I often tell my students to pay attention to the news because they're living through the history that their children and grandchildren will be studying in school. Think of everything that today's students have lived through from the fall of the Soviet Union, Clinton's impeachment, the 2000 election, September 11, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the 2004 election plus all the technological developments. Well, now it's the time for Clinton's impeachment to enter the textbooks. The Associated Press reports that new textbooks are now addressing Clinton's impeachment. It's no surprise that the coverage in textbooks doesn't get into salacious details. In fact, I remember my first year teaching 8th grade Social Studies. In the first week of school, wanting students to pay attention to current events, I'd assigned them to read about the Starr Report since it came out that week. And, my first week teaching the class, parents were calling the principal to complain that they didn't want their children reading about what the President had been doing. I remember how astounding it felt to know that we had a president that 8th graders weren't allowed to read about in the newspaper.

My principal called me in for a meeting. He was uncomfortable because he didn't want to tell me to cancel my assignment, but we all recognized why parents were uncomfortable having their children reading about what was in the Starr Report. Just then the assistant principal came in and said that we were in luck because Clinton had just bombed a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan and a terrorist training ground in Afghanistan and so I could use that as an alternate assignment. Little did we know how much more we were going to be hearing about Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan in the future. Or how faint was that response to the embassy bombings in Africa. Those two events have always been tied together in my mind: the sex and perjury scandal and the futile gesture against terrorism.