Bill's Learning

Today in social studies, we were talking about the Holocaust.   One of my classmates made a big speech about how anyone who was alive during the Holocaust that didn’t speak up against what the Germans were doing to minority groups was a chicken.  His point was that anytime that you see something bad happening, you HAVE to speak up -- and that if you don’t, you aren’t a good person.   I’m not sure that I agree with him.   While I agree that we SHOULD speak up when we see something bad happening -- especially something as bad as the Holocaust -- I don’t think it is always that easy.   Take living in Germany for example:  I bet that all of your neighbors and friends in school would either agree with Hitler’s decisions or be afraid of the consequences of disagreeing in front of everyone else.  I know that’s how I feel when I see friends making bad choices.  Even though I know the choices are bad, I don’t always speak up because I don’t ...

In social studies class, we've been studying the role that artifacts play in helping us to learn more about ancient cultures.  That's been really interesting to me simply because I always wondered how we know what we know about civilizations that existed hundreds -- even thousands -- of years ago. But the question rolling through my mind right now is what artifacts will they use to learn more about today's civilization?  Or better yet, will they need to use artifacts at all? After all, so much of our lives are lived online that most of the time, you can just Google somebody and learn a ton about them.  You can watch entire television shows on the web, see interviews with people, and explore thousands and thousands of pictures. If I understand the web right, those kinds of images and pictures will never go away -- and if they don't, that means people should be able to learn about our civilization without ever having to collect solid artifacts. Here's what I...

One of the major events on the news right now is  Donald Trump's decision to restrict immigration from seven Muslim countries .   I also know that there have been lots of debate in the world about allowing refugees from the Middle East to move through Europe.  Letting immigrants and refugees in feels like the right thing to do, but many countries think it's a bad idea simply because refugees are so needy that accepting them into your country can be really expensive .  Also, there have been terrorist attacks in lots of places over the last year.  One I can remember  happened in Paris . That's super interesting to me largely because in Social Studies, we've spent the better part of the last two weeks talking about all of the different ways that immigration has helped society.  Ideas travel around the world as a result of immigration -- so shutting down immigration also means shutting down the movement of ideas. It's also interesting to me because w...