At the end of last week, before taking a few days to review for the shared government final, I showed my students an interesting and fairly well made video tape about the "Patriot Act" made by the ACLU. I was careful to point out tht the ACLU was not by any means objective on the subject but that the issues raised were nontheless valid.

After a semester of examination of the way our government was conceived, the philsophy of limited government, judicial review, checks and balances, the federalist view that power should be shared with states and individuals, the idea of popular sovereighnty and the insistance that the government serve the needs of the people and not the needs of its own power. After the exploration of the suspicion, the well founded suspicion, that our founding fathers had that given power unchecked, any government, any individual, any institution will seek to retain or even to grow that power, and that once given that power would never be returned. And after the exploration of the Constitution of the United States and the many, many layers of restriction and oversight therein to limit the possibility that what power was given would not be abused.
After all of that; the abuse of that power occurs anyway.

The video seemed to at least hold their attention. I put on the board the names and contact information for our two senators from New Mexico, Bingaman and Domenici, and suggested that their participation in our government need not wait until the next election, until they are old enough to vote. I told them that the "Patriot Act" was up for renewal and that their opinion on the topic would in some small way influence the vote of these two gentlemen regarding their civil liberties.

I don't know that any of them made the call or sent the email. But the following day, when it became evident that the pentagon (part of the executive branch) had been spying on anti-war groups as inocuous as a group of Quakers who opposed military recruitment on the local high school campus, and in the week after that, that the President himself had approved wiretaps on citizens of the United States, I believe that the supicions of our founding fathers are being bourne out.

It is evident that this administration in particular (though by no means in exclusivity) is incapable of responsibly exercising restraint in using the powers that heypercieve they have been given. The fight to preserve the components of the "Patiot Act" that are the source of contention regarding their renewal is evenence also that once given, power will not be returned without a struggle.

Of course this makes me angry. Of course this frustrates me. Of course I feel that my best response to this anger and frustration is to educate my students as best I can to become informed and opinionated and to exercise their right, ney their responsibilities to make their needs known.

I feel the overwhelming need to go one step further however.

Monitor this, a$$holes!

Some good news. Christmas break starts Saturday and before it is over, I will be going to Golden with the Burkstallers to visit the Bristols for the New Year's holiday.

I can't even begin to express my disappointment today. After grading a bunch of the final essays which were due last Friday, I was excited that they seemed to be really good. Although I recieved far fewer than I should have (maybe 60% of the classes), I was really positive. I told some other teachers that I was suprised that my students seemed to have responded well to a little less hand-holding regarding this essay.

My goal was to see what they could generate on their own. The papers are, for the most part, of an appropriate length. Many students have made a legitimate effort to apply their analytical skills to the project and have described a unique (or at least supportable) examination of George Orwell's 1984.

Others, unfortunately, decided that someone else could do it for them and simply attached their name to something they cut and pasted from the internet. Five so far, in fact. And I still have one class to check.

Now, I appreciate that some students really do better with hand-holding. It is not a question of intelligence. I have been beating myself up a bit worrying that they didn't have the tools to make such analysis, or that they somehow didn't feel confident enough to try to meet my expectations. And really, I believe that these things are probably somewhat to blame. Unfortunately, though, it seems more likely to be laziness and "senioritis" than much else.

What really makes me angry, though, is that in most cases they didn't really even try that hard to hide it. In one case, the kid simply put his name on an essay that was written by a kid named Xin Wang. Furthermore, most of the kids that tried to get away with this are the same that I have been trying to coax into passing territory for the last few weeks by begging, cajoling and sacrificing anything like fair standards. These kids will fail this semester. I was hoping to save ost of them. They will fail.