Blue Cereal's blog

I've written and published a book of important Supreme Court cases. Although I ended up leaving "ancillaries" out of the book, I have questions written over each of the major cases and several graphic organizers which someone other than myself might find useful. So here's the deal - if you buy the book (which, let's face it, you desperately want to do anyway) and want the supplemental materials, I'm posting them here to download and do with as you see fit.

Well, my #11FF, I decided to record a few podcasts for new (or reviving) educators. This seems like a wonderful idea because I lack the proper equipment, there are dozens of excellent education podcasts out there already, I have nothing to sell, and this year is so weird it's hard to know how to prepare for it anyway.

In other words, why not?

In Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, Juliet laments that she cannot be with Romeo largely because of their last names. Their families are enemies and neither would ever accept the other into their homes. Standing on her balcony, unaware that he’s listening, she rejects the idea that names could be so important. Why should it matter what you’re called if you’re as awesome as Romeo - at least in Juliet’s eyes?

Don’t get excited – I’m not diving into current events or anything. (I’m far too demure for such things.) In fact, I’m intentionally avoiding the subject at the moment because any effort I make to write rationally about what we’ve become ends up as a spittle-spewing, obscenity-laden rant and, worse, totally off-brand.

The first shots were fired at Lexington, but the first documented occasion on which colonial minutemen were ordered to fire upon British soldiers (and did) was on the North Bridge at Concord. That was what many would point to as the first official act of outright treason committed by the colonists and marked the beginning of open, violent rebellion in Massachusetts.

These are complicated times, and in the interest of serving ALL students (and avoiding as many problems with parents as possible), I’m renewing my commitment to avoid pushing my own personal values and ideology and just sticking to the facts.

Each summer, I solicit suggestions from real live middle school teachers of books to use in social studies classes. I post them on Blue Cereal as a reference for other educators, and over the years it’s become one of the more visited sections of the site. I’m a huge fan of reading across the content areas, although I try not to call it that because it sounds too much like the name of an expensive curriculum being pushed on desperate districts, like “Literacy First!” or “Pre-AP.” I even try to actually read the books before I add them to the list. Given that most of them are written with 12-year olds in mind, you’d think I’d do a better job keeping up.

“School choice” wouldn’t emerge onto the national scene until after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the various forays into moral corruption and social decay wouldn’t become staples of the nation’s highest court until a decade after that. The rest of the Lochner Era was largely about how freedom meant letting corporations do whatever they wanted to workers because those being exploited had just as much theoretical control over the outcome as their gilded overlords did. (They didn’t put it in those exact terms.) Between 1897 – 1937, the Supreme Court struck down nearly 200 different statues, most as violations of “freedom of contract” or other violation of “economic substantive due process.”

The Lochner Era (1897 – 1937), however, is named for a case representing a judicial philosophy which dominated the nation’s highest court for nearly forty years. For over a generation, the Court pushed back against the reform efforts of the Progressive Era and gave FDR fits by overturning many of his best efforts to regulate industry during the Great Depression. They laid the foundation for the modern “school choice” movement by uncovering new rights related to parenting and families. In the process, they brought to life an understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment that would end up securing the rights of American citizens to contraception, gay sex, and abortions.

The dilemma of any effort to compile “must know” Supreme Court cases is deciding where to draw the line. If you narrow it to a list of 12, there are at least 3 or 4 others that really MUST be added in the name of consistency. If you expand the list to, say... 24, you're sacrificing another half-dozen that should simply NOT be neglected if you're to retain ANY credibility.