I am a professor of English at a state university and I've just been roped into presenting "the anti-war position" to a group of high school students studying current events in an extremely conservative part of the country (SW Missouri). The students will be watching both Farenheit 911 and Farenhype 911 and will be hearing a pro-war presentation from an ultra-conservative business professor at my institution.
I'm probably pretty typical in that my intense interest in politics was sparked by the Bush election in 2000, 911 and, finally, the Iraq War. Before that I was a smart-ass cynic who voted Democrat (without a lot of passion), but considered all politicians to be equally repulsive. BushCo taught me the harsh lesson that my form of cynicism was very naive indeed and that I could no longer afford to remain basically apolitical.
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So I got involved and read blogs and listened to Air America and plowed through Chomsky and Zinn and started to get an idea of the whole rotten picture. Still, I consider myself a rank amateur when it comes to sorting through all the available material and selecting the most effective stuff.
That's where my fellow Kossacks come in.
Can you help me put together a 30-40 minute presentation (with a handout and possibly some Powerpoint slides) for high school students? I've already found some good timelines and articles on Wikipedia, The National Security Archives, Global Policy Forum and the Doskepedia, but any further help would be appreciated. I'd especially love to see existing presentations of this type to use as possible models.
As with all teaching, a large part of the problem is balancing coverage with depth. How far back should one go? To the first Gulf War? To the Fall of the Shah of Iran? To the creation of Iraq following WWI?