Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice

 

Just finished reading Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice by Bruce Levine.  As Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Halm noted in his review of the book,

“Often reviled and generally misunderstood, Thaddeus Stevens has been relegated to a dark corner of the American historical stage. The distinguished historian Bruce Levine not only brings Stevens back into the light but also reveals his significance to the revolutionary dynamic of the Civil War and Reconstruction.”

When many modern readers think of Thaddeus Stevens what may come to mind first is the curmudgeonly Congressman played by Tommy Lee Jones in Steven Spielberg’s great bio-pic, Lincoln.  While Jones apparently got the personality of Stevens right in the film, Stevens role in the nation’s struggle over slavery was much greater than most people understand.  In order to properly tell about Stevens’ contribution to American life, Levine gives us a detailed history of how issues of emancipation and racial equality evolved in the decades leading up to the American Civil War and during—and after—the war itself and of Stevens’ central role in shaping our concepts of racial equality that resulted.  It is a remarkable story—one not given much time in our high school history classes—of how American politics and culture dealt with the issues surrounding slavery while fighting what many now see as the Second American Revolution.

Stevens was born in Vermont in 1792 and suffered from a club foot all his life.  His father abandoned the family when Stevens was six, and he grew up in poverty.  However, his mother encouraged him to read and to get a good education.  Thanks to a New England culture that provided access to education for poor students, he was able to attend Dartmouth College and then taught school while he studied for his law degree.  In 1816, he moved to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he established himself as a lawyer.  He was elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 1833, where he advocated for public school system, and served as a delegate to the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention in 1836-37.  After losing re-election, he moved to Lancaster to build his law practice and was elected to the U.S. Congress. Over the next three decades, until his death in 1868, Stevens was an outspoken advocate for full emancipation of slaves and their acceptance as full citizens. 

What is intriguing about Levine’s book is the detail that he provides on how emancipation and related issues gradually developed in the years leading up to the Civil War and during the war itself.  Politicians were so concerned to attract the Confederates back into the Union that they were reluctant to make any demands on the slave-holding states, even to the point of being reluctant to allow escaped slaves to serve in the military.  The result is a fascinating look at this aspect of our history that few of us got in high school or college American history classes.  Given today’s climate, where we again as a nation are struggling to overcome the idea of racial distinctions, it is a powerful bit of historical narrative.

Stevens was in the midst of the debate over these issues and championed freedom throughout his career.  He wrote this epitaph for himself, which was carved into his monument in 1868 at the Shriner-Concord Cemetery, then the only racially integrated cemetery in Lancaster, Pa:

I repose in this quiet and secluded spot not from any natural preference for solitude.  But, finding other cemeteries limited as to race, by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life: EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR.

Thaddeus Stevens is a great read and a great lesson for our times. 

Online Technology and the New Normal for K-12 Education

 

In September 2020, I posted some thoughts about the return to school in the midst of the COVID-19 surge and the idea of a “new normal” stimulated by the pandemic.  I ended with this note:

In short, the new normal will be one marked by continuing change.  The immediate challenge will be to remind ourselves of the foundational principles on which the new normal must be based and to articulate them for this new environment.  As we move through the pandemic, it would be good to keep an eye out for innovations that could—or should—be part of the new normal, whenever that may come.

 

This month, as my son prepares for a new year of teaching high school English next week and his sons get ready to start their years as sixth and eighth graders later this month, the public is focused mostly on the extent to which our schools—both K-12 and higher education—are prepared to require masks for both students and faculty, given the prospect of a new surge in COVID-19 cases due to the Delta variant.  Let’s put that issue aside for a minute and take a look at where we stand with the “new normal” and what might lie ahead for both teachers and students.

 

One sign of movement toward a “new normal” is that some schools will continue to offer virtual as well as in-class instruction, but will fine-tune how they do it.  Last year, my son had to teach both in-class and virtual students at the same time.  It was not an easy task, since his virtual students could see him only if he sat at his desk all the time.  This year, they are taking a new approach.  The school will offer virtual sections as well as classroom sections.  Students can choose which one they want to attend.  Teachers will have only one environment at a time.  This is clearly an improvement for both teachers and students and a good starting place for normalizing virtual instruction as an option in an otherwise face-to-face environment.

 

That said, we can also expect to see more “blended” or “hybrid” teaching and learning environments—courses for which the teacher mixes live classroom sessions with occasional online learning elements. 

 

There is no question that technology will play an important role in defining this new environment.  Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when innovation was stimulated at least in part by the space race and geopolitics—not to mention the explosion of baby boomers into K-12 classrooms—public broadcasting played an important role by providing content for teachers to use in their classrooms.  I worked at WPSU-TV back then, and every weekday, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. during the school year, we broadcast television series chosen by teachers for use in area classrooms across grade levels.  We also produced a number of instructional K-12 television series.  Two of my favorites were Investigative Science in Elementary Education (ISEE), which showed scientific phenomena at work as the basis for classroom investigations and experiments in grades 1-3, and What’s in the News, a weekly news series for middle-schoolers designed to stimulate classroom discussion of civics. 

 

I was delighted earlier this week to learn that Pennsylvania’s public television stations—working together as Pennsylvania PBS, are continuing to refine and expand the use of their broadcast signals to provide expanded video lessons and other resources to schools in the area through data-casting—sending digital content on the stations’ broadcast wavelength.  While datacasting provides access to a large collection of instructional resources, it is limited in that it is a one-way delivery system.  That is a problem in rural areas like Central Pennsylvania, where broadband is often unavailable.  However, the federal government’s new infrastructure plan includes funds to provide broadband nationally—the information revolution’s counterpart to interstate highways—which will allow teachers and students to interact with data and remote students and content experts and complete the instructional cycle.  Other states are also experimenting with datacasting K-12 content to schools and homes, so adding broadband ultimately will create a powerful new instructional resource for all students across the nation.

 

What other innovations might play an important role as the new normal takes shape?  Here are some thoughts based, in part, on the experience of higher education institutions over the past two decades:

 

Open Educational Resources (OERs) For almost two decades, higher education institutions have worked together to create and share online instructional materials that are open and available free of charge for any instructor anywhere to use.  An example is the Community College Consortium for OERs (CCCOER).  Another example is the Pressbooks Directory, which hosts more than 2,000 open access e-books that have been developed by college and university faculty members.  In the new normal, we can expect K-12 schools and teachers to increasingly share locally developed instructional resources through a curated OER platform.  One example is Open-Up Resources, which describes itself as “a 13-state initiative to address quality gaps in the curriculum market.”  I would also expect to see other sharing collaboratives emerge at local, state, and regional levels to give teachers direct ability to share lesson plans, study guides, and other locally developed teaching materials with colleagues within a school district and in other districts that have a shared curriculum.  Public Broadcasting—whether it be within a station’s service area or among stations across service areas statewide, regionally, or nationally—can play an important role in encouraging and supporting access to K-12 OER sharing through datacasting services.

 

Course Sharing As online learning began to mature and be accepted in the higher education community in the 1990s—and as more and more institutions adopted online courses for local/regional use—institutions began to work together to share courses and share students. One example is the Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance (IDEA).  Universities in the Midwest have created online degree programs that integrate courses from several institutions.  Students enroll in a degree program at their local institution, but take online courses from several institutions as part of the curriculum.  Rather than compete, the institutions combine resources to ensure that all students have access to the best possible courses in a discipline.  In the K-12 arena, this kind of sharing might focus on sharing specialized courses, such as STEM courses that prepare graduating high school students to move into technical jobs after graduation.

 

Dual Enrollment High schools may also want to work with local colleges and universities to offer selected online undergraduate courses for dual enrollment, allowing high school students to earn both high school graduation credits and college credits toward an undergraduate certificate or degree.  

 

The Pandemic has been a shock to the system for K-12 education, but one which K-12 teachers have already begun to use to create a new normal for education in the Information Society.  It is a process that will extend well into the decade but that will create an educational environment responsive to the societal and technological changes that are now underway.

Acting on "These Truths"

 

In These Truths, author Jill Lepore paints the landscape of American history focusing on how Americans acted on the values that were described in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and other key historical documents and how the ongoing struggle over these truths shaped—and continues to shape—American politics and culture.

Toward the end of the book, she describes the social changes that began in the 1960s, many rooted in interpretations of the Constitution, that have continued to shape American culture and politics over the past few decades, in the process creating the divisions that plague our culture.  She writes:

In the waning decades of the twentieth century, liberals and conservatives alike cast the lingering divisions of the 1960s less as matters of law and order than as matters of life and death.  Either abortion was murder and guns meant freedom or guns meant murder and abortion was freedom.  How this sorted out came to depend upon party affiliation. ‘The economy, stupid’ became the mantra of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, when he tried to set aside the guns and abortion divide. That proved impossible.  Especially after the Cold War came to an end, a domestic cold war began uncompromising, all-or-nothing, murder or freedom, life or death (p. 648).

She goes on to examine the issues that began to divide the country in the waning days of the Cold War and that have continued to shape society for the past 50 years as three generations have tried to adapt to a society increasingly affected by technology and by an increasingly diverse culture.  With each issue, we may have found a middle ground, but in each case, the uncompromising extremes have driven us further apart. 

The list of issues that have created our divided society is long.  It begins with the longstanding issue of women’s rights, from voting rights to a woman’s control over her own body to issues of sexual freedom.  Lepore also discusses a wide range of other factors that have contributed to today’s oppositional politics:

·      Removing religion from public life

·      Race and Segregation

·      Taxation and the role of central government versus local government versus business

·      Gun control and interpretation of the Second Amendment

·      Immigration

·      “Originalism” in the judicial system

·      Nuclear weapons freeze

·      LGBTQ Rights

·      Personal Privacy Rights

·      Voting Rights

These are issues that people of my generation, who came of age in the sixties, have lived with all of our adult lives.  They have been part of the texture of daily life in America and beyond for decades, with one result being that we tend take them for granted as part of the environment rather than seeing them together in context and understanding their impact on the health of our overall democratic political and social cultures.

Another key issue that Lepore notes is the evolution of communications technologies and the impact of ending the Fairness Doctrine, which forced media outlets to present current events objectively.  The days of Walter Cronkite and Huntley & Brinkley are long gone.  Rather than seek out fairness in the news, we all tend to drift to news sources that reflect and reinforce our own biases, making it even harder to find a common understanding and shared values that brings our increasingly diverse population into a unified community based on shared values and truths, in which our differences allow us more ways to understand new phenomena rather than keep us at odds with other.  By the time of the Clinton Administration’s scandals, Lepore writes, “The nation had lost its way in the politics of mutually assured epistemological destruction.  There was no truth, only innuendo, rumor, and bias.  There was no reasonable explanation; there was only conspiracy” (These Truths, p. 711).

Our Common Purpose

 

This increasingly volatile environment is what spurred the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to establish a Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship in 2018, with the goal “to explore how best to respond to the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in our political and civic life and to enable more Americans to participate as effective citizens in a diverse 21^st-century democracy.”  They published their report, Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century , in June 2020.  As Academy President David Oxtoby notes in his introduction:

 

Throughout our country’s history, the American people have confronted moments of crisis with resilience and an openness to reinvention, enabling our nation to become a better version of itself. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the members of this Commission recognized that we found ourselves at a similar crossroads. The recommendations in this report touch all sectors of American life and offer a bold path that will require all of us to commit to reinventing aspects of our constitutional democracy. The realities of a disruptive media and information environment, outdated political institutions, economic and social inequality, and hyper-partisan political leadership have laid bare the urgency of this imperative. The Commission challenges us to achieve significant progress toward its recommendations by 2026, our nation’s 250th anniversary (Our Common Purpose, Section 1, para. 3).

The Commission identified 31 recommendations gathered within six strategies:

1.     Achieve Equality of Voice and Representation – This strategy includes eight recommendations, including enlarging the House of Representatives and the Electoral College to make them more representative of the population, setting limits on Supreme Court appointments, eliminate gerrymandering, and making election funding fairer.

 

2.     Empower Voters – The goals are to make the voting process less burdensome by giving voters more opportunity to vote—making election day a national holiday, for instance—automatically register eligible voters, and make voter participation in the election process mandatory.

 

3.     Ensure the Responsiveness of Political Institutions – Expand opportunities for citizen participation in the political process beyond voting so that citizens can better shape decision-making, budgeting, and policy at all levels; and provide better citizen access to elected officials so that citizens have more effective input into governance.

 

4.     Dramatically Expand Civic Bridging Capacity – This strategy calls for the creation of a National Trust for Civic Infrastructure to improve leadership at all levels and to build bridges to those who previously had little access to civic leadership opportunities.

 

5.     Build Civic Information Architecture that Supports Common Purpose—This strategy focuses on what the report calls, “the intersection of digital platforms, academic research, policy-making, jurisprudence, and economics” with the goal of re-designing our information technology-based platforms to better support constitutional democracy and our sense of purpose as a society.  This includes requiring for-profit social media outlets to provide “public-friendly digital spaces” on their media platforms. 

6.     Inspire a Culture of Commitment to American Constitutional Democracy and One Another –The five recommendations in this strategy are focused on ensuring the future.  They “aim to inspire a culture of commitment to American constitutional democracy and to one another. They imagine a future in which every American is expected to perform a year of national service and is paid for doing so. They envision national conversations to reconcile the noble aspects of our history with our greatest sins; a vibrant ecosystem of gatherings, rituals, ceremonies, and public debates in which Americans discuss what it means to be a citizen; and public media efforts that support grassroots engagement. They demand that we invest in civic education and educators for all ages.

Jill Lepore has reminded us that, for the last half-century or more, we have seen our democracy gradually pulled apart by issues that led us to take sides rather than to find common cause with our fellow citizens.  It has happened bit by bit, issue by issue, but over the past few years, it has also been a clear strategy of a political movement committed to pushing “these truths” aside in favor of gaining absolute power.  The report of the Academy of Arts and Sciences makes an excellent case that it is time for us to stop and forge a path of government that respects and builds on the core values—the truths—that define American democracy. 

 

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Lepore, Jill.  These Truths. New York: W.W. Norton, 2018.

 

Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship. Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2018. Retrieved from the web at: https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose

 

General Education for the Information Society

 

In 1988, I wrote The Meaning of General Education (Teachers College Press), a history of innovations in the general education curriculum as U.S. institutions responded to the impact of the industrial revolution in the 20th century.  Much has happened in the intervening 3+ decades as the Information Revolution matured, creating a new context—whether you call it the global information society or the fourth industrial revolution – in which we need to consider freshly the role of general education.  I have written a couple of blog posts about the issue over the past couple of years.  Now, I’ve written an expanded piece on the role of general education in this new environment in a free ebook.  It is available here. 

Please take a look and share your thoughts.

 

 

Thinking About K-14

 

President Biden’s new infrastructure proposal includes an education element that would, essentially, provide free access to the first two years of undergraduate education for all Americans.  It is a major educational innovation that responds the maturation of the Information Society, just as universal access to high school was a response to the maturation of the Industrial Revolution early in the 20th century.  It also builds on several state-level initiatives, such as the recent New York State move to make free access to the first two years of college available to high school graduates in New York. 

The move toward a national pre-K-to-14 public education has some broad implications for higher education and for American life.  Looking at the pre-K part of the plan, for instance, there are benefits that go well beyond the obvious one of giving all children a better start to their education.  It also means that many mothers will be able to rejoin the workforce and help provide financial security for young families.

That said, the potential changes for higher education raise some important strategic planning needs for higher education.  Some thoughts:

*Assuming that free access to the first two years of college is limited to community colleges, one impact could be that both public and private four-year institutions lose enrollments in those first two years while the demand for community college enrollment expands significantly. Some four-year public institutions have regional campuses that they may want to transition to serve as community colleges.  Other institutions may want to focus on upper-division majors and graduate programs, partnering with community colleges so that students can effectively migrate to a four-year program. 

*At many universities, supporting introductory and general education courses is a job assigned to graduate assistants.  If funding for K-14 is limited to community colleges, institutions with graduate programs may need to find new work for graduate assistants.  This could mean putting more energy into serving adult learners, so that, while their relationship with students begins at the Junior year, they can maintain a relationship with them far beyond the undergraduate degree.  Historically, institutions have talked about the three-legged stool that supports learning:  instruction, research, and public service. The K-14 movement might open new doors for doctoral students to participate in research transfer and other forms of community engagement related to the research and dissemination function.

*The K-14 movement would mean a more seamless curricular sequence between high school and college.  This raises obvious questions about the role of general education in the undergraduate curriculum and the relationship of undergraduate general education to the high school curriculum.   The goal would be to minimize duplication in general education courses taught in both high school and college and, importantly, to ensure that there is a logical progression—curricular unity—in general education from high school through the first two years of college as students prepare for both adult citizenship and, ultimately, a profession. 

* The move also raises other curricular questions.  Should there be a “gap year” built into the educational experience?  If so, should the gap be positioned (a) between high school and college? (b) between the first two years of college and the upper division of the undergraduate experience?  (c) at the end of the undergraduate experience?

*What are the implications for colleges that want to attract adult learners and international students into associate and baccalaureate degrees?

The K-14 movement is very likely to continue regardless of how this one Bill fares in Congress.  There is much to consider in terms of strategic planning in this new environment.  Now is the time for higher education to begin thinking seriously about the best ways it can serve its students and its public purpose as the Information Revolution matures and the interest in a K-14 environment continues to grow.

Thoughts?

John Meacham's "The Soul of America"

The Soul of America by historian Jon Meacham is about events in the history of the United States, but it is also book for our times.  Published in 2018—in the midst of the Trump Administration—it looks at other times when our core beliefs were challenged in order to inform our lives today.  “The war between the ideal and the real,” he writes, “between what’s right and what’s convenient, between the larger good and personal interest is the contest that unfolds in the soul of every American. . . The message of Martin Luther King, Jr., –that we should be judged on the content of our character, not on the color of our skin—dwells in the American soul; so does the menace of the Ku Klux Klan.  History hangs precariously in the balance between such extremes.  Our fate is contingent upon which element—that of hope or that of fear—emerges triumphant” (p. 7). 

            He begins with a look back to when the Presidency was first defined during the debates that led to the Constitution.  Alexander Hamilton proposed that the president be elected for life. Others suggested that Congress should select the President.  Their trust in George Washington led them to a create an elected office as “an act of faith in the future and an educated wager on human character. From the start,” he writes, “Americans recognized the elasticity of the presidency and hoped for the best” (pp. 25-26). 

            Meacham goes on to take a fresh look at times when that hope was tested, starting with the Civil War and its aftermath—the Ku Klux Klan and Reconstruction.  He examines the rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Progressivism as the Industrial Revolution matured and, with it, brought millions of immigrants into the nation and sparked new cultural tensions as the idea of America as a “melting pot” took hold.  He documents the rise of women’s suffrage movement in the early 20th century and the cultural conflicts that attended the Roaring Twenties. 

            A chapter on “The Crisis of the Old Order” looks at Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the challenge to Roosevelt’s vision led by Huey Long, as Fascism grew in Europe.  Meacham goes on to describe the anti-communist McCarthy movement reaction to Truman’s Civil Rights initiatives in fifties, and the ultimate successes of Civil Rights brought about by Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson.

            Meacham concludes with some thoughts on how the lessons of the past can help the nation survive crises that arose during the Trump administration but that are still with us today.  “How then,” he wrote in 2018, “in an hour of anxiety about the future of the country, at a time when a president of the United States appears determined to undermine the rule of law, a free, press, and the sense of hope essential to American life, can those with deep concerns about the nation’s future enlist on the side of the angels?” (p. 266).  He suggests five steps that all citizens can take:

·      ENTER THE ARENA – He urges all citizens to become politically engaged, noting, “. . . the paying of attention, the expressing of opinion, and the casting of ballots are foundational to living up to the obligations of citizenship in a republic” (p. 266).

·      RESIST TRIBALISM – Meacham quotes Jane Addams: “We know instinctively that if we grow contemptuous of our fellows and consciously limit our intercourse to certain kinds of people who we have previously decided to respect, we not only tremendously circumscribe our range of life, but limit the scope of our ethics” (p. 267).  Meacham adds, “Don’t let any single cable network or twitter feed tell you what to think” (p. 268).

·      RESPECT FACTS AND DEPLOY REASON—Meacham quotes Truman: “The dictators of the world say that if you tell a lie often enough, why, people will believe it.  Well if you tell the truth often enough, they’ll believe it and go along with you” (p. 268).

·       FIND A CRITICAL BALANCE – He notes that, “Being informed is more than knowing details and arguments.  It also entails being humble enough to recognize that only on the rarest of occasions does any single camp have a monopoly on virtue or on wisdom” (p.269).  This is one of the values of a free press.

·      KEEP HISTORY IN MIND – He argues that it is good to look back, as this book does, to see how other generations have responded to similar issues.  “To remember Joe McCarthy,” he notes, “. . . gives us a way to gauge demagoguery” (p.270).  The past also teaches us “that demagogues can only thrive when a substantial portion of the demos—the people—want him to” (p. 271).

The Soul of America brings important, but often little discussed, issues in our history to bear to help us understand where we are today as a nation and as a culture.   A great read.

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Meacham, John. The Soul of America: The Battle for our Better Angels.  New York: Random House, 2018.

 

"These Truths"

 

I have found my pandemic "read"--These Truths by Jill Lepore.  It is a history of the United States from 1492 to 2016 in one very large volume--789 pages of text, plus another 200+ pages of notes, index, and acknowledgements.  A good long read for these very quiet days and nights. What makes it special, though, is its focus.  Lepore tells the American story in terms of how we have responded, over the past five centuries to “these truths”—to the promise of America—that the Founders stated in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness--that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .

It is the story of the United States told by looking at the ongoing struggle for both equality and independence as we—as individuals and communities—pursue our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  That it has been a long struggle, Lepore makes clear by showing how the major events in our history are tied to our understanding of “these truths.”  That it is a continuing struggle, our times make abundantly clear.  As Andrew Sullivan noted in his  New York Times review, it is also a story of contradictions:

This is not an account of relentless progress. It’s much subtler and darker than that. It reminds us of some simple facts so much in the foreground that we must revisit them: “Between 1500 and 1800, roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried 12 million Africans there by force; and as many as 50 million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease. … Taking possession of the Americas gave Europeans a surplus of land; it ended famine and led to four centuries of economic growth.” Nothing like this had ever happened in world history; and nothing like it is possible again. The land was instantly a refuge for religious dissenters, a new adventure in what we now understand as liberalism and a brutal exercise in slave labor and tyranny. It was a vast, exhilarating frontier and a giant, torturing gulag at the same time. Over the centuries, in Lepore’s insightful telling, it represented a giant leap in productivity for humankind: “Slavery was one kind of experiment, designed to save the cost of labor by turning human beings into machines. Another kind of experiment was the invention of machines powered by steam.” It was an experiment in the pursuit of happiness, but it was in effect the pursuit of previously unimaginable affluence.

 

            In the process, Lepore creates a very different reading of American history than most of us got in school.  Instead of focusing on battles and personalities, it focuses on how Americans defined “these truths” over the years and fought about their definitions.  It is a very fresh look at our history and one that can open our eyes to the truths we are dealing with today. 

            The book has four parts:  “The Idea” (1492-1799), “The People” (1800-1865), “The State” (1866-1945), and “The Machine” (1946-2016).  I am about half-way through at this point and am learning a lot, getting a fresh perspective on our path to today.

            I also just picked up Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a collection of early Joan Didion essays dating from 1968 to 2000—another unique insight into our culture and times.

            Happy reading!