April has been a busy month of driving, speaking and drawing. It’s the high season for my Author’s Purpose talks and SOL review speeches. The students I’ve seen have been bright and engaged — last night I met one who even knew what the War of Jenkins’ Ear was!!! He was in a group of fifth-graders from California visiting Williamsburg, and I couldn’t stump them in my Hysterical History talk no matter how I tried.

But students in an earlier group stumped ME. One asked what the root of the slang term “Yankee” was — and I fumbled around the answer (I was in the neighborhood, but not knocking on the front door). Here’s the real answer: “Yankee” goes all the way back to 1683, when the Dutch were in control of what we now call New York City. It’s a not-so-nice term they used for the English colonists in neighboring Connecticut. It may be from Dutch word Janke, meaning “Little John.” In one college class I studied how groups that get insulted chose to use that insult as a brand of pride, and this may be a great example of that kind of recycled use. “Yankee” may also be a form of the Dutch nickname Jan Kees, after “John Cheese,” the generic nickname the Flemings slapped on Dutchmen. So the Dutch took an insult at them and then turned it onto the English — who then took it as a proud description for themselves! It’s a general term for “native of New England” by 1765. Of course, during the American Revolution the British in London used it as a slur for all Americans, but look at how that one turned out.

In that same group of students, I was asked why the Pentagon headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense has five sides. NO CLUE!!! Turns out we got a striking building just because of a striking need — it’s a great story of American can-do-in-a-hurry. The Pentagon was built quickly because of the need for office space to run the American military effort in World War II. It has 3,705,793 square feet, making it one of the largest office buildings in the world. The first site planned for it was beside Memorial Drive, and an early plan called for a square structure with one corner cut off to fit it by an existing road. This produced a skewed Pentagon shape — five sides but not balanced or pleasing to the eye. With further planning, the building got moved to a larger plot of land nearby, and that allowed the project’s chief architects, George Edwin Bergstrom and David J. Witmer, to refine the five sides into the form of a true pentagon — which actually allows for easy movement around the huge building and for the most sunlight possible to enter the building. Preliminary design and drafting took just 34 days — and resulted in the happy accident of a world-famous shape.

I love it when History and geometry come together!

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings was in Virginia this week on her never-ending road tour to keep the No Child Left Behind federal program alive. Congress has been debating its renewal for a year now, and Spellings has the lonely task of defending this lightning rod law.

We all want students to read at a level appropriate to their age. We all want them to be able to do math. The trouble with No Child Left Behind is that - as many state education laws had done before it - it passed requirements without giving the neediest schools enough money and resources to attack the problem. What federal money there was shifted to reading and math intervention, naturally, which also meant school systems dropped classroom time and budgets for subjects like history. If you compare state testing items from 1999 and 2008 you’ll see that many states simply dropped social studies curriculum off the exams. Not a great way to build the next generation of informed citizens.

A lot of states are rethinking this power grab by the federal government. No Child Left Behind is an odd push for a “conservative” White House that allegedly doesn’t believe in big government. Virginia is one of several states where lawmakers have said they won’t participate in NCLB if they and the feds can’t agree on the standards and the way they are tested. It was revealing that when Spellings came to Richmond this week she used the federal money as one of her main reasons to stay with NCLB. The state got $352 million in fiscal 2007 from the feds, and she warned it would not be good for Virginia “to walk away from those federal resources.”

I remember the Reagan administration using the same big government money scare when it wanted states to raise the legal drinking age to 21. And it worked.

I think a renewal of No Child Left Behind should give states more flexibility on their standards. If politicians want schools to be more like businesses, they should recognize that economic choice is pushing us towards an ala carte world. For every McDonalds in the economy there are thousands of local and regional businesses that offer more choice for their local markets.

No Child Left Behind should get more money from the feds with fewer strings attached.

And of course it should include history testing! Thomas Jefferson said we needed an educated citizenry. Boosting reading may boost subscriptions to Sports Illustrated, Vogue or Car and Driver, but we Americans need to keep in touch with the communal politics that hold this nation together. We’re losing that, and No Child Left Behind doesn’t help.

Stay tuned . . .

For all the exploring I do with my boys, we still make the classic Locals mistake! We have lived in Virginia for 15 years and still missed some great sites nearby. We’ve travelled hundreds of miles to climb rocks at Gettysburg, view the Cyclorama painting in Atlanta and walk the woods of Shiloh, but we had never stood at Cold Harbor. So a few weekends ago we took a traipse through Civil War sites around Richmond.

We were amazed at how many defensive earthworks survive in the woods. Almost 150 years after they made the difference between life and death for some soldiers, these earthworks still run right behind people’s backyards! I always get a better sense of a story or event when I can walk the land where it happened, and it was chilling and beautiful to see how the defensive earthworks still snake over the land around Richmond

Truman has a great eye for detail, and he discovered that the cannons posted outside one farmhouse used in the 1862 Seven Days Battle were actually cast in 1863, as we could see from a stamp in the barrel. He was . . . horrified!

And this photo is not of Grant’s tomb — it’s his cabin. Truman stands guard over the place where Union General Ulysses S. Grant stayed on a bluff above the James River during the months of siege against the Confederate railline at Petersburg, Virginia, just south of Richmond. It’s part of a pretty park in what is now Hopewell, VA, a place we’ve driven through to get to church for 14 years - and we’d NEVER stopped until after church this rainy Sunday!

With the New York Philharmoic performing a groundbreaking concert in North Korea this week, now is a great time to have students read “Pyongyang,” a 2005 comic by Canadian-born cartoonist Guy Delisle. The concert has provided a splash of media attention to this closed, Communist country, but Delisle’s work provides a lot of simple details that show how a government can grind down people. He proves that in the modern rush to digitize and animate and YouTube, the pencil is still one of the most powerful tools a human can wield.

The grayness of his pencils perfectly suits his travelogue about his time in North Korea’s capital city while supervising an animation project. Most of us who follow the news have a mental picture of this nation controlled by one totalitarian family for the past 50 years, but Delisle provides evidence of a cultural brainwashing that goes even farther than I suspected.

The details are human and built naturally:
Peasants sweep the superhighway that no one uses.
Nothing else can hang on a wall holding a portrait of Kim Il-Sung.
Movies and TV shows continue to glorify resistance to the Japanese occupation in World War II or the American fighting in the Korean War. (There was a massive effort before this week’s concert to tear down a lot of street posters showing the same kind of images, but reporters still saw some of them.)

But the most chilling moment comes when the cartoonist notices there are no handicapped people on the clean streets of Pyongyang. His guide answers, “There are none. We’re a very homogenous nation. All North Koreans are born strong, intelligent and healthy.” And that’s that. Delisle concludes that his guide believes it - the propaganda has sunk in.

The best joke is that the North Korean handlers panic about any photography a foreigner attempts. But they never questioned Delisle’s pencil. Their mistake.

CONTENT WARNING: There is no violence or nudity and only a handful of PG-13 swear words.

How do you hold the attention of 500 elementary students on a rainy day? Show them how a few penlines makes anyone into a superdude! I draw three versions of myself in my Author’s Purpose talks, to show how a powerful imagination can reshape reality (and there is no greater reshaping to be done than to make me into a superhero!).

I had a great time at Kempsville Elementary in Virginia Beach last week. After the opening session in the cafeteria I did break-out sessions with two classes at a time, and we drew up a storm. A brainstorm - there were drawings about Ben Franklin’s kite hypothesis, Thomas Jefferson’s narrow miss of a hangman’s noose and Abe Lincoln’s old magic hat. We even explained why the Powhatan Indians built longhouses out of the reeds and sticks on the ground around them — because no one had invented “Longhouse Depot” for Saturday errands yet.

Elementary students love feeling the power of their own creativity. So did I - so I never gave it up!

A few weeks after I posted a blog here about the death of the magazine American Heritage, I was wandering through my local Barnes and Noble and the American Heritage logo jumped out at me! It’s BACK!!

Editor Edwin S. Grosvenor has reinvented it as a quarterly magazine pushing History in the headlines - just look at that cover of women soldiers in the Middle East! Throughout the mag there is a push to use History to understand what the news is now.

I’m happy to see print isn’t dead. But there’s no mistaking the priorities here. The mag is now published only a third as often as it once was, and it really becomes a glossy marketing tool for the staff’s website (which carries the tagline “History’s homepage”). The good news is that the mag and the website are in step in their new, lively dance. The website features:

* the news of actor Heath Ledger’s death because he starred in the well-received historical movie “The Patriot”

* easy-to-find blog entries, including one about how to volunteer on an archaeological dig at Mount Vernon

* news of the rediscovery of photos of Lincoln’s second inauguration, which had been mislabeled long ago

It’s a great resource for teachers making the case to students that History is new everyday. It’s been a great resource for me! www.americanheritage.com

Earlier this month I spent a day at Mantua Elementary in Fairfax County - a wonderful neighborhood school in a wooded, older and quieter section of bustling Northern Virginia. My presentation needs are simple because I travel with my own overhead projector, but Mantua’s library was tricked out! There was a digital projector for me, several computer stations and even a scanner (the tech I use all the time to get my hand-drawings into a digital form). It was tantalizing (I’ve used whiteboards at schools and shown my PowerPoint to civics groups) but I stuck with my old overhead because it allows me to work the magic of drawing and still face my audience.

The funniest tech interaction was between me and the signers who came to two of my four sessions. The school has several hearing-impaired students, one who needed me to wear a mike so he could hear. It all went well - I asked the hearing-impaired students some questions directly as I did my Phil Donahue routine in and around the audience. But the poor signers had to figure out what to do with my active style. I literally walked circles around one signer. The other one decided to trail me when I went to the back of the audience for one questioner, and she and I got back and forth just fine.

And the snowfall that day gaveth and tooketh tech away: school wasn’t cancelled, but I spent too long talking to teachers after my presentations and got stuck behind the afternoon bus line. A PT Cruiser’s car wheels won’t get me around big buses in the snow! So I just stayed in the library - where some of my earlier audience members discovered me and gathered around my Mac laptop to see me coloring one of my new cartoons. That was a fun day!!

I’ve spoken to school groups for more than a decade. Each visit energizes me as much as it does the students and teachers I meet. Last week I was up in Fairfax County, Virginia, for a whole day at Mantua Elementary and had a great time talking to students about rough drafting, language, symbolism and my Author’s Purpose in creating Chester’s adventures — and I think I even held the students’ attention from the snow falling outside!

Now I’m going to work with WorldStrides to connect to school groups VISITING Virginia! I worked for this great Charlottesville-based company last spring as an on-site coordinator, steering school groups to their destinations in the Historic Triangle and making sure their hotel stays were pleasant. Now I’m offering an evening program for WorldStrides client groups called “Hysterical History” for school groups looking for something to do after the museums close.

We’ll brainstorm ideas as I cartoon about the historical stories they’ve witnessed that day. We’ll talk about what the early American experience says to our lives now. We’ll talk about Why things happened. And we’ll draw a big nose on George Washington. It’ll be fun! I have five school groups scheduled for the spring already, so if you’re coming to Virginia with WorldStrides, ask about my “Hysterical History” program. You can find out more about this school travel company at www.worldstrides.com.

You know a forum on democracy is cool when they include the cartoonists! A few weeks ago PBS gathered about 50 American leaders to Colonial Williamsburg to debate a 21st Century description of American citizenship. Mixed in with the founder of the online Craigslist and the mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, was Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Mike Ramirez and Kansas comic book publisher Alonzo Washington. I wasn’t there as a cartoonist but as a reporter for the Daily Press, where I have worked to varying degrees since 1992.

The three days put air under my feet and ideas in my head. Democracy matters! And these people practiced it with great care and vigor. Sometimes it got heated as they discussed immigration and health care and service to the larger community, but they also did the one thing that seems to be a vanishing skill in our loud media society: they listened to each other.

We live in an age when opinion is bursting out all over, thanks to cell phones and blogs. We’re yakking and yakking. But democracy happens only when we listen and then decide in a group way which is the favored solution to the problem at hand. Some people aiding this conference are pushing hard to exercise democracy in this new century. This session at Colonial Williamsburg will air on PBS early in 2008, but if you or your civics students want to read about it now check out

www.pbs.org/newshour/btp/did2007.html

Extra credit: check out the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University. Prof. James Fishkin has a new way of political polling that involves online debate and Q-and-A with experts, and he told this CW session that the numbers are clear: the more people learn and study an issue, the more their opinions change! It’s exciting stuff to realize that we the people CAN have the power!

cdd.stanford.edu/