Afghanistan & The Taliban & Islamic World

Is the U.S. doing the right thing in Afghanistan?

Student presentations of key terms/concepts:
Mujahedeen - Islamic fighting force --Osama Bin Laden
Deobandi movement- Islamic movement against Western Civilization & teachings - now have grown into madrassas
Madrassa - anti-westernization; Mortensen dislikes their fundamentalist world view; seen as threat by U.S.
Wahabi - Sunni branch of Islam
ISI - Pakistani Intelligence agency; helped create the Taliban; now working to stop the Taliban. Pakistan has a history of supporting Islamic fundamentalism.

Charlie Wilson, US congressman who helped divert millions of dollars towards the Mujahideen in Afghanistan

Questions about new style fundamentalism of the Taliban:
What was the role of Islam in Afghanistan before the Taliban?
What were the major developments/disruptions to Sunni Afghan society 1979-1990 ?
How does Mortensen explain the presence of dictators in many Islamic fundamentalist movements?
What are the arguments for and against the Taliban as a legitimate government for the people of Afghanistan?

How have jihadists used religion to justify war/terrorism?  The true meaning of Islam and the Koran are not reflected by the extreme fundamentalists.
(Americans have a history of fundamentalists:  Puritans, Great Awakening, Evangelicals...)

Video: PBS Frontline: Return of the Taliban in our "classroom of the future" projected on 3 screens.
Peshawar, Pakistan - birthplace of AlQaida; new base of operations for Taliban;
Pakistan has little control in the tribal zones which have never been integrated into the Pakistani state.
Many human rights violations as Taliban terrorize the local populations. Mortensen kidnapped in the tribal area of Waziristan.

Questions to think about for tomorrow:
Is America Islamophobic? Talk to your parents/family about memories of 9/11 tragedy.

Three Cups of Tea

Guided Readings for Establishing Geographic, Historical and Cultural Context:

"Pakistan Since Independence"
"Challenging Islam: The New style Fundamentalism of the Taliban"

Select additional readings from the classroom BlackBoard site:

• "Rising Powers and Global Institutions"
• "Defining Success in Afghanistan"
• "The U.S. in Afghanistan"
• "2-National Theory and Partition"
• "How Dangerous is the Taliban"
• "The Future of the U.S. and Pakistan"

How to complete a critical summary:
1. Spend time sourcing/evaluating the articles for their biases and contexts.
2. Identify claims made by the articles or essays. Evaluate the evidence or argumentation used to substantiate.
3. Reflect on how each article/essay interacts with the knowledge or attitudes you previously held on this topic.
4. How do these texts shape your answers to the some of the essential questions we've generated regarding Three Cups of Tea.

Full group Town Hall Meeting

Juniors - Science

Using Twitter in the Classroom

This short video shows a great way to have "private" online discussions on Twitter.
Pretty easy to set up!

Global Education Conference

Be sure to check out the Global Education Conference.

The conference (online and free) will be held November 15 - 19, 2010, at multiple times and in multiple languages. This innovative conference sounds very exciting. The two co-chairs, Steve Hargadon and Lucy Gray, are nationally recognized educators. As you will see, there are numerous opportunities to be involved –as a presenter, on an advisory board, an attendee, etc… and the site is still under development with more information being added regularly.

Education seen through the lens of the children of Korphe and students at New Trier

Discussion centered on Quotations from Three Cups of Tea and our own motivations for education vis a vis the New Trier motto.


p.32 "Can you imagine a fourth grade class in america, alone, without a teacher sitting there quietly and working on their lessons?"

p. 149 "And I remember thinking, if I go to school, maybe one day I can become distinguished, too."

p. 207 "Shakeela is the first girl in all the Hushe Valley to be granted the privilege of a higher education....And now, all the girls of Hushe look up to her her."

p. 209 "Once you educate the boys they tend to leave the villages...But the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they've learned.  If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygience and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls."

p. 257 "I implore you to dedicate your full effort and commitment to see that all your children are educated. Otherwise, they will merely graze like sheep in the field, at the mercy of nature and the world changing so terrifyingly around us."

p. 312 "Before I met you Dr. Greg, I had no idea what education was," Jahan said, refilling his teacup. "But now I think it is like water. It is important for everything in life."

We're Back.............

Bonding with the new Junior and Senior students! So exciting to meet everyone. We are in the large EPI Center on the 3rd floor as a whole group today.

Colby shared expectations and syllabus and introduced students to our BlackBoard website which includes the student calendar which includes assignments/readings.

First English Essay assigned:
"What in your opinion is the most significant event in Three Cups of Tea?

Breaking out in small groups to do an inquiry activity with Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea.



Next, the super fun outdoor activity which involves creating a human amoeba.

Amira Mortenson performs the song "Three Cups of Tea"

This performance is inspired by the book of the same title written by her father, Greg Mortenson.



Good news just tweeted by Greg Mortenson: From 2000 to 2010, Afghanistan school enrollment went from 800,000 to 7 million, including 2.5 million girls.

Collaborative Consumption

Michael Wesch recently tweeted about the growing trend of "Collaborative Consumption". This YouTube video explains the concept:

We are at the start of the "Big Shift" away from the 20th century defined by hyper-consumption towards the 21st century, an age of Collaborative Consumption.
But just how LARGE and FAR-REACHING is this groundswell? Watch & listen.

It seems to me that this ties in with the notion of "cognitive surplus" as explained by Clay Shirky. He argues that the time Americans once spent watching TV has been redirected toward activities that are less about consuming and more about engaging—from Flickr and Facebook to powerful forms of online political action. And these efforts aren’t fueled by external rewards but by intrinsic motivation—the joy of doing something for its own sake. I think that the enthusiasm for saving resources and sustainable living are a part of this shift.

World Simulation Project

From Professor Michael Wesch,Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Digital Ethnography where he was Kansas State University's 2008 U.S. Professor of the Year.
You may remember him as the creating of the short film:

YouTube - The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)

Wesch's motivation for the World Simulation Project:

"The World Simulation is a radical experiment in learning that is the centerpiece of the Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course at Kansas State University, created in a fit of frustration with the large lecture hall format which seems inevitable in a classroom of 200-400 students. Of utmost concern to me, was the nature of questions I was hearing from students, which tended to be administrative and procedural rather than penetrative, critical, and insightful. My least favorite question was also the most common: "What do we need to know for this test?" Something had to be done, so I set to work creating the World Simulation."

Watch the trailer for this project:



This project is nothing less than awesome. For the full set up, rules and objectives, and the wiki with full materials, see the Project website

We need to globalize education

Alan November argues that we need to change the concept of the learner to that of being a contributor.

Myths and Opportunities: Technology in the Classroom by Alan November from Brian Mull on Vimeo.

Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, refers to Clay Shirky as "a prominent thinker on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies".  Shirky is a consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He teaches a New Media course at New York University investigating the interrelated effects of social networks and technological networks, and how our networks shape culture and vice-versa.

In a recent TED Talk, Shirky explains how the social sciences are recognizing that our intrinsic motivation for being a part of something larger than ourselves is leading to the "design for generosity", enabled by social media. Simply put, we have positive feelings about sharing information with one another. Shirky argues that civic value is a side effect of communal participation in large scale action in the 21st Century.

This ties in with the research of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. I just finished reading Half the Sky, Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. Watching Shirky's talk was exciting and confirmed for me that there many opportunities to work against poverty and injustice via social networks that will be game changers, especially for women.

Kristof seems to be one of the only journalists writing about the oppression of women on a regular basis in the NY Times. In the stories Kristof and WuDunn share about women across the developing world, we learn that the key to economic and social progress lies in unleashing women's potential.

Take 10 minutes out of your day and watch Shirky demonstrate the correlation between social media and changing the world.

12 Events That Will Change Everything, Made Interactive

"12 Events That Will Change Everything," which appears in the June 2010 issue of Scientific American has an interactive companion website.  IGSS students will be exploring global ethical issues in 2010-11 and hopefully, they may want to  explore some of the global ethical issues related to future events and how societies can best respond.

I am currently looking at essays from a recent NT library purchase:

This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future
Edited byJohn Brockman. Harper Perennial,which is Part of a series stemming from his online science journal Edge (www.edge.org), including What Have You Changed Your Mind About? and What Is Your Dangerous Idea? 

In this book author and editor Brockman presents 136 answers to the question, “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” 

From the book's website: Milan architect Stefano Boeri responds with a single sentence: “Discovering that someone from the future has already come to visit us.” Most others take the question more seriously; J. Craig Venter believes his laboratory will use “digitized genetic information” to direct organisms in creating biofuels and recycling carbon dioxide. Like biofuels, several topics are recurrent: both Robert Shapiro and Douglas Rushikoff consider discovering a “Separate Origin for Life,” a terrestrial unicellular organism that doesn’t belong to our tree of life; Leo M. Chalupa and Alison Gopnik both consider the possibility resetting the adult brain’s plasticity—its capacity for learning—to childhood levels. Futurologist Juan Enriquez believes that reengineering body parts and the brain will lead to “human speciation” unseen for hundreds of thousands of years, while controversial atheist Richard Dawkins suggests that reverse-engineering evolution could create a highly illuminating “continuum between every species and every other.” 

Many of these ideas are related to those in the Scientific American article. The June article is available full text in the library's print periodicals section.  ProQuest database does not offer the article full-text.

Mediavore's Dilemma

An excerpt from:

The Mediavore's Dilemma: Making Sustainable Media Choices

How Big is the Media's Carbon Footprint?

"Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a private equity firm, reported that the media industry rose from the 10th largest sector of the economy in 1975 to the 5th largest in 2009. According to the 2009 Deloitte Media and Entertainment Industry Outlook, media and entertainment is one of the largest sectors in the U.S. economy: About $950 billion was spent on products and services provided by media and entertainment companies in 2006. That spending is expected to grow by 38 percent to $1.3 trillion by 2011.

Another key aspect of the media game that can be measured is advertising spend. A major source of revenue to media companies is the purchase of advertising by brands who spend in excess of $125 billion in the U.S. each year to sponsor media products. Close to $500 billion is spent each year worldwide. According to research firm Kantar Media, while advertising expenditures fell 12.3 percent in 2009 due to the recession, advertising expenditures in the first quarter of 2010 rose 5.1 percent from 2009 to $31.3 billion.

The U.S. Department of Energy reports that approximately 360,000 tons of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gas emissions are associated with each billion dollars of economic activity, which would mean the carbon footprint of the media industry could be as much as 500 million metric tons of greenhouse gas. That would be equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of 130 coal-fired power plants burning 2.6 million railcars of coal; or the annual greenhouse gas emissions from 95 million four passenger vehicles burning 56 billion gallons of gasoline. The DOE also reported that in 2008 the United States consumed about 138 billion gallons (or 3.3 billion barrels) of gasoline and emitted approximately 6.9 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gas."

Read the full report from PBS' MediaShift blog.

The New York Times’ Summer Reading Challenge

Have you heard about The New York Times’ Summer Reading Challenge?

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/student-challenge-the-times-as-your-summer-reading-2/?scp=2&sq=choice%20blog&st=cse

This is an attempt by the Times to promote reading of their own paper and also to encourage reading of more non-fiction and current events of the students’ choice and more discussion of the content.  This year, the Times will repeatedly ask students to post their thoughts (400 words or less) in response to the question “What interested you most in the Times this week?” They can comment upon an article, photo, podcast, graphic, etc. and the page for this week is here.

The Times cites rationale for this project in an earlier posting:  In “The Crush of Summer Homework,” last August by Professor of Education Elizabeth Birr Moje.

Linda Straube

Librarian, New Trier High School

IGSS Challenge: Civil Rights Data Collection

Something really got me fired up today! I decided we should pose this question to IGSS students since they are writing about the efficacy of change agents in U.S. history and today.

Here's the story--Our Asst. Supt. for Student Services Mr. Tim Hayes sent the following letter home to parents:

Dear Parents,

By now you have been contacted by your son’s or daughter’s adviser regarding New Trier High School’s participation in the Civil Rights Data Collection.  New Trier has been selected for participation in this data collection by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.  The data collection is conducted every other year, and participation for those schools selected is mandatory.   More information on the data collection can be found at http://ocrdata.ed.gov/.

We are reaching out to you because our records show that your son or daughter is listed in the “multiracial” category in his or her demographic information.  However, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights does not recognize “multiracial” as a category for this mandatory data collection, nor does it allow a person to choose more than one category.

If you have not already responded to your son’s or daughter’s adviser, please reply to this email, and let me know what category you would like the school to use for your child.  You may only select one category.  [emphasis is mine] They are:

·         White

·         Black

·         American Indian/Alaska Native

·         Asian/Pacific Islander

·         Hispanic

We recognize that this is a sensitive topic for students and families.  For that reason, I am contacting you directly to make sure that you are aware of the request.  Please know that the data submitted for this purpose does not identify individual students.   Your selection of a race will be used solely for New Trier’s submission to the Department of Education and will not affect your student’s record at our school, which continues to recognize the multiracial category.  In addition, you will have the opportunity to review all of the school demographic data for your son or daughter later this summer and make any necessary corrections.

If your child has been incorrectly listed in the multicultural category, please let me know how they should be listed, and we will correct our records.

Thank you for your consideration of this request.  Please let me know if you have any questions.

 Sincerely,

Timothy Hayes

Assistant Superintendent for Student Services

New Trier High School

Why are educators constantly asked to do stupid things by governmental agencies?  Why do schools comply? [to get funding!]  What if schools were to write-in the racial information provided by the parents?  Would anyone even notice?   What could Civil Disobedience to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights request for information look like? Obviously our Supt. takes his job seriously and wants to comply with federal regulations.  What can we do as teachers and as a student body to change this? 

Why do federal regulations include naming/labeling children of multiracial origin?  Should we all roll over and take this?  What if you or your son or daughter were biracial?  Do you want the federal government making you choose a category? To the exclusion of another? Does this actually violate Title VI in some way?  Does the race labeling itself constitute a type of discrimination?  

The intent of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was to declare that discrimination on the grounds of race, color, or national origin shall not occur in connection with programs and activities receiving Federal financial assistance and authorizes and directs the appropriate Federal departments and agencies to take action to carry out this policy.

Why does the U.S. Census take into account a larger variety of categories and also allow a write-in category?  Shouldn't the U.S. Department of Education take this into consideration?  Why are they allowed to bully parents into making a statement about the race of their child?

According to the Public Law 94-171 Redistricting Data File, Race is defined for the 2000 U.S. Census as:


"The concept of race as used by the Census Bureau reflects self-identification by people according to the race or races with which they most closely identify. These categories are sociopolitical constructs and should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature. Furthermore, the race categories include both racial and national-origin groups."

Now, take a look at the  Census 2010 form with their categories for "race". Note that they are very careful to specify that "Hispanic origins are not races". Note also that respondents may provide write-in entries such as multiracial, mixed, interracial. Also, take a look at the most recent (2006) New Trier High School data collection report.  How does this type of report promote educational excellence (which is the purported mission of the Office of Education)?  I would guess that these demographics are used to track educational attainment of students.  At the end of the day, aren't these statistics just more government misinformation/lies?