Eastside Project

In 2008 Dr. Irene Pocarello, President of the Eastside College, envisioned an umbrellic project that celebrated the history, culture, and people of Magnolia Park. Eastside College is located in Magnolia Park. The project included an oral history series, a video, and a history book. I co-authored the book published by Pearson. Entitled The Spirit of Magnolia Park: Ethnic Pride in a Mexican Barrio, 1909-2009, I’ve used the book in my Mexican-American history, Mexican American studies, and sometimes for the second part of the the US survey.

The book is nine years old and so I started to both rewrite and perform more research to continue the history beyond 2009. More and more of my students had demonstrated an interest in local history and  so I began lecturing more on the history of Houston and assigning monographs on race in Houston.

Then in the Fall of 2017 I began having student write brief essays on why they decided to enroll in college. That led to essays on their contemporary neighborhoods. The Dr. Pocarello died in early 2018 and I began talking to my students about her any her contributions to the college and the neighborhood. And that just evolved into the idea of continuing to research the people, places, and culture of Magnolia Park, but through the lens of Eastside College's students.

I collected many personal accounts on why they decided to enroll in college, first semester trials and tribulations, and advice they would give to incoming students on how to succeed. I then started to assign readings on local, even micro, history. Lectures followed and then I assigned small research assignments on local events (Kennedy's visit in 1963, UN's Decade of Women, HISD labeling Mexican-Americans white for busing purposes). And so in the Fall of 2018 I started posting the work of students on a website I created. The website is password protected. If you are interested in reading about our students' experiences and their research on Magnolia Park, contact me and I will give you the password.

The URL is: https://jamesrossnazzal.wixsite.com/eastside

Continuity or Change?

John Adams signed the Sedition Act, which voided parts of the First Amendment, including freedom of the press and free speech. John Adams later said voting for Thomas Jefferson would be voting for the Devil. Jefferson’s supporters called John Adams “King John.” But then President Andrew Jackson’s detractors referred to him as “King Andrew.” 

                                       

Abraham Lincoln did suspend habeas corpus, had the military detain certain legislators to ensure Maryland voted to stay in the Union, and had protesters arrested. Woodrow Wilson also had protesters arrested during the Great War. Refusing to go to war due to religious reasons could have resulted in being thrown in prison at that time. I believe that last conscientious objector was released in 1933. 

Teddy Roosevelt routinely attacked his predecessor and fellow Republican, William Howard Taft. But then his cousin was also attacked. "Roosevelt is a socialist," said Rep. Robert Rich, which was a sentiment held by various corporate leaders. Others wondered if Communists infiltrated FDR's administration and there was talk among some Republicans (who were the minority in Congress) to try to impeach FDR. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) claimed spies from the Soviet Union infiltrated the presidency of fellow Republican and one-time Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower. McCarthy's military exploits were found to be akin to fairy tales and so he was mocked in his nickname "Tail-gunner Joe." The House impeached Bill Clinton for lying about having committed adultery. And then there was Nixon who famously said if the president does it, it's not illegal. Many in his administration ended up in jail. "I am not a crook," he repeated and repeated and repeated.

            

Every president has been portrayed at sometime during their presidency as someone who will destroy the pillars of this country, a potential king or dictator. The country remains, the Constitution is intact, and the center of the American experiment, democracy and capitalism, remain firmly in place.  

This isn’t normal,” “threat to democracy,” “disgraceful,” “dangerous,” “treasonous” and similar sentiments are being alleged every day by more members of Trump's own party and retired military leaders. To name a few, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE), Senator and one-time GOP presidential candidate John McCain, Gov. and one-time GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, George Will (columnist Washington Post who recently renounced his affiliation with the GOP),  Stephen Walt (Foreign Policy magazine), Ben Shapiro (Alt-right author, speaker, radio personality), John Brennan (ex-Director, CIA), General Barry McCaffrey, and Admiral William McRaven.

Is there more continuity or more change among major themes in US history? I am interested in five major themes to Trump’s time in office: Press, Race, Immigration, Patriotism, and Foreign Policy. I am going to look at those themes in other presidencies. I’d like to research and write an OER ancillary or reference guide in a non-traditional format. The first chapter would cover the 2016 election to the present examining those five themes. The rest will be chronological, from Washington to Obama, examining those themes in various presidencies. Then the final chapter will address the big question: Continuity or Change?  On Inauguration Day, 2017, Peabody and Emmy Trustees Award winner Dan Rather wrote “These are not normal times.” Was that a sentiment regularly repeated since 1789 or unique to 2017? 

                                            

Comparing the words and actions of whoever is in power to those of Richard Nixon 

has been low-hanging fruit of political cartoonists. Memes, however, are relatively new.

Fall’s Focus

Even though the words and ideas coming out of Washington DC are unique during my lifetime, those will be examined in a scholarly work I outlined below. My classes on US history from 1877 to the present will continue to focus on women’s history in my lectures and and by reading primary source documents on women’s history. But this semester, assignments will focus on local history as I’ve heard from more students interested in learning about the history of their neighborhoods after they heard a six hour lecture series on the history of the neighborhood surrounding the college -Magnolia Park.

Those students will be reading two monographs on Houston. One examines migration history, segregation, and the blurring of race (Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City) and the other looks at racial identity in the 1970s (Brown, Not White: School Segregation and the Chicago Movement in Houston).

Students will have the choice to complete various assignments on their neighborhoods or the larger Second Ward. Those projects will include their own histories, oral histories of residents from the various neighborhoods, traditional research papers on those neighborhoods, and histories of unique buildings and businesses. The final assignment will be letters to future Eastside campus students about the experiences of my students at the college. There will be a website that will display students’ works in the hope of adding to the rich history of Houston’s Eastside started by Dr. Irene Pocatello.

This project is dedicated to the memory Dr. Irene Pocatello, a past president of Houston Community College’s Eastside campus and a champion of recording the tapestry of the neighborhood surrounding the college, Magnolia Park in what is commonly known as the Second Ward. In celebration of the neighborhood’s 100th anniversary, Dr. Pocarello launched various projects to record the centennial, to include an oral history project and a monograph of the first 100 years of Magnolia Park. Dr. Pocatello was from Magnolia Park and died in 2018.

The Fall 2018 will be the first time I am using this format. Throughout the semester I will ask for students’ feedback: What they liked and didn’t like and why, as well as their ideas on enhancing the project.

Hidalgo Park quiosco 

OER Strategy - Part II - Document Collections

Over the years I have collected many hundreds of primary source documents and academic journal articles on a wide array of US history but with a focus on women, African American, and Mexican American history. I have made some of those available in the Canvas classes. Starting in the Fall I will put all of my documents and articles together into two ancillaries. One will be just about US women's history entitled "Arise All Women How Have Hearts." That is the title of a poem Julia Ward Howe wrote in 1870. Then I will all of my collected OER materials under the title "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About History But Were Afraid to Ask." That's a spin on the title of a 1972 Woody Allen movie.

I will then allow students to select anything from those ancillaries to read each week. That will mean, however, that I will need to create assignments that are sufficiently broad so that whatever students select to read can be used in successful completion of those assignments. Which means more work for me. Yikes!

Ultimately (before the Thanksgiving break is the goal) I want to put both of those ancillaries on PressBooks.

OER Strategy - Part I - My Textbook

I am implementing an OER strategy, as opposed to just trying something here and something there. First, I am moving my US history ancillary from the Rice platform (OpenStax) where the book has been available since 2010 to PressBooks: https://ourstory.pressbooks.com/. I will be moving the material sometime before the Fall semester begins. The book covers US history to 1877 and so I will be able to use that resource in my Hist 1301 classes. I will assign a few chapters then ask for feedback from my students and rewrite as necessary. I have received much interest in the book on the Rice platform over the years from California to Sweden, but as a legacy author Rice does not promote the book and so people have a hard time finding the book. Heer is the URL for the book on the Rice site: https://cnx.org/contents/2IDlLfJX@8.2:kGr-4VFA@2

The other reason for the move to PressBooks is because the college' s OER program is trying to coordinate all OER to one platform. OER is part of the college's larger Z-Degree program:  http://www.hccs.edu/zdegree/.

Four Down, Two to Go

Two of my four classes in the first Summer semester were on-campus. In those two classes I used 100% OER; the students, as a class, voted on their assignments and I accepted late submissions with a one grade penalty. For the first time I had 100% completion, 100% succession (passing) in both classes. The other part of the equation was my attitude. I became more laid back and less of the task master.

Summer Semester is Upon Us!

With our Summer semester upon us, here is what I hope will be the evolution of my students’ thoughts about my class on the first day, by song title:

First day of class students are normally anxious, some to the extent of being, shall we say, freaked out, as Chic put it in Le Freak (Chic) which was released in 1978.

Between my no late work policy, my "Damn the torpedoes" attitude but self-effacing humor, after awhile students are on the fence. And ask themselves, Should I Stay or Should I Go? (The Clash), released in 1981.

And finally, after my first lecture (more like a vignette) they will understand how I will be able to lead them to the Promised Land and so they will raises their voices and collectively proclaim, Show Me The Way (Peter Frampton) released in 1975.

Self Reflection (with the help of my students)

At the end of each semester, I take stock by talking to students, by looking at what went right, what went wrong. Thinking if I can make what wrong better or if not, what can I replace it with? But this semester my students were particularly helpful, insightful, and offered deep, meaningful assistance on what they thought went right, what went wrong, and how to fix it, from their side of the classroom.

So, this is what I've come up with, this is both my Lessons Leaned as well as my vision for the Fall.

I have come up with three things that I am going to introduce in my summer classes, then tweak them for the Fall classes. Why three? Three is a magical number in world civilizations. Three dimensions, three types of time, three prime colors, three is important in every religion (most Christians are Trinitarians, for example). The Christian god has three attributes (omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence). Hindus have a triumvirate of gods. Three branches of government. A syllogism is a three-part statement (If A=B and B=C thus A=C) and the Declaration of Independence is a syllogism. The old School House Rock series has a song about the number three. Entitled 3 is a Magic Number.

So, here are my Big Three:

1.      

         By the end of May, I will have recreated all Hist 1301 and 1302 PowerPoint presentations, recorded them using a screen grab program called Camastia I purchased recently. This will allow students to hear embedded video in Canvas and my on-campus classes will be able to see the videos instead of those annoying black boxes created by a clash of technologies. I will also upload all of those videos to my YouTube channel as some students said they would like access to new lectures after they have left the class. 

2.      I like the idea of organizing the documents, articles and essays in a more accessible way than chronologically. So, after talking it over with some of my students, I will identify themes, create folders for each theme, then place all the resources into their respective folder. 

This is going to take a bit of time. The OER students see in the Canvas class make up about 10% of the sources I have collected over the years. I do not want to overwhelm students, which is why I place just a fraction in the classes. But if I am placing the sources in a more accessible format, maybe its time to upload all of my collected OER. My ultimate goal is to create a class in which students would not have to purchase anything at all. Maybe it’s time to do that. My goal is to have this completed by the end of July.

3.      And the biggie . . . The one thing that I work on each semester, the one thing that I want to improve on the most, the one thing that I think I get better at, but the one thing that students point out that I fail at each semester, is to become more warm and fuzzy.

      I am concerned that being too welcoming would result in students taking advantage of my good nature. However, that could be unfounded anxiety (left over from my divorce -oh the baggage we carry). 

      Two assignments this semester changed how I will approach students. I will test drive the approach in the summer and if necessary make changes for the Fall. Here are the assignments: 

      This semester I had students in my Hist 1302 class write an optional essay on feminism. Those who did so provided me with an unexpected insight into what makes them tick. The assignment was to watch 12 videos of women from various political backgrounds talking about their definitions of feminism based on their experiences in the workplace. Then students were to draft their own definitions of feminism using evidence from the videos. Well, the essays used evidence from the videos but then explained why -that something in their past was not unlike what the women in the videos experienced. I was unprepared for that. And, I read the same experiences from those students, over and over again. First, I was impressed with these students for being so open with me and second, I was delighted to gain such insight into their lives because if I would have known this stuff earlier, that information would have helped me to have shaped the class more towards their experiences. To create a more meaningful class.

      The second assignment was an essay on how students came to the college. Entitled “The Road Less Traveled” around two dozen students wrote about their past experiences. Most started before high school. And their stories were quite similar. Lots of real human tragedy. Sorrow. Sadness. Again, I was impressed with their willingness to share that stuff about themselves with me and I had wished I had that knowledge at the beginning of the semester in order to better shape the class.

      There was almost nothing the students wrote about in these two assignments that I have not experienced. And, there is one thing that nobody wrote about that I have experienced. I know that most of you did not do those two assignments. But those who did know exactly what I am talking about.

So, here is what I am going to do.

A.    I am going to begin the class with my “Road Less Traveled.” I am going to be as open and honest with my new students as you all were in your essays. I am hoping in doing so that that will start the process of students looking at me less as an authoritative figure (I still think the haircut scares folks) and more of a person who will help guide them through the next 16 weeks. Someone whose experiences are not unlike their own.

B.     The first assignment will be “The Road Less Traveled.” Students will have until the end of the second week to complete this assignment. I will read these over the weekend and then at the start of week #3 I will re-chart or re-purpose the class to better align with the experiences/expectations of the students so that each class will have a particular focus or set of goals.

C.     Discussion will be a sizable part of the course grade. On the second day of each week students will be required to bring to class one question to ask the class. It can be about the syllabus, an assignment, or something they read.

D.    Finally, the Perfection Model is pushed in K-12, resulting in grade inflation (did you know anyone who graduated high school with a GPA in excess of 4.0?), an inaccurate belief in the significance of grades, and the belief that any grade less than an A is a failing grade. In every class, every semester, I do indeed have students who ask me for extra credit because they do not want to “fail the class” when their course grade is in the 70s. In other words, they believe that a C is failing!

“Failure is not an option” is an ideology supported in the K-12 arena (and sometimes by really bad managers in the business world) across the country for about 20 years. But, we learn from failure. Without failure we have no way of measuring success. So, here is going to be my motto, what will appear at the top of each syllabus in the Fall:

“It’s OK to fail. Not only is failure an option, failure is an expected outcome at some point this semester. Do not panic.”

And my new policy will be that if you earn a D or an F on any assignment (except the final exam), you may see me in my office and we will discuss what happened and what you will do in the future to avoid that or those things that resulted in a less than passing grade. NASA calls that “Lessons Learned.” Then you can redo the assignment. If you adhere to the assignment’s requirements, your grade will go from an F to a C. 

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

I

LULAC in Houston

There was no such thing as “the civil rights movement” in Texas but rather civil rights movements and LULAC certainly was the tip of the spear for demanding, securing, and protecting civil rights for a large and under served population along the Third Coast.

This building, this project, and now this memorialization is a beacon to those who served here in Houston and an acknowledgement of the importance of UHD, its faculty, staff, and graduates to our community.

https://www-nbcnews-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna842721

Entitlement

One development I have noticed is an increase in the number of people who demonstrate entitlement. This trend is of course not limited to academia. Pundits have been pointing this out for years. I am unsure if a sense of entitlement is a result of the participation trophy philosophy of the last 15-20 years or something else. What I have noticed is an increase in students thinking they should get an A because they submitted something. Work that had not met the minimum requirements to garner a C is nonetheless being touted as A work. Excellence, it seems, is equal to participating. Some have even used the word "deserve" in connection with the grade of A.

When I was ten years old I began playing football in my school league. There were 16 teams, two divisions, and each team consisted of players from the 4th grade to the 8th grade -roughly 10 to 13, or thereabouts. I was on the Eagles.

The Eagles played for the league championship my first year on the team. I played in every game. The coach would send in the 4th graders in the final quarter. We played offense only as to ensure the other team would not score on us.

At the end of each season was the awards banquet where team and individual awards were presented. The team came in second place and so I was presented a trophy. Although I was initially excited about receiving my first trophy, the feeling of elation wore off the next day. You see, I knew I was awarded that trophy because I was a member of the team, not because I performed or participated in any way that resulted in the team winning the trophy. In other words, I did not feel that I had earned that trophy. And so I placed the trophy in my bedroom closet, where it stayed for four years.

Four years later I was in 8th grade. I started on both offense and defense and was on the All-Star team. The Eagles won the league championship that year. That time, as I was keenly aware of how I helped the team secure the trophy, I placed that trophy on the shelf above my bed because I knew that I had earned the accolades and my part in the team securing that trophy. 

I was cognizant of the difference between deserving something and earning something, which is something I try to instill in my students. This is known as a soft skill, an emotional quotient and something that employers look for: potential team members with the soft skills that translate into successful members of their corporate team.

I wonder if that is one of the major differences between the feelings of earning something and a feeling of deserving something: team work. To earn something is to participate as a member of something greater than oneself while entitlement is focusing on oneself?

I played football from nine years. I was on the track team four years. I was in the Army for over seven years and was part of numerous other teams throughout my life. Although some of my colleagues here and across the country may see what they do as compartmentalized, I see what I  do as a member of a team: the History Department team, the Liberal Arts Division team and the College team. Students are indeed members of a team. My classroom is a team and I happen to be the Project Manager. Feelings of entitlement have no place in my classroom nor in the corporate world.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.