Reflecting & Storytelling About Teaching
As we start the school year, I’m just not feeling the debating spirit. Last November, I wrote about an electoral college debate gone awry in my eighth-grade history classes. The topic felt too stale and too political… Continue reading
Assigning opinion pieces on current issues gives our students voice and lets us hear their strong and sometimes fiery perspectives. When I’ve assigned op-eds in both world and U.S. history, students have responded best when… Continue reading
Asking students to use books for research sometimes feels old-fashioned even to me, an inveterate reader. So much exists online, in subscription databases and on the free web, and students instinctively reach for their phones or a keyboard to discover information. Yet doing research for my own master’s degree in history over the past few years… Continue reading
This week it has been even more of a pleasure than usual to spend time with eighth graders. They’ve been creating social reform concept maps, an oldie-but-goodie project that I… Continue reading
Most days, I feel reasonably positive about how my classes have gone, in this my 19th year of teaching. I usually have in mind tweaks or even overhauls for next year’s version of that topic, but rarely do I feel that an entire project has fallen short of my expectations. But last month… Continue reading
Participation has always been one of the most difficult things to assess and encourage for my 8th grade history students. Sometimes the quietest students in discussion are the most devoted in their writing, and sometimes the most vocal students are not aware… Continue reading
Three Broadway musicals from throughout the 1970s – Follies, A Chorus Line, and Annie – in the intentions of their creators and actors, in the reception by critics and audiences, and in the messages of the book and music themselves – reflected larger social issues of the time… Continue reading
In a never-ending search to infuse garlic and oregano into the plain marinara sauce of textbook history, sometimes I ask students to read a scholarly journal article or a chapter of a popular history book… Continue reading
So many times as an English and history teacher, I’ve rushed students through the first step of the research process: choosing a topic. Then we can move on to the real work — or so I’ve always thought. Recently, however… Continue reading
At the end of every year, like so many history teachers, I regret simply skimming the surface of the past. Three weeks, and there went India. We spent half a day on Emperor Ashoka, and I completely glossed over… Continue reading
