Ok, this is a longshot, but maybe someone here can figure this out. I was thinking about a lesson on Islam that my social studies teacher gave when I was in high school. The only thing I remember is the little mnemonic he gave us at the end: Sunni looks like sunny, and is the name for the good Muslims. Shiite looks like the word shit, and is the name for the bad Muslims. Huh? Leaving aside the fact that this is offensive and inappropriate for a public school teacher to say, does anyone have an idea why he separated the groups this way? Was the U.S. involved in some problems with Shi’ites and not the Sunnis or something? For an idea of the time frame, it was around 1997 or 1998.
If anyone else out there has a story about a weird thing your teacher said, feel free to share. That way, the thread won’t be wasted if we can’t figure out what he meant:)
Yep. Those Shiites in Iran were a “big problem” for the US in the late 1970s and most of the 1980s, while those Sunnis in Saudi sold us oil (sometimes cheap oil) during the same period. It may seem odd now, but “radical Shiites” were pretty darn scary during a lot of the 1980s.
I’m betting this “lesson” is a holdover from those days, akin to someolder folks having a fondness towards (non-Communist) Chinese because “they” were on our side during WW2. It’s a racial stereotype based upon a limited understanding of contemporary affairs.
Sure. :smack: That had to be it. Actually, I don’t remember anyone mentioning the various sects*, but I assume someone must have.
*The Muslim unit was only on the old stuff like the five pillars and prayers (none of which I remember) etc. and the Sunni thing was a random throwaway comment that I never connected with anyting else.
Yes, this thread is reminding me of something that I really need to work on. My knowledge of U.S. history between around 1975- 1990 is fuzzy in some areas. Every single American history class I took was supposed to cover these years but we ran out of time. For some reason no one ever thought to offer a separate class for the newer things, even though it happened every year. I need to make some time to read my old texbook and do some googling.
We never learned word association for religious sects in my school, but I still recall a few other ditties
(7th grade) There are 3 types of twins: Fraternal, Identical & Minnesota
(3rd grade) The way to remember the male ♂ and female ♀ symbol is: Men ♂ carry spears to war and women ♀ use hand-held mirrors.
(2nd grade) The greater than / less than symbols are an ice cream cone - you always want more ice-cream, so always point the top of the cone toward the higher number.
I’m sure just about everyone recalls 3 teacher’s assistants: RoyGBiv, HOMES & SohCahToa
Ponder Stibbons and pinkfreud, I wish there was a “groan” smilie for you two :D. The Weird One, you’re right. I’ve heard of it but don’t have an actual memory of the event because I wasn’t alive in 1980 either.
HOMES is for the great lakes, Huron Ontario Michigan Erie Superior. SohCahToa are the trigonometric functions, Sine, opposite over hypotenus, Cosine adjacent over hypotenus and Tangent, opposite over adjacent.
HOMES is a way to remember the names of the great lakes. Huron Ontario etc., and SOHCAHTOA is a way to remember how to find the sine cosine and tangent of an angle. SOH= for sine use opposite/hypotenuse for cosine, divide the adjacent side by the hypotenuse and for tan divide opposite side by the adjacent side. We also learned PMAT in biology and PEMDAS in math.
When I was growing up in the 70s and early 80s, American history coverage would inevitably peter out somewhere in the Kennedy administration, if not earlier. We never seemed to have enough time for the Vietnam War, the civil rights acts, the Moon landings, Nixon’s scandals, or anything juicy that had happened since about 1962.
I don’t know exactly why this was; I suspect it was just bad planning on the teachers’ part. But it’s not like I went to a poor school system with tattered, obsolete textbooks, nor did I have lousy teachers either. For whatever reason, we always ran out of time by the end of the term, and had to rush or just punt the last couple of chapters.
As a result, by the time I entered college in the late 80s, I could tell you who ran against Eisenhower in both of his elections, and Reagan in his, but not who ran against Nixon. I was completely ignorant of the war on Israel in 1967 — as in, ignorant of it entirely, not even knowing such a thing had happened. I knew of Nikita Khrushchev — the Soviet premiere who liked pounding his shoe on the table and playing nuclear chicken with Kennedy over Cuba — from the history books, and I knew Leonid Breshnev from watching the news myself, but for a long time had no earthly idea when the first man left and the second man took over. And one day, in my late twenties yet, I was astounded to learn that Winston Churchill lived all the way into 1965, making him almost a contemporary. He’s so etched in the mind as the bulldog of World War II, I couldn’t imagine him being around to hear the Beatles.
(Not that I’m connecting their arrival to his death.)
Aside from Watergate and the later Moon landings, to this day I still can’t tell you anything of national or international significance that happened between 1970 and 1974. To me world history simply took a break for that interval. It’s even possible that nothing else really did happen. I certainly couldn’t refute such a claim without first visiting a library or checking the Net.
Sometimes I feel guilty about this stain of ignorance on my knowledge of 20th Century history. I try to fix the problem as time permits. But then I meet young people who’ve never heard of the Jim Jones cult tragedy, or the Iran-Contra scandal, or who don’t know that Apple used to make computers besides Macs, and my self-esteem is instantly restored.
I think it’s at least partly because, without really thinking about it, people tend to think of “history” as “stuff that happened before I was born.” The stuff that happened during your teachers’ lifetime, they think, “I lived through that; everybody knows about that.” They forget that their students didn’t live through it and don’t know about it.
Plus, the more recent stuff is more controversial. It’s harder to talk about without getting personal, maybe taking sides and offending someone.
I think poor planning had something to do with it in my school’s case. The teachers always listed modern history on the class syllabus. I went to a good school with good teachers and new books too. This seems to happen in lots of schools. My old roomate went to a good school, and she didn’t realize that there had been a Korean war until her sophmore year of college.
My junior high history teacher asked our class one day if we could name any female prime ministers or presidents. This was back in 1980, so we socially unaware kids were able to name Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir, but we couldn’t come up with any others. The teacher kept trying to get us to read her mind for another example, until finally she told us that the President of France, Valerie Giscard D’Estaing, was also a woman… You can image my father’s reaction when at the supper table "What did you learn today ?"conversation I let that new tidbit fly …
Med school was a treasure trove of acronyms and other memory aids. Some of the most memorable ones were sexual / sexist and probably can no longer be taught in school in this politically correct day and age.
example: to remember the names in order of the twelve cranial nerves:
Oh, Oh, Oh, To Touch and Feel a Girl’s Vagina - Ah, Heaven!
and to remember which ones carried sensory information, motor information, or both:
Some Say Money Matters But My Big Brother Says Big Breasts Matter More
On a more decorus note, from biology class: King Philip Come Out For Goodness’ Sakes (binomial system of nomenclature)
Ah, we had Kings Play Chess On Fat Guys’ Stomachs. Another favorite was My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.
And Bytegeist and Omega Glory, my historical education was as spotty as yours seems to have been. I can only recall a few years in which we didn’t study the Civil War extensively, and in just one class did we have extensive coverage of the pre-Revolutionary period that was more extensive than, “There were a lot of Native Americans living here. Then Columbus came for a visit. A couple of hundred years later, the English settlers were feeling mighty agitated…” I cannot in all honesty recall having studied anything after WWII, and there was far too strong a focus on American history and almost nothing about world history as a whole.
To this day, I have far too vague an understanding of Iran-Contra, and I really need to read up a bit on the Falklands War. And you know, I was absolutely shocked when I first heard about the Monegasque invasion of British Columbia for a brief period in July 1979.
