I enjoyed reading The Historical Method- Building student understanding of the past. I often relate what I'm learning now as an adult, to the way I learned in school as a child. Unfortunately, what we usually remember is the bad parts. I think of my 6th grade teacher who was retiring at the end of the year that I had him. He literally would turn his hearing aid off in class and go about his business, while we raised heck. Every day we would take out our spiral notebook for Social Studies and our Social Studies book and copy word for word, page by page. That was how we were supposed to learn. We were just expected to absorb it. It was like this for every subject of the day too. I don't remember anything from that year.
I think that it has helped me to become the teacher that I am now though. I am, as a learner, gaining a better, broader view of history. I think my difficulties lie in establishing a time sequence of where everything fits. I have strived to do an engaging way of teaching this, while incorporating personal connections to the past. I have also learned from my colleagues, Robin and Nancy, how to bring in primary source documents and evaluate different perspectives in them. All in all, I think that the article is great to keep as a refresher. It encourages me to think outside the box, and to challenge myself to always do better. And hopefully, I will never be remembered as I remember my 6th grade teacher Mr. Bain.
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Cori, that was a great post. My main motivation for participating in this grant, was that I felt like the way I was teaching History was Boring (for me and my students). I would never have my kids copy the book, but I just wasn't having as much fun with History, and neither were my kids.
ReplyDeleteIt is challenging, but I agree that once you start thinking outside of the box, and start bringing in some different resources things start to become a lot more fun for everyone.