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What's Lori Reading?

Lori Forlizzi is one of our instructors, and her specialty is reading.

Lori is currently reading Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. Freedom is a novel that explores the relationships between family members and how they appear to each other and to people outside the family unit. Lori says she is reading this book because she liked one of the author's earlier books, The Corrections.

What's Chuck Reading?

Chuck Klinger is one of our instructors. His specialty subject is math.

He's reading The Bourne Legacy by Eric Van Lustbader. Chuck says he liked the Bourne movies so much that he's decided to read the book that have not been made into movies. He says they are fast-paced books that keep him reading to see what will happen next.

Chuck coaches his daughter's soccer team, so he is also reading Coaching Girls Soccer by John Dewitt. He says it is helping him to understand the fine points of soccer better, and also provides him with ideas for drills to use during practice.

What's Destiny Reading?

Destiny Long is our fearless leader! She is our program coordinator, as well as a distance instructor. Destiny is very, very busy and doesn't have much time to read books, but she does read magazine articles. She is taking Spanish classes and she is currently reading her way through an issue of People Magazine -- in Spanish!

What's Lisa U. Reading?

Lisa Urban is our Distance Learning Liaison for the eWorkSkills program. She enjoys reading Sue Grafton's "Alphabet" mystery series, and is currently reading T is for Trespass. The series centers around a female private investigator named Kinsey Millhone. Lisa says she likes these books because Kinsey is a smart, competent, and capable woman who always solves the mysteries and catches the bad guys! Lisa says, "It's fun to see what titles Sue will come up with as she works her way through the alphabet!" The next book in the series is U is for Undertow.

If you'd like to read Sue Grafton's mystery books, you might want to start with A is for Alibi.

What's Shannon Reading?

Shannon Mischler is our ESOL instructor.

She's been reading a lot lately, and she's been reading different genres and styles of books. She recently finished Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. Shannon says the topic was not something that would normally interest her, but the writing was "riveting." Shannon's father-in-law was a B24 pilot during WWII, just like the main character in the book, so she enjoyed being able to sit down with him and listen to his stories of flying during the war. Real-life experiences can sometimes bring a work of fiction alive!

Shannon has also recently finished Moll Flanders by Daniel Dafoe. She says, "I was astonished at the seventeenth century depiction of independent women. Truly one of the original stream -of-consciousness chick lit books!" Dafoe is an ancestor of actor Willem Dafoe (a bit of trivia!), and he also wrote Robinson Crusoe.

Shannon is currently reading The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Wharton's works usually employed dramatic irony to portay the lives of the upper class. The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 making Edith Wharton the first woman to win the prize.

What's Jen Reading?

Jen Wagner is one of our DLP teachers. We all teach all subjects, but Jen's specialties are science and math.

Jen says she doesn't have much time to read, but when she does, she reads Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. She loves the story and admires the main character, Elizabeth Bennett.

Jen also likes to read books by Nora Roberts. Her current favorite is the new Vision in White series.

She enjoys reading to her children. Favorite children's books include The Big Wide-Mouthed Frog by Ana Martin Larranaga, and The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry, and The Big Hungry Bear by Audrey and Don Wood.

Jen says she loves to read and wishes she had more time to do it. When she does have time, she likes to read happy books.

Summer Session Begins Monday

Welcome back, DLP students! We hope that you are having a great summer and keeping cool during this heatwave. Our Summer Session begins Monday, July 18.

This blog has been added as a resource on our Moodle site.

If you have any suggestions for the blog, please email me at svanart@tiu11.org.

DLP on Hiatus

Congratulations to our students for completing another session and another year of classes! The Distance Learning Project will be on hiatus until mid-July.

Seward's Folly

Before the Civil War, Alaska was a Russian territory. Russia offered to sell it to the US, but the Civil War, and America needed to focus on that. When the war ended in 1865, US Secretary of State William Seward wanted to expand the US as much as possible. He wanted to go ahead with the purchase of Alaska from Russia, but he needed approval from the US Senate and Congress. They laughed and called the purchase "Seward's Folly" and "Seward's Icebox." They believed the land was useless, full of ice, snow, and frozen land.

Seward's purchase of Alaska was approved by one vote. Settlement was slow until 1898, when gold was discovered there. Since then, other Alaska has found to be a wealth of natural resources, such as oil.

Did you know that Alaska is closer to Russia than it is to the US? The Bering Strait, which separates the two countries, is only 2.5 miles wide! Alaska is about 500 miles away from Washington, it's closest American neighbor! Alaska's entire land border is next to Canada.

Alaska is also the largest state. Its land mass is about 1/5 the size of the rest of the United States. The second largest state is Texas, which is about half as big as Alaska.

PAACE

I'm at PAACE this week.

Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan

On March 3, 1887, Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan met for the first time. Helen was 6 years old and Anne was 20.

Helen Keller was born in 1880 to a Confederate Civil War veteran and his wife in Alabama. When she was 19 months old, she contracted an illness which left her deaf and blind. Her parents, who wanted her to have as normal a life as possible, contacted Alexander Graham Bell, who was an authority on deafness. Bell also invented the telephone. Bell told the family about the Perkins School for the Blind, near Boston. In turn, the school recommended Anne Sullivan as a teacher for Helen.

Anne Sullivan was born in 1866 in Massachusetts, and was a student at the Perkins School. Because she has a severe visual impairment herself, she had some understanding of Helen's feelings of isolation and frustration.

Anne tried to teach Helen by using her finger to spell out words in the palm of her student's hand. Helen did not understand what her teacher was doing, and resisted, sometimes violently. A breakthrough came one day when Anne held Helen's hand under running water, and spelled out the word "water" in her other hand. At last, Helen understood! From that day forward, she wanted Anne to teach her everything she could.

Helen's love of learning flourished she was able to complete high school and go on to Radcliffe College in Cambridge, MA. She was the first deaf-blind person to receive a Bachelor's degree. She graduated from college with honors in 1904.

Helen and Anne became inseparable. Anne accompanied Helen to college and continued to help her to communicate and study. This only ended when Anne died in 1935.

Helen became an author and a public speaker. She published her first book, an autobiography called "The Story of My Life," in 1902. She was a strong advocate for the deaf, the blind, and racial equality.

Helen Keller died at her home in Connecticut in 1968 at the age of 87.

Apologies and Call for Suggestions

I have been very lax this month in posting. The new year has been very busy, but I promise to try to get back to posting on a regular basis, even if it's just weekly.

If you have any questions, or something you'd like to know more about, please comment on this post, or contact me directly.

Happy New Year!

We at DLP hope that you all have a safe and wonderful 2011!

The PA DLP blog has been dormant for the last several weeks, but I'm ready to get rolling again! I hope that you enjoy the blog in the coming year!

Feel Free to Comment!

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post, or to contact me. You are also welcome to use the check boxes under each post to let me know whether the post have been helpful or not.

What Do Hot Beverages Have to Do With Politics?

Before the American Revolution, our country was under English rule. The colonists had to rely on England to import a lot of goods, and tea was one of those goods. The East India company was a large trading company. They were having financial problems and in danger of going out of business, which would have a devasting effect on England's economy. England decided to solve the problem by placing huge taxes on goods that were shipped to the American colonies.

The Americans were already angry about taxation without representation, which meant that they paid taxes to England, but they were not represented in the British government, called Parliament. They did not feel that they were treated as tax-paying citizens. They felt disrespected.

At the time, there was an underground, or secret, resistance group called the Sons of Liberty. They were led by Samuel Adams, and membership included Paul Revere, Patrick Henry, John Adams, and John Hancock. To some, the Sons of Liberty were heros; to others, they were terrorists.

The American Colonists were already paying heavy taxes on printed materials, sugar, textiles, and other goods, but the final straw came when England enacted the Tea Act, which gave the East India Company a monopoly on all British colonies, including America. This meant that colonists were not allowed to buy tea from anyone else.

Other colonies simply refused to allow the tea to be unloaded from the ships, and allowed them to sail off to other colonies. In the Massachusetts colony, however, they not only refused to allow the tea to be unloaded, but they would not allow the ships to leave Boston Harbor. On the night of December 16, 1773, a group of colonists, led by the Sons of Liberty, boarded the ships and threw all of the tea into Boston Harbor.

In response to "The Boston Tea Party," England closed the port of Boston and declared that the colony would pay for the tea that was destroyed. They took complete control of the Massachusetts colony, basically declaring martial law. Colonists were even expected to provide room and board for occupying British troops.

This chain of events led directly to the organization of the Continental Congress and the American Revolution. If you'd like to know more, plenty of information is available online or at your local library!

So what does the Boston Tea Party have to do with the modern Tea Party we've been hearing about on the news? The Tea Party, is not a "real" political party, but more of a movement. It's made up of a group of people who support tax cuts, less government spending, and lowering the national debt and the federal deficit, and they believe that Washington is not serving their interests. Most Tea Party supporters are conservative Republicans, and Sarah Palin is one of their main public figures. Their name connects them to the Boston Tea Party, because they have adopted a Sons of Liberty phrase as one of their slogans: "No taxation without representation.

The Coffee Party arose in response to the Tea Party. Although the Coffee Party is mostly made up of liberal, or progressive, democrats who want to separate big business from politics, they are a more diverse group of people. There are even some conservatives who support the Coffee Party. The group is also interested in environmental, energy, and immigration issues. They encourage all Americans to become involved citizens.

Wikipedia

If you would like to read more about any of the posting on this blog, or anything else you would like to know more about, check out http://www.wikipedia.com. This site is a giant encyclopedia, and the best part is that everything is hyperlinked. This means that, as you are reading, you can click on the highlighted words to go to another page and learn more about that subject! You could spend an awful lot of time on wikipedia just jumping from subject to subject!

Remember, the more you read, the more you know!

Sitting Bull and General Custer

Many American children have played "Cowboys & Indians." Usually the "Cowboys" were the good guys, and the "Indians" were the bad guys. A better name for the game might have been "Cavalry & Native Americans," and historically speaking, the "Indians," or Native Americans, were not bad at all. They were simply trying to preserve their culture and keep their lands from being stolen.

The events of the 1800s resulted from Anglo-American expansion across North America. Sitting Bull was a Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux holy man and chief in the Dakota Territory, which is now North and South Dakota. Anglo-Americans, or white men, were moving further and further west into Sioux territory and meeting with resistance from the Sioux people. In the mid-1870s, the Northern Pacific Railway attempted to build a railroad directly through Sioux territory, and the Sioux resisted.

Shortly afterward, Civil War vetaran Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills to scout for gold and a place to establish an Army fort. When he announced that there was gold in the Black Hills, mining companies wanted a piece of the action.

The government tried to force the Native American people out of their lands and onto reservations. This action led directly to the Battle of Little Big Horn. The Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho joined forces to fight Custer's 7th Cavalry near the Little Big Horn River in the Montana territory. The Army attacked the Native American camp, not realizing how many tribes had joined together. The US troops were badly outnumbered and they lost over 700 men, including Custer himself.

After the Battle of Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull led his people to safety in Canada. They stayed there for four years, but returned to the United States as they were facing mass starvation. Sitting Bull surrendered in 1883, and was sent to the Standing Rock Reservation in what is now South Dakota.

In 1890, the Ghost Dance religious movement gained popularity amongst Native Americans. In an effort to keep Sitting Bull from supporting the movemnet, a group of Indian police was sent to arrest Sitting Bull. They went very early in the morning, hoping to avoid confrontation; however, the confrontation took place anyway, with several people, including Sitting Bull, being killed.

Shortly after this happened, the Wounded Knee Massacre took place, and ended the Native American resistance.

Saturday Night Live Released on This Date in 1977

Are you old enough to remember disco? It was a popular dance style in the 1970s. On December 14, 1977, a film called Saturday Night Fever was released. It was about a young man in Brooklyn, NY, who lived for dancing at a local club. The young man was played by a very young John Travolta. The movie was all about the disco culture, and the soundtrack, which heavily featured The Bee Gees, became a bestseller. That was when music was still released on vinyl disks that us old folks called albums! If you'd like to see a little bit about what the late '70s were like for young urban 20-somethings, head to your local video store!

Blog Changes

You may have noticed that this blog has been changing over the past month. The posts have been leaning more toward reading, history/social studies, and science, than about math and writing. While I will still be posting on these subjects, I am planning to include more posts about cultural literacy. This means that, not only will I be posting on things like Watergate and the Civil War, I will also be posting more about modern cultural references, such as movies, books, television, the Internet, and news items.

Cultural literacy is more than reading. It is having the background knowledge to make the most of your reading. Have you ever started watching a movie in the midde, so that you didn't really know what was going on? That's how a lot of people feel when they read a newspaper. One of my goals for this blog is to help fill in those gaps!