Am I crazy? Educators or anyone else with an opinion 😊

[oped]

Before you just answer off the cuff 😜

A few of my resources on my Teachers pay teachers page are just things I’ve used in the past, maybe prettied up a little.

I have a thing on Code of Hammurabi where I had my kids read the code or portions of it, list a few rules they agree or disagree with and then choose one to either write an agree or disagree with paragraph.

It got pulled this week because it goes against appropriate content as it ‘gives students the opportunity to make arguments that would deny basic human rights’ and it ‘trivializes traumatic experience’.

Can you help me out here? Am I missing something in the classroom experience I should be looking at? I’m just not sure how I’m supposed to fix this without reverting to recall questions or asking students to support my thesis, which isn’t usually how I do things?

[giramomma]

Do you know why it got pulled? I'm betting because of what happened my neck of the woods.

thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/537245-wisconsin-teachers-suspended-over-assignment-asking-students

I don't know what to tell you. I'm not familiar with what TPT is looking for, in terms for you to retool.

Maybe just have them focus on rules they disagree with? Maybe the wording "agree" is the issue? The History channel tells me that " Did you know? The Code of Hammurabi includes many harsh punishments, sometimes demanding the removal of the guilty party’s tongue, hands, breasts, eye or ear."

I'm not sure you'd want teachers asking if the kids agree with the removal of body parts as punishment.

[giramomma]

Maybe you need to someone add something like to situate the Code in historical context?

I think that's the part, now in present times that people forget to do..Right. Mention Little House on the Prairie books or Mark Twain using the "n" word and oh. goodness. People want to run away from it.

Because banishing Laura Ingalls Wilder from  our history is so much easier than explaining the historical context of those books, and then having a discussion of why we call indigenous people indigenous folks now (or whatever we call them. I can't keep up anymore)...rather than "injuns"

[oped]

Maybe. Honestly I’m not sure this is as much about this resource or me wondering if I should be back in a classroom. I thought my dream would be to teach social studies and media literacy but maybe in today’s classroom I’d be too... I don’t know... shouldn’t kids analyze and synthesize? And if they make irresponsible arguments shouldn’t they get shut down by their peers?

Gah. I’ll think about the historical context angle. Honestly I’ll prob lay just leave it off but now I’m concerned about how I approach history and social studies in general.

[giramomma]

I was doing a bit more reading on Wikipedia (because guess who is procrastinating at work. )

But it seems like classism was very relevant back then. If you were lower class, you were punished harsher than if you were upper class.

I COULD see something like compare/contrast that theme to today, where we know, for example that class and race matters in terms of punishments.

What grade are we talking? Yes, kids should analyze and synthesize. Maybe just don't go so deep in the law itself. It seems like this guy was also important because he first introduced the concept of innocent until proven guilty. I think that's a great theme for kids to think about how that concept has evolved through time...and are we really innocent until proven guilty? 

ETA: Other bigger picture themes that you could talk about: How men and women are treated differently in the code.

It looks like the code also allowed for folks to present evidence to a Judge and draw on witnesses.

[oped]

Yes, just focusing on against maybe. 

The laws that people usually agree with are like, If anyone store corn in another man's house he shall pay him storage at the rate of one gur for every 5 ka of corn per year. or  If any man, without the knowledge of the owner of a garden, fell a tree in a garden he shall pay half a mina in money. Mostly rules about reimbursement or fees.  

Yes, I'll add historical context for violence, just remove the pros and focus on the cons, maybe add an 'is there anything? in Hammurabi that is justifiable? 

[NomoreDramaQ1015]

I think you should talk about the cons and why they wouldn't fly today.   That is a valid discussion because there is a lot of throwing the baby out with the bath water mentality going on right now.

I have this argument all the time about the founding fathers and the constitution being a "sacred text".  When you put into context the time period there is no way in heck it should be a sacred text.  It doesn't include women or minorities or the LBGTQ community.  It should be amended to reflect that society has changed.  

That being said I don't hop on the bandwagon of ripping it to shreds and canceling it.   They were sexist racist aholes just like every other white man on the planet at the time.  HOWEVER they were self aware enough to give us a form of government that with our participation can be changed.  We are not stuck with what they gave us, we can build on it.

[teen persuasion]

DH saw that story, and we were discussing it. Neither of us remember actively being taught about the Code of Hammurabi, and yet "everyone" knee-jerk reflex thinks "eye-for-an-eye", so we must have covered it in passing in ES, just don't remember. But the way it was represented in the news reports, those teachers really approached it terribly.

I read something a few months ago, wish I remembered the source, that gave more context to why the Code of Hammurabi was so important. As harsh as the punishments sound to our ears, they were actually to limit the punishments, because the norm was ever escalating revenge between parties who felt wronged. Think: Hatfields and McCoys. So the Code set out straightforward penalties for infractions. I never knew that before.

I'm big on context, knowing WHY something is important, it why it triggered an event. I get much more out of reading about a topic if i understand the background, especially when talking about past eras with different norms. One of DH's biggest pet peeves with the whole Common Core rollout was its insistence on students reading assignments with no background discussion of cultural context. That just utterly boggles my mind. There's no way a current student (who resists reading in general) would know the historical background to understand the Code of Hammurabi's significance, for example. Just reading the source material isn't enough! It needs to be placed in context.

[oped]

When I used this it was an extension of the Story of the World which covers history in a linear fashion but not always very in depth, so we always did other reading/talking/writing about it. 

I originally wanted to do a series of extras that kind of followed the same timeline as a supplemental resources. When I decide to go forward with that I will revamp this to include a discussion on more of the context like you have outlined here, and focus differently on the pro/con type argument. 

Like I said, it was one of those things I basically had because I made it to use and just popped up there. Kind of like my life cycle stuff which started out with frogs because that's something I cover every year at our vernal pond. I will have to make sure I think about things like that more carefully as sources outside of the context I used them in. 

Right now I need to get back to some spelling though, vomit. Then some book clubs and vocabulary. 

[tskeeter]

Feb 9, 2021 14:52:35 GMT -5 oped said:

Before you just answer off the cuff 😜

A few of my resources on my Teachers pay teachers page are just things I’ve used in the past, maybe prettied up a little.

I have a thing on Code of Hammurabi where I had my kids read the code or portions of it, list a few rules they agree or disagree with and then choose one to either write an agree or disagree with paragraph.

It got pulled this week because it goes against appropriate content as it ‘gives students the opportunity to make arguments that would deny basic human rights’ and it ‘trivializes traumatic experience’.

Can you help me out here? Am I missing something in the classroom experience I should be looking at? I’m just not sure how I’m supposed to fix this without reverting to recall questions or asking students to support my thesis, which isn’t usually how I do things?

Your assignment sounds interesting.  So I’m not just speculating, would you tell us what the objective of this exercise is supposed to be?  

[oped]

To examine one of the first codes of law through a modern sensibility. We talked ourselves about the time period and how this was one of the first established codes of law and what that meant for the time, but the discussion of whether you agree or disagree that a law is a good law or a bad law is generally going to be based on modern constructs of justice, not historical ones. 

Its honestly been a long time since I did this activity and like I said I probably shouldn't have just popped it up there. I probably used it as a means to add to writing response assignment to social studies. The kids first jotted down the numbers of rules they felt strongly about one way or the other and then picked one of each that most fit the agree or disagree and then picked one of those to write about. 

These are some of the pages included, I do not think the history page gives enough context for this to be a stand alone assignment. I used it as an extension activity with my kids who I homeschooled. 

[NomoreDramaQ1015]

You can tie the rules for punishment to our laws against cruel and unusual punishment.

Obviously this provided part of the bedrock for our modern democracy just like the Magna Carta.

But just like today were those rules applied equally? No. You can discuss how the elite had different rules than slaves.

Which ties into today and unequal treatment under the law.

The teacher that did the "appropriate punishment" exercise was an idiot. Her lesson should be purged not the entire subject.