Archive for the ‘Popular Culture/Media Literacy’ Category

The engineering team that has spent the past week dangling from the top of the Washington Monument assessing damage done by the August 23 earthquake that struck the Washington, D.C. area, has concluded its study.

The National Park Service will determine how repairs will be done, but the structure remains closed in the meantime, according to The Associated Press.

Expert engineers scaled the Washington Monument today in an effort to catalog every defect that occurred to the structure during the August earthquake that shook Virginia, the nation’s capital, and surrounding states.

“Climbers will work their way up and down the sides of the entire monument, snap photos with a digital camera and tap the stones with a soft mallet, listening for indications of damage,” according to The Associated Press. They’ll also be carrying two-way radios and iPads.

Check out the AP story and see photos of the monument being scaled here.

Above image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Mount Vernon’s education staff was extremely inspired by an opinion piece by Norm Augustine in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. As the former under secretary of the Army and retired chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, Augustine emphasized the importance of history in forming tomorrow’s top execs and leaders. We’d love to see your thoughts in our comment section. An excerpt from the beginning of the piece, in which Augustine asks readers which subject they think American 12th graders do the poorest in, is below:

“With all the talk of America’s very real weaknesses in the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and math), you might be surprised to learn that the answer — according to the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress — is neither science nor math. And despite what might be suggested by the number of underwater home loans, high-school seniors actually fare best in economics.

“Which leaves history as the answer, the subject in which students perform the most poorly. It’s a result that puts American employers and America’s freedoms in a worrisome spot. But why should a C grade in history matter to the C-suite? After all, if a leader can make the numbers, does it really matter if he or she can recite the birthdates of all the presidents? Well, it’s not primarily the memorized facts that have current and former CEOs like me concerned. It’s the other things that subjects like history impart: critical thinking, research skills, and the ability to communicate clearly and cogently. Such skills are certainly important for those at the top, but in today’s economy they are fundamental to performance at nearly every level. A failing grade in history suggests that students are not only failing to comprehend our nation’s story and that of our world, but also failing to develop skills that are crucial to employment across sectors.” — Norm Augustine

Photo: Flickr Commons/Ryan Stanton

A 5.9 earthquake that sent tremors from Virginia to New York City shook Mount Vernon Tuesday, but George Washington’s mansion stood sturdy as a rock. The Mansion and other buildings throughout the estate shook and creaked, but the only damage noted by our team of collection specialists and historians was a nickle-sized piece of green plaster that fell from the large dining room ceiling.

A CNN news crew that happened to be onsite filming a piece for the 2012 elections on presidents and wealth caught the quake on camera, and subsequently reported about it from the east lawn of Mount Vernon.