So I mentioned this in an earlier comment, but I've been thinking about it all day.
When I was in school, there was no Google. Our town, when I was young, had no bookstores: as I mentioned, the closest we had was the Hallmark store, and the "lurid paperback" rack at the supermarket, and of course, the magazine racks, and least half of whi…
So I mentioned this in an earlier comment, but I've been thinking about it all day.
When I was in school, there was no Google. Our town, when I was young, had no bookstores: as I mentioned, the closest we had was the Hallmark store, and the "lurid paperback" rack at the supermarket, and of course, the magazine racks, and least half of which were up high with only the top edges showing. My parents got us a World Book Encyclopedia set, twenty-some volumes of the "authoritative history of everything." The county library had what it had, and there was a card catalogue, but its curation was a bit haphazard.
The real Authority was the textbooks we were given in our classes, because it consisted of material we had to memorize and regurgitate, though typically only once. There was no real synthesis of ideas, just discrete sections with discrete globs of things to memorize, regurgitate, and forget. But we all knew that if it was in the Textbook, it was right, and the teacher was wrong.
Now, I can go online and learn how to install and mud drywall (that's been a home project, and we did a good job), gather enough information to write an algorithm for reproducible floating-point sums, get an overview of global warming trends (with data), read three competing histories of the attack on Pearl Harbor, order a book on John Dee's Enochian Magick.... If I can ask the question, I can get answers.
It's like something out of Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night.
So how DO you approach the teaching of history? Can it be summarized?
When I taught third grade my class and I researched and wrote and published neighborhood histories. We began with the neighborhood around our school, which included many olh houses as well as the site of the first gristmill in our county. We discussed how we could learn what the neighborhood was like 150 years earlier. We walked downtown to the main branch library and discovered the Sanborne insurance maps as well as old city directories. We found a history of Asheville ( our city) houses. We knocked on doors and interviewed people. Eventually we divided the research into pieces and kids wrote different sections. We invited the man who lived on the gristmill site to talk to us. We had discussions about how you could decide which was the correct answer when one source gave a different date than another. It was a fascinating project for all of us. We integrated language arts, social studies, research, etc. These were 8 and 9 year olds, and at the end of the year we went to a City Council meeting where a few of the kids got up and gave reasons why the neighborhood should be designated a historic district.(It did).
So I mentioned this in an earlier comment, but I've been thinking about it all day.
When I was in school, there was no Google. Our town, when I was young, had no bookstores: as I mentioned, the closest we had was the Hallmark store, and the "lurid paperback" rack at the supermarket, and of course, the magazine racks, and least half of which were up high with only the top edges showing. My parents got us a World Book Encyclopedia set, twenty-some volumes of the "authoritative history of everything." The county library had what it had, and there was a card catalogue, but its curation was a bit haphazard.
The real Authority was the textbooks we were given in our classes, because it consisted of material we had to memorize and regurgitate, though typically only once. There was no real synthesis of ideas, just discrete sections with discrete globs of things to memorize, regurgitate, and forget. But we all knew that if it was in the Textbook, it was right, and the teacher was wrong.
Now, I can go online and learn how to install and mud drywall (that's been a home project, and we did a good job), gather enough information to write an algorithm for reproducible floating-point sums, get an overview of global warming trends (with data), read three competing histories of the attack on Pearl Harbor, order a book on John Dee's Enochian Magick.... If I can ask the question, I can get answers.
It's like something out of Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night.
So how DO you approach the teaching of history? Can it be summarized?
When I taught third grade my class and I researched and wrote and published neighborhood histories. We began with the neighborhood around our school, which included many olh houses as well as the site of the first gristmill in our county. We discussed how we could learn what the neighborhood was like 150 years earlier. We walked downtown to the main branch library and discovered the Sanborne insurance maps as well as old city directories. We found a history of Asheville ( our city) houses. We knocked on doors and interviewed people. Eventually we divided the research into pieces and kids wrote different sections. We invited the man who lived on the gristmill site to talk to us. We had discussions about how you could decide which was the correct answer when one source gave a different date than another. It was a fascinating project for all of us. We integrated language arts, social studies, research, etc. These were 8 and 9 year olds, and at the end of the year we went to a City Council meeting where a few of the kids got up and gave reasons why the neighborhood should be designated a historic district.(It did).