Millard Fillmore for Life!

Perhaps the biggest hit of the Forgotten Presidents mini-unit was making paper hats, inspired by this piece of McKinley campaign paraphernalia. As silly as this may seems (and there’s nothing wrong with some silliness, mind you), the neat thing was that students seemed to really latch on to the presidents they chose to make hats for. A number of students decided to wear their hats for the rest of the day, which sparked some great conversation with other students.

Students decided to make a serious face for this picture

Today was the final day of the mini-unit, and we revisited the list of the reasons we/the American public remembers or forgets presidents that students brainstormed on the first day. Some of the reasons that students listed, they still thought rang true, but others seemed less true. For example, dying in office is actually more common in “forgotten” presidents, rather than remembered ones. Students discussed that maybe the things in the remember list were true, but that you needed a combination of them or to be a relatively recent president to be remembered by most Americans.

Forgotten Presidents

In the last weeks of school, the other 8th grade US history teacher and I survey students to gauge their interest in topics we’ve haven’t covered that year. We then compile their responses and the teach classes on the topics that emerge as the favorites by class. Since we teach overlapping periods for most of our students. I’ll teach some of his students for the week and he’ll teach some of mine, depending on their interests. Some of the topics are four day seminars and some are one day seminars. This always feels like a crazy short time period for the topics, but students get exposure to topics they wouldn’t otherwise and I think the variety is welcomed as the school year winds down. The topics that were chosen this year for four day seminars are the history of comedy, history of/in the movies, and forgotten presidents. The one day seminars are history of music (that we haven’t already covered), history of sports, disability and GLBT rights, and history of computers.

The forgotten presidents topic is a new one for this year. It’s challenging to decide exactly who should be on the list, but the below list represents the presidents with which I think students will be least familiar. My goal isn’t necessarily for them to learn facts about these presidents, so much as to gain some general familiarity with presidents that aren’t often taught in any depth and consider why we remember the presidents we do.

Martin Van Buren (1837-1841)
William H. Harrison (1841)
John Tyler (1841-1845)
James K. Polk (1841-1849)
Zachary Taylor (1849-1850)
Millard Fillmore (1850-1853)
Franklin Pierce (1853-1857)
James Buchanan (1857-1861)
Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-1881)
James A. Garfield (1881)
Chester A. Arthur (1881-1885)
Grover Cleveland (1885-1889, 1893-1897)
Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893)
William McKinley (1897-1901)
William H. Taft (1909-1913)
Warren G. Harding (1921-1923)
Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929)
Gerald R. Ford (1974-1977)

Day 1

Take presidents quiz (circle names of those who have been president from a list of names, some presidents and some not), turn over and write down the names of all the presidents you can remember

Discussion in two large groups- What are the differences between these two lists? Why do we remember some presidents and not others?

Record on large sheet of paper (save for Day 4) and share with whole class

Discuss in smaller groups- What do people look for in a president? How has technology changed campaigning? Does physical appearance matter? (Heights of presidents and presidential candidates) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heights_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States_and_presidential_candidates

Day 2

Watch Animaniacs Presidents What types of facts does it highlight about each president?

Assign each student a forgotten president. Read his biography and develop a 30 second elevator pitch for that president. Cover at least the following…

*What time period in US history/what else important was going on?
*What political party did the candidate represent?
*Significant achievement/issue of presidency
*Fact people most likely to remember about this president

Have students deliver elevator pitches with the class. (Project a picture of each president from my computer as they pitch)

Day 3

Look at examples of campaign memorabilia from forgotten presidents

Van Buren Pull Card 
McKinley Paper Hat
Cleveland-Harrison Scales
Harrison Paper Lantern

Choose a forgotten president and create a campaign poster highlighting and (if time) a piece of campaign swag

Day 4

Quick 5 point quiz

Re-visit 1st day’s discussion- Have your opinions changed? What similarities do forgotten presidents have with well-remembered presidents (assassination, presidency during war time, good looks, popularity or infamy, etc.)

Watch segment of Michael Gerhardt on Morning Joe http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3036789/ns/msnbc-morning_joe/vp/51287398#51287398

Working with a partner- Create the ultimate (fictional) candidate. What would be the best set of characteristics/events to assure a president’s memory is preserved?

If needed for any of the four days…
Chicago Tribune Presidents Quiz 
Presidential Trivia
45 Odd Facts Video
Presidential Facts- History Channel 

Animal Farm and Russian Revolution Update

In a previous post, I described a lesson I’d created for 7th grade World History class on the Russian Revolution. Below is a picture taken of the board  after students wrote the allegorical elements they saw in Animal Farm. I was impressed with some of the connections they saw. I’d like to find a bit more middle school-friendly video about the Russian Revolution, but overall I feel like the lesson went well.

Classroom Updates

I haven’t blogged as much recently as I would like to, but I did just post updates from my seventh and eighth grade classes on the classroom blog.

The Upper School class has wrapped up the student-taught lessons. The final lesson focused on the history of cancer treatment in the US. It was a great introduction to how treatment has changed. The student who was teaching the class choose three volunteers to illustrate this point at the end of the lesson. The three students put on sunglasses that were obscured to various degrees and tried to retrieve a bone from the Operation game. The class then had to guess what period of cancer treatment each set of glasses represented. It was a great way to wrap up one of my favorite parts of the course.

One of the students wrote on her reflection after teaching, “I also learned that once you are able to teach someone material, you truly do have a full understanding of it. I now realize what it is to truly understand something, and I think now I may even have a new study method! (sorry mom… you’re about to learn a lot about photosynthesis…)

Questions About the Holocaust

Today in 8th grade classes, we discussed the typical experience of Jews and other victims of the Holocaust as they traveled to and arrived in concentration camps. After a reading and looking at some photographs, students were getting restless but still had a number of questions, so I had them do the following.

Students split into pairs and wrote two questions they had about the camps or Holocaust, more broadly on two post-it notes. Then they stuck the post-it notes on the board and chose two post-its from other groups with questions they wanted to answer.

I didn’t want to turn students loose on Google to start looking for the answers to their questions, so I directed them to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum website. If they couldn’t find the information there, then I asked them to talk with me and we researched the information together. I was attempting to strike a balance between wanting students to research on their own, but also giving guidance to avoid potentially disturbing or inaccurate information.

After they finished answering the questions, they returned the post-its to the board and the originators of the questions retrieved them. There was a built-in quality control. Students whose questions weren’t sufficiently answered complained to the question answerers which allowed me to say to those groups, “Hey, they don’t think you’ve answered their questions well. Give it another go.” Students then shared some of the questions and answers with the class as a whole.

The activity was really productive in terms of being able to answer large number of student questions and also to give students the sense that I’m not the only source of trustworthy information.

Wedding rings taken from Jews and others who were taken to Buchenwald

Russian Revolution and Animal Farm

Seventh grade students have read Animal Farm in English class, but have not discussed the Russian Revolution or the allegorical elements of the novel. Because of time constraints, we only have one day to devote to doing that in history class.  It kills me that we’re so limited on time, but I wanted to at least give the students an opportunity to think about allegory and  connections between the novel and the events in Russia during and following the Revolution. Here’s the lesson I’ve created for the day. (We’re using a video from Discovery Ed streaming to offer a quick overview to the Russian history.) We’ll see how it goes

Primary Sources

I received an email last night notifying me that I’d been accepted to the Library of Congress’s Summer Teacher Institute. The STI focuses on helping teachers develop lessons based on the primary sources available in the LoC’s collection. I am super-excited about the opportunity, both for the work we’ll do at the STI and the chance to spend a week in DC, one of my favorite cities, other than the amazing city where I live.

The acceptance email also reminded me of a thought-provoking post Mike wrote a few weeks ago questioning why it is that we teach primary sources (specifically text-based ones) and whether they provide the most value in instruction, especially when a video or image might be more accessible to students. Mike’s point was that, while professional historians examine these text-based sources to construct historical understanding, a video might give the same content and yet be more accessible, especially to struggling readers. He asks whether a teacher risks being a literacy snob by valuing (text-based) primary sources over other types of literacy. I appreciated Mike’s post because it questioned what seems to be a fundamental assumption from the Common Core to the Stanford University’s Reading Like a Historian curriculum.

In response to Mike’s post are a few thoughts about why I think there is value in working through text-based primary sources with students.

1. We study text-based primary sources because they are primary, that is, they were composed by those who experienced the events we are studying. To avoid exploring these sources with students suggests that we trust the interpreters more than the people who experienced an event. Certainly humans can be unreliable narrators, but I think we at least owe those who have lived the opportunity to narrate their experience. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we ought to value these sources more highly than others, but I think at the least, we give them a charitable reading and value their perspective.

2. Reading primary sources helps demystify the work of historians and challenge the myth of a single story. In my experience, the best uses of primary sources are to challenge the conventional narrative of a particular event. While they may not be the best for an initial presentation of a topic or event, especially in the language in the text is complex or challenging, they can help complicate a simplistic understanding of an event. Studying them can demonstrate to students how many choices a historian has to make in his or her interpretation of them.

3. There’s value in working through difficult material, in whatever form in might take. While only a small percentage of the students that we teach will become professional historians, the skill of reading challenging texts is transferable to a number of fields. At the same time, it’s important to choose texts that challenge students, but don’t frustrate them to the point that they tune out. (Think Vygotsky’s concept of a zone of proximal development.) The use of primary sources ought to be age and skill level-appropriate. I don’t think that means that the use of primary sources should be limited to the upper grades, but it means that teachers and curriculum writers ought to chose texts that students will be able to analyze successfully with guidance.

When the Goal Gets in the Way

I’ve decided to drop part of my goal for 2013- reading 10 big books. Over the past several weeks, I’ve realized the goal isn’t working for me for several reasons. I never clearly defined what big books were. I imagined books weighty both literally and in ideas, but what I’ve realized is that was a placeholder in my mind for “books that I feel like I should have read, but I haven’t.” I told myself that this is because I lacked the time or the focus to read these books, but what I’m realizing is that I lacked the desire.

In the past 24 hours, I’ve read two books- Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Words that Work. I read Mr. Penumbra because I’d seen it on a list of books for adults that teens might enjoy. I’d had it around for a week or so, but what kicked me into reading it was a notification from the library saying it couldn’t be renewed because someone had checked it out. I was hooked by just the first few pages. It’s an adventure kind of book, about old technologies and new technologies. (It reminded me of Ready Player One.) There are geek and pop culture references galore. It’s certainly not dense reading, but it addresses broader cultural issues and themes.

I read Words that Work because a friend loaned it to me to read. It’d been sitting on my nightstand for weeks. I wanted to read it because it was important to this person, but I kept having difficulty finding time to dive into it. So on this lazy Saturday morning, I decided to read it fast, around an hour for the whole book. I picked up the key ideas and anecdotes, more than enough to have a good conversation about it with him, which was my goal in the first place.

As with most things, guilt isn’t a particularly powerful motivator, at least not one that makes you feel good about being spurred to action. For now, I’m just going to read. I’ll probably continue to pick up The Brothers Karamazov from time to time. Maybe this will even be the year that I finish it, but I’m taking it off the nightstand where it feels like it’s judging me for not finishing it.

(De)Constructing Texts

Over the next several weeks, students in my Upper School class will begin teaching the class on their self-selected topics. Teaching the class is part of the cumulative project for the class. Students have been researching their topics and interviewing an expert about the topic. One of the challenges of asking students to select topics that interest them is to help them incorporate not only current controversy and their personal opinions/experience, but also dig into the history of the topic and view it with an analytic eye.

Before students began teaching their lessons, I wanted to have a discussion about the types of topics they’ve chosen and their place within what has traditionally been thought of as material integral to history courses (aka what gets covered in textbooks). This year students’ topics include the history of…

transportation and commerce
collegiate sports
role of firearms in war
government involvement in healthcare
organization of political parties
race and sports
religion’s influence on political issues
popular literature’s reflection of culture
baseball
newspapers
blood donation/supply
cancer treatment
sports and the economy
information sharing, storage and usage
advertising strategies
medical technology
race and film
(tap) dance
regulation/safety of household products
aviation

I distributed a set of US History textbooks, which provoked surprised exclamations from students, since we’ve yet to touch a textbook up until this point in the year. I asked students to use the index and skim to see how much coverage their topic was given in the textbook. Afterward, we used todaysmeet to have a conversation about how much discussion there was on their topics in the textbook and what the reasons for that might be. It led to some useful reflection on how historical importance is assigned to various topics and the point of view of textbooks. You can read a transcript of the discussion here.

When I was in high school, I so desperately wanted to keep my US History AP textbook that I reported it lost and paid for it to avoid having to return it. It wasn’t that I didn’t have plenty of access to books. We even had the internet at our house, despite it still being a bit of a novelty. But I wanted to keep my textbook because to me it represented order, 300 years of history neatly explained and bound.

My high school history textbook

Now that I teach history I struggle every day with the messiness of it. I worry that I don’t bring enough voices from the past into my classroom and that I’m not giving students enough since of the variety of perspectives. The next day I worry that I’ve overwhelmed students by not helping them develop frameworks to think critically about the variety of narratives that I’ve brought into the classroom and that they’ve explored in print and digital resources. Even though we don’t use a textbook in our class, we are constructing a text, and I think it’s just as important to be self-reflective and critical of that process as we would be of a hardbound book.

(Thanks to the Unraveling the Textbook session at EduCon for spurring me to think more about textbooks.)

Seeing the Connections

Prior to a quiz on the early and mid-1800s (primarily focused on events leading to the Civil War) in 8th grade history, I asked students to make conceptual maps of the people, places, and ideas that we had studied. I broke students into groups of three or four and gave each group a large piece of paper and markers. The only requirement was that each term had to be connected to at least two other terms. The terms didn’t have to form only one web, but some students challenged themselves to do this. The best part of this activity was that there was a lot of realization on students’ part about material that they didn’t know. If there were terms that they couldn’t connect to other terms, either because they weren’t sure what they meant or because they didn’t realize how they related to the other material, it was a good clue that they needed to review the term.