Teaching Middle School Students About America's Industrial Revolution

    One thing that I love when guest teaching is refreshing my memory about what I once learned so very long ago and sharing my point of view.  Today was such a day.  We started with Samuel Slater, one of America's first industrial spies.  He memorized England's secret textile industry techniques and developed them from memory in America which started our industrial revolution.  We weren't just farmers and settlers on the frontier after that. 
    Oh, the book didn't call Samuel Slater an industrial spy.  Textbooks always make people more heroic than they really were.  I was an industrial spy for the semiconductor industry in the late 1980's and memorized competitor's designs to improve my company's designs, so I called the apple an apple. 
    Next came Eli Whitney's cotton gin and his idea of interchangeable parts.  The cotton gin, of course, allowed us to gather more cotton to make more textiles than we could use as a country, so we developed exportable industrial products.  The mere idea of interchangeable parts was ground breaking in the early 1800's!  Imagine if every car had a custom-made rear bumper?  A new, individually-made bumper would probably cost more than the car and would never match the original paint color!  Thank you Eli!  I also pointed out that the student desks were all made out of interchangeable parts, but don't break any part of them, because we're in a budget crisis and can't afford to replace them.
    Then came our plethora of inventors.  I explained to the kids how we've invested so much money in our wars that our US Patent and Trademark Office is severely understaffed and underfunded.  My current kayak accessory patent has been under review for about 4 years and is no where near being approved.  I told the kids, "Imagine all the patents that can change our country's economic leverage and provide jobs just sitting at the Patent Office for 4-10 years?  We need to fix that!  We are a country that has prospered, because of our new inventions.  This has to be fixed!"
    We finally got to the immigration section dealing with the tensions of the entrenched Americans and the newly arrived Americans.  Staring at the sea of ~90% ethnic (mostly Latino) faces, I explained how my ancestors came over from Germany to start a new life.  They could be Hessian's (mercenaries) sent around the world fighting other country's wars or come to America and build a new type of life. 
    Before World War 1 the German language was almost the national language, but this war ended any hopes of that.  German schools were closed, and German people were not well liked.  My Slovenian grandmother, who's accent was close to the German accent, was thrown into the bins at her factory by the Polish girls, because she was a "German."  Fortunately, my grandmother's boss liked how productive grandma was and questioned why she was quitting.  The boss, being a German-American, fired the Polish girls when he heard the story. :-)
    So I explained to my sea of immigrant children, these ethnic tensions are as old as our country.  However, new immigrants bring a hardworking spirit to our country which our country needs.  Yes, it causes job losses, but it lights a fire under those that have gotten lazy with the comforts that are so prevalent in our wealthy nation.