Tuesday

My meeting with the parent of the student who plagiarized went far better than I feared. So often we dread things and they never turn out to be that bad. She supported me fully. How nice it was to hear that. We just talked about our concerns for the student and what we could do to get them on the right track. What a relief.

*********

We live in an incredibly shrinking world. Since this summer I have listened to podcasts by a Dan Carlin called "Dan Carlin's Hardcore History." Carlin is not a history teacher or historian even. He is a self professed history fan. As am I. I downloaded several podcasts this summer that deal with both literature and history; however, such as "Great Moments in History" and "Military History" are quite bad. The latter is read by someone with absolutely no speaking skills at all. Listening to it is like listening to the most boring lecture you've ever heard. But Carlin has a background in talk radio. The production quality of the podcast is excellent.

He has 18 episodes completed so far. Because he researches the topics thoroughly and spends a great deal of time on prodcution values and so on, it takes about a month and a half between episodes. Prior to his latest episode, the last two podcasts focused on hamnity's facination with the Nazis and the fall of the ancient assyrian city of Nineveh. Both were great.

In fact, nearly all 18 episodes are great. I find myself referring to them in class. I also used one on the Great War for my British Lit class.

Carlin's most recent podcast is an interview with the renowned (or so I'm told - I'm flubbing here since I've never heard of him - but there's a WHOLE LOT that I haven't heard of) scientific historian James Burke. I think I could blog for month (and I probably will in bits and pieces once I get my mind wrapped around the issues) on what they discussed.

At the end of the episode, Carlin mentioned how they received thousands of emails and that while he couldn't respond to them, he did read them and enjoyed the feedback.

I figured, what the hell? So I shot off a quick email yesterday morning telling him that I shared his ideas with class and thought he was doing a great job of making history entertaining (I listen to the podcasts mostly to and from work).

Within the hour I received an email back from Carlin, which finally gets me back to my original topic here. He thanked me for my comments and for sharing his podcast with my class.

While the internet has a lot of drawbacks, one thing it has done has suddenly shrunk our world down. Since everyone has email, we are really just one click away from just about anyone else - regardless of location, age, or status. That's pretty amazing. So much for the theory of six degrees of separation, right? It's more like two or three degrees of separation.