Victory! And other updates.

It's a small victory for the class as a whole, but a huge victory for one kid. We recently played a stock market game (that of course led to the Great Depression), so the students were split up in groups, which my mentor assigned before break, when they started the game. One student had been sitting alone prior to this game and didn't socialize much. Today, he's still sitting with his group, even though the game is long over; I see them pounding fists and giving high fives, both of his other group mates telling him he's awesome. Yay!

I've been planning a lot of lessons lately. One lesson I'm especially excited about is our Myth Busters day. I'm splitting the classes into multiple groups, and I'm going to put a myth on the overhead (I have a sweet power point made up for it) with things like "True or false? Millions of men rushed to enlist after Pearl Harbor, making up a mostly-volunteer military." (The answer is false. 60% of the military for WWII was drafted, and the draft had actually begun before Pearl Harbor.) So then the groups will have about 30 seconds to talk amongst themselves and bring their answer up to me on a piece of paper. Then the scores will be tallied, and the group with the highest score at the end will get some extra credit pts or cookies or something. I chose to have the kids bring the paper up to me, because I think that shouting out answers can get really unruly, and I don't want them looking at other groups and basing their answer on what popular opinion says. But I hope they're still lively and excited about it. This is supposed to be a fun and relaxing day for everyone. :-)

I'm also beginning to realize how hard it can be to choose lessons for a unit like WWII. I mean, for the Great Depression or the 1890s, there's kind of a formula for what you teach. But WWII is so huge. I studied it for 4 years in college, and I still never got to the Pacific conflict! But I do know that a lot of kids got to the war in Europe in World History, so I am focusing on the Home Front, the Pacific conflict, and a series of controversial issues surrounding the era (specifically Civilian targets--holocaust, Japanese internment, the Rape of Nanjing, the A-Bombs). We're reading a lot of primary resources and having a lot of discussions about these issues. In particular, we're reading these three primary resources from the holocaust (an excerpt from Primo Levi's "Survival at Auschwitz," which is kind of cliche, but they haven't read it before), from the Rape of Nanjing, and from Hiroshima. They're all very eye-opening, and my hope is that it will de-romanticize some of these events that have not been properly placed in context for them. People always talk about how justified the A-bombs were, but they never really pay close attention to what it actually did, aside from bringing an end to the War.

I'm also having them write a "Taking a Stance" essay on whether or not they thought Japanese internment was justified. They will need to back up their claim with three pieces of evidence and respond to why someone might think the opposite. (The format is more for working on writing essays, not so much for the topic, but I think it will work well with this and make their organization better.) And their overall assessment is to write a letter, acting as themselves during WWII, to their grandchildren or to future generations, telling them what to remember from WWII. My hope is that each of them will take their own situation during the time into account when they write this. So I want my female students to write from the perspective of a woman and my Black students to write from that perspective of the time. But I'm not sure if that will be good as a total assessment for the unit. I'll have to think about that a bit more.

Finally, I think we're doing a huge series of projects next semester, called "Teach Me." Students will get a list of topics that we're not covering in the class due to time or curriculum constraints, and they can pick one and do a project on it. Right now, I'm thinking that they're going to do some sort of visual thing, like a scrapbook or poster, so that we can keep it up in the room and all the classes can look at it. They'll also give a presentation to their class. But this isn't just for one unit. Students can pick a topic from a range of units. So on the list will be things like Holocaust Art, Blues Music, Roe v. Wade. And the students will be able to choose their own topic outside of the list, as long as they clear it with us to make sure we're not already covering it. But maybe if that's the case, we'll just let them teach that part to the class. The idea is that they teach something that the class may not know, and hopefully stuff that Mr. Richards and I don't know! And I'd like to see them have the freedom to do something meaningful to them and really let history come alive in their own hands.

All-in-all, I'm pretty excited about next semester. We just have to get through exams, and I'll be a pretty happy camper!