied to anyone born in America. He demanded that he be called an American Indian... The waters of political correctness are indeed deep and turbulent...

As in Sweden, here in Spain, exposure to English throughout many years of education certainly doesn't guarantee anyone learns it! Students have to take English right up to the age of 18, and it's even a compulsory subjects in the university access exam. However, you rarely meet English-speaking youngsters who didn't learn their English at some sort of private language school... They all seem to have a far greater command of the rules of English grammar than I do, but they can't communicate. This is a reflection of the backwardness of many aspects of the Spanish educational system. It's come a long way in the last 25 years, but there's still a very long way to go...

I just got this from a colleague. I think it makes a point... http://www.aclu.org/pizza/index.html

Berlin was a center of tension throughout the Cold War. NATO battle plans assumed that the Soviet response to an overflowing of tension elsewhere in the world would probably lead to a conventional strike on the GDR/West German border where the Soviet superiority in armour was if not overwhelming, at least very significant. The Berlin Airlift Crisis is one of the great "what if" questions of Cold War history. I think it's clear that neither side wanted to start a war. Truman had ordered Gen. Clay not to attempt to force a land route through to the city using his armour. Soviet warplanes were ordered not to shoot down Allied aircraft. However, the possibility of an "accidental" outbreak of war was ever-present. What if one of the Soviet aircraft "buzzing" the Allied aircraft got so close as to cause it to crash? What if some aircrew -- from one side or another -- either accidentally or on purpose opened fire without official authorization? However, on balance, I don't think any of the series of Berlin Crises brought us as close to war as did the Cuban Missile Crisis. Why? (1) When the Berlin Airlift was taking place, the hardware needed to Nuclear Holocaust was not yet in place. The USSR didn't explode her first atomic device until August 1949 and even then had few planes with which to deliver them. Even the United States couldn't be sure that its atomic strike force would be effective. US Intelligence reported to Truman that his existing capability would not enable him to cripple the USSR either industrially or militarily. Any engagement would, therefore, have had to have been largely conventional, at a time when both sides were under great pressure to reduce the size of their conventional forces. (2) Later "crises" were caused in large part by Soviet posturing. At no time until the Brezhnev era did the USSR achieve anything like nuclear parity with the West. The "missile gap" never existed (and there's even evidence to suggest that JFK knew it didn't exist even as he was using it as a major weapon in his election campaign!) and the frequent Soviet response to a PR failure anywhere, or to the need to demonstrate "leadership" in the face of growing Chinese hostility was to provoke a "crisis" in Berlin. There's no evidence that the USSR was ever willing to escalate such incidents to dangerous levels, although, as in the case of the Airlift, errors and miscalculations could always have led to war... (3) In Cuba, Khruschev was under a lot more pressure. His agricultural and educational reforms had been unsuccessful and had prompted unheard of criticism within the CPSU. Mao seemed to be winning the propaganda war and was also becoming a serious military threat. K felt he had to take risks to bolster his position at home and within the international communist movement. And he underestimated the risks involved. Kennedy was young and inexperienced, and his performance in Geneva had failed to impress. Surely he could be persuaded to accept Soviet intervention in Cuba as being no more of a threat to the USA than was the presence of US missiles in Turkey... Of course, once he had taken the risk, it was even more difficult for him to climb down -- "We were eyeball to eyeball and the other guy just blinked" -- without losing face... (4) The US crisis management team also underestimated the threat. At the conference held in Havana to mark the 40th Anniversary of the Crisis, the old protagonists met together, some of them for the first time. When the Soviet commander of the defence force in Cuba told the conference that he already had tactical nuclear weapons at his disposal and, even more important, had received authorization to use them without further reference to Moscow, the US contingent apparently blanched visibly. They hadn't been aware of this when they were examining the options open to them during the crisis... As with most of the crises of the Cold War, MAD saved us. I don't think any side -- with the obvious exception of the Chinese!! -- ever seriously contemplated the first use of nuclear weapons. The constant danger was the Dr Strangelove scenario whereby the world would be cremated as the result of error or miscalculation...

As John says, it's important to bear in mind that Stalin did not initiate the use of terror in Russia. The first secret police force, the Cheka -- Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage -- was established under Feliks Dzerzhinsky in December 1917. This conducted the Red Terror during the Civil War period, using much the same tactics as Stalin was to use later. Whilst I agree with John that the employment of terror tactics was fundamental to the survival of Stalin's regime, recent research has tended to show that it was not as all-pervasive as had been claimed by historians writing in the climate of the Cold War. Whilst high party and government officials (especially in the security services) did indeed live in terror of the anonymous knock on the door in the early hours of the morning, ordinary Russians, after the initial period of the collectivization and de-kulakization campaigns, were largely free of the effects of the purges. Another point to remember is the important economic contributions made by Gulag camps to Stalin's 5-year plans. Much of the infrastructure work was carried out by slave labour from the camps, and camp commanders would frequently extend the sentences of workers they considered important to efficient production... The security services were encouraged to make sure that labour supplies were frequently replenished by the arrival of more political prisoners...

I suppose I've hesitated in adding to this debate since nothing decided by this review could in any way affect what I teach here. However, one or two points do occur to me, and, at the risk of boring you all... First, a little story. One day, about 8 months after the vcitory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini, I was invited to a small party at the home of a man who had been the head of the Shah's press bureau. The party was attended by a peculiar mixture of people, including two members of the Shah's last government, which he had appointed in extremis before fleeing the country. The government, headed by Shahpour Bakhtiar, inlcuded many reformists who had spent years and years in exile. I got talking to the former Minister of Housing. He was a poet who'd been living in Paris for 15 years and spoke Persian with a French accent. He'd returned to Iran full of hope that this was a new dawn of democracy. Now, he was in constant fear of arrest and was considering a return into exile. "How," he asked me, "could anyone have expected that it would all turn out like this?" Well, the answer is that anyone who'd studied the history of the French or Russian Revolutions could have predicted the rapid radicalization and the descent into mob violence, but, under the Shah, bth had been banned from the history curriculum... I suppose I see that as one of the dangers of the narrowing down of the curriculum that has taken place since I left England 30-odd years ago. Looking at the threads on what people teach at GCSE and A Level does indeed show a marked preference for Hitler and Stalin. It's difficult to work it our from the replies, but it would seem that you could almost get away without studying anything else from year 10 through year 13. Some appeared to study Weimar Germany, then thre rise of Hitler, then the Nazi Economy, then Nazi foreign policy... Now, I'm not saying Nazi Germany cannot teach us important lessons, but perhaps such an emphasis is a little excessive... Perhaps I'm misinformed, but it would appear that virtually all the "world" history being taught is from the 20th Century, and British history -- apart from "thematics" like medicine, crime, etc -- outside the 20th Century doesn't seem to cover much other than the Tudors. If this is the case, then I think there's rather a lot of babies been thrown out with the bathwater. I'm not advocating the sort of over-simplified survey courses the American AP examinations demand, but surely we can only achieve the level of "cultural literacy" necessary to maintain some level of communication if there is at least a general understanding of the forces which formed the 20th Century. It would seem to me, for example, that a study of the French Revolution would be pretty fundamental to a proper understanding of nationalism and liberalism... Again, I don't want to appear overly prescriptive since any "list" of what should be study would inevitably be incomplete, leaving out something someone else thought of as "essential", and I do appreciate that one can teach, for example, the growth of early civilizations as easily by looking at the Minoans as by looking at the Egyptians. However, I think the present system has gone too far the other way. Topics seem to be picked, more often than not, for the ease of the exam board, or their "interest level" rather than on the basis of their intrinsic worth, or of whether or not the complement the other topics chosen. For example, some IB teachers teach "The Rise and Rule of One-Party States" as one of the two topics they choose in year 12, and then study Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin again in year 13. This does mean that they stand a better chance in the examination, but does it really give them a fully rounded historical education? I think there's also a "baby and bathwater" element to the movement towards the use of evidence. I'm reminded of a year 13 child who informed me last year when I told him to make some notes on the Terror from his textbook, that in IB class, they did interpretation, not facts... It is important to learn the skills needed to evaluate evidence -- I remember the wonderful Mark Pullen and Tollund Man materials from the SCHP many, many years ago -- but I do think there also has to be a chronological framework upon which to hang what stduents learn from evidence. Again, in our rush to make history "hands on" and "relevant", I think we've perhaps lost track of "history as story"... Sean mentioned R. J. Unsted, and what I remember from his books was the excitement of reading history as a story -- as narrative. Looking at history books today, I think we've lost some of the excitement that comes from reading a really exciting story... This isn't very coherent or well-thought-out -- just a few observations from an ancient teacher rapidly approaching a well-earned retirement -- 10 years to go and counting....

But I'm not saying either that the JFK assassination is essentially unimportant or uninteresting, just that for 80% of the posts on an Educational Forum to be devoted to it is just a tad excessive...

I just checked the new posts for today. 14 out of 17 posts were JFK related... I accept that this is a legitimate interest for many members, but this is supposed to be an education forum, and it's beginning to get a bit swamped... Is there a technical block I can install to skip the JFK debate posts? I'm really not interested! I tried adding all the JFK enthusiasts to my ignore list, but it didn't seem to make any difference....

One often hears this sort of statement, and it would be really nice if it were true! I even believed it myself when I was younger... Then I lived through the Islamic Revolution in Iran. I taught there for five years, before, during and after the Revolution. It really did give me a different perspective! Our school, like all other private schools in the country, was obliged to hire a gentleman, nominated by the Revolutionary Committee, who was charged with supervising the religious correctness of teh school. One day, he called the Head, the Deputy Head and me (I was head of the middle school) into his office and informed us that the school was in breach of Islamic correctness with regard to the separation of the sexes. We were surprised: after the revolution we'd adopted a policy of rigorous segregation. Each year group was divided into separate boy and girl classes; they ate lunch separately; they even used separate staircases! However, this was not enough! He told us that the 4-year-old classes were still mixed..... We protested in vain that 4-year-olds didn't even think in gender terms. He told us that the Revolutionary Committee was in possession of conclusive proof that co-education in Europe and the United States led incontrovertably to homosexuality... We segregated the 4-year-olds.... On another occasion, he asked me what the basis of my Christian faith was. I told him that it was based on love: love for your neighbour (which he had no trouble grasping) and love for one's enemies. This he found quite shocking -- the idea of "turning the other cheek" to totally alien to him. Now it would be easy to dismiss this as simply being the views of one benighted fundamentalist. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case. His views were widely shared. When the son of the Anglican bishop of Tehran was assassinated during the revolution, the authorities didn't even investigate it -- the bishop was an apostate and therefore a legitimate target. The treatment of the Bahaii (spelling!) minority was brutal -- many of them were executed for "corruption on Earth" (try proving yourself innocent of that!) and all were driven from government jobs. Many members of the Jewish minority were also imprisoned or executed as "Israeli spies". Supposed homosexuals and drug users were hanged from the bridges over the main highways. It is an unpalatable fact that all these activities enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the majority of the population... Sorry, but that's the way it was! I think there really is a fundamental difference between Islam and Christianity. It may not be politically correct to claim this, but while we continue to pretend that Osama bin Laden is simply an abberration (sp?), a psychotic fundamentalist who is completely unrepresentative of his co-religionists, I think we will be poorly prepared to face the challenges of the post-Cold War world.

"It wasn't a lie; it was a terminological inexactitude." W. Churchill

You can access one of the 5 interactive demonstrations at: http://www.channel4.com/learning/microsite.../his/choice.htm <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It may be the result of my incompetence, but I can't make the link work...

And it's even fairly simple to do -- even I managed (and I'm a fully paid up member of the IT-Luddite Federation) once Andy explained it to me in words of one syllable....

I've been a teacher at the American School of Madrid for the past 25 years and before that taught for 5 years in Tehran. I have taught in technical college, comprehensive school, elementary school, middle school, and currently teach high school history. I also subscribe to the History Teaching Forum. I do have a website but it's so poor I'm ashamed to let anyone except my students access it!