Transcontinental railroad, Morrill Land Act, Plains Indian Wars, Dawes Act of 1887, Wounded Knee, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, White Earth Reservation, industrial mining in the southwest and midwest, the Bessemer Steel Process, barbed wire, business leaders such as James J. Hill, John Deere, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie, impact of railroads, agricultural productivity and mechanized farming, factories, new forms of marketing and advertising, trusts, Mark Twain, Ashcan school of painting, Stephen Craine, Sears catalog, Street lights and trolley cars, the Tweed Ring, the new middle class Victorian culture, architecture and literature, Ellis Island, Angel Island, ethnic enclaves, Melting Pot idea, 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Scientific theories of race in the late 19th century, Jim Crow laws, Poll tax, literacy test, Grandfather Clause, founding of the Ku Klux Klan, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Plessey v. Ferguson; anti-Chinese movement in the west and the rise of lynching in the south, the shift from workshop to factory, Knights of Labor, Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor, Railroad Strike of 1877, Homestead, Haymarket bombing 1886, 8 hour work day, Pullman strike 1894, Monetary policy, Greenbacks, Gold Standard, Depressions of 1873-79 and 1893-97, Farmer's Alliance, Grange movement, Populist party, Omaha Platform of 1892, 1896 election, free silver, William McKinley, William Jennings Bryan, Eugene V. Debs, Frances Willard and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, National American Women's Suffrage Association, women's suffrage, 19th Amendment, Hawaii, Alfred Thayer Mahan's theory about the importance of controlling the seas, Cuba, Filipino insurrection, Puerto Rico, Admiral Dewey, Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, Yellow Press, William R. Hearst, intervention in the Boxer Rebellion, Jane Addams and the settlement house, Florence Kelley, Upton Sinclair and muckrakers, Ida Tarbell, Conservation, planned use and the origins of the national forest service, Preservationism, Yellowstone National Park 1890, Sierra Club 1892, Robert Lafollette, city manager system, civil service reform, initiative and referendum, Progressive Party and Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, income tax, 16th Amendment, Sherman Anti-trust Act, direct election of senators, National Women's Suffrage Association, Carrie Chapman Catt and the winning plan, The Woman's Party, Alice Paul.

Why this goes here:

Perhaps I have other teachers wrong but I remember too vividly high school instructors preaching their content area singlemindedly, driven by their discipline at the expense of all others. I don't want to get too florid here in my description — that's Dylan Thomas' fault today — because oftentimes their enthusiasm made them more exciting and more engaging.

Didn't matter if their content-area leash enabled or disabled them, though. As a kid with a bobbing, jittery interest in just about everything, an adult whose interests didn't extend past her classroom door could only alienate me; that wasn't anybody I ever wanted to be.

So I show a clip after our mid-period break. Every day I show something new and unseen. I model curiosity. Three out of four periods thought Night Driving was deadly dull and wanted something that ended with a loud fart or a pratfall. Fine, that's fine. But with that one period, they and I, we promised ourselves that even if the math couldn't be easy every day, even if we'd occasionally fail the terms of our implicit teacher-student contract, that we'd never bore each other. Not for lack of trying, anyway.

Personally, I joined the 3/4 of his classes who thought the VW ad was boring, despite the poetry recitation by Richard Burton.

Here's his post, with the aforementioned video clips.

P.S. Will anyone be able to resist the I-phone?