Homework can be fun right?

So here I am in the blog world; a world that I swore I would never dive into. But I guess if it becomes an assignment for class there isn't much you can do to avoid it. Anyway, my name is Lauren Hulet. I am a lover of music, attending concerts, reading classical literature, finding tall things that I can jump off of (into water or while harnessed) and I am on the road to become an educator. That sentence on its own should give you some idea of the type of  person I am, but let me paint the picture for you.

Its a rare kid that dreads summer vacation and walks down to the school almost daily to see if the class list had been posted early, trying to catch a glimpse of who my teacher was and who would become my fellow classmates. I loved school. I loved the work, the knowledge and skills I was developing and most of all, it was fun. I grew to love my teachers and always had a special connection with them. Even today I still keep in contact with many of my teachers from past years. I believe in my heart I always knew that I would become a teacher, it was just a matter of what I would teach.

When I reached high school, my very first class was AP European History with Weston Clark. I instantly fell in love with was I was studying due to Mr. Clark's teaching style, encouragement and enthusiasm for the subject. Here I learned study habits, how to read a college level text and how to effectively take notes. I also learned the importance of people and their stories. History is one of the most important subjects one will encounter during their education. It shows us where we came from and how our life came to be. It shows us how things can change in an instant and how if we aren't careful and don't pay attention, we can repeat those events that were so disastrous. Winston Churchill once said "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." I agree.

The main purpose of this blog is to tie in literacy to history. There are many forms of literacy; such as how to function in society, how to understand and comprehend different texts, and how to understand culture and what makes people tick. But here I will focus on how to become and truly be historically literate. We need to understand the past and how it influences our world today. We also need to understand that the world of the past is an unfamiliar and strange world to us. We cannot put our values and ideas on the people of the past and expect things to make sense. To become historically literate we need to remove ourselves from our world and take a look into the events as the people experiencing them would.

Finally, here is my favorite youtube video right now.