Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

All right, I don't usually come to Civics 101 episodes from a personal standpoint.

We have a topic we want to explore, we call guests to explain it to us, we edit it together as a team,

and we try to maintain a professional distance from the subject.

But I frankly don't know any other way to start this episode.

I'm just going to say I was sick and angry when I saw the attack on the Capitol on January 6th.

And that night I thought, how on earth are we going to talk about this on the show?

And thankfully there was another group of people wrestling with the exact same question.

There's this community of social studies and civics educators that we regularly interact with on the show.

They're called SS Chat.

They hold weekly live discussions on Twitter where teachers all over the country share resources and lesson plans.

They give advice to each other, they talk about what their kids are talking about,

their air grievances, and they host an emergency chat session on the night of the 6th with one question.

How are you going to talk about this with your students tomorrow?

Meredith Baker, who teaches social studies in Virginia, said she would focus on definitions.

So that's what we're going to do today.

You're listening to Civics 101, I'm the Capity J.

I'm Hannah McCarthy.

And today we're going to talk about some basic dictionary definitions with Meredith

and hear how our students responded to the events on January 6th.

I wanted to make sure that we did that in class because in my class, meaning matters,

context matters, language matters, accuracy matters, truth matters.

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