The best class you will ever--I mean, EVER--take. Mine.

Picture this. Its the first day of school. 

You've made your classroom all cute, or organized (what ever adjective suits you best)

You've been pouring over the class pictures of your students, trying to memorize names

--(braces, bad hair decisions, acne and all)--

Your lesson plans are ready.

Your outfit is as "teachery" as it could possibly get.

Finally, your first day of school on the other side has arrived.

Finally, you have a classroom of your own. Students of your own. 

You have made it. 

Buses arrive. Students file into the hallways. The bell rings. Students sit before you.

Your mind goes blank. 

WHAT AM I DOING HERE? WHY DIDN'T I BECOME A DENTAL HYGIENIST LIKE MY MOTHER TOLD ME TO?

Worst. First. Day. Of. School. EVER. Let's just all say a prayer that this does not happen to us when we graduate, get hired, go through training, and finally become a teacher. But another scene does beg for out attention. We have all been in classes with one of them. One of those kids who swaggers into the back of the class, throws their stuff to the floor, slides into their seat, raises their hand and in a whiny voice says, "Why do we need to know this? Will I ever use it in real life?" Well whiny kid, let me tell you why this is the best class you will ever take.

The first five minutes of your class will make or break it for the rest of the year. Students will be pushing your limits and testing to see what they can get away with. But the first day of class is important for more than just classroom management reasons. This is the first time they will be exposed to your content and your level of enthusiasm for your subject. The typical first day is expected where you go over class rules and expectations, but it is also and opportunity to show your students how great your subject can be.

History touches every aspect of our lives. If you want to understand jokes in the Simpsons, Psych or any other sitcom now a-days, having a basic knowledge of historical events will make those jokes all that much more funnier. That was one thing I remembered my history teacher said my first day of high school. "You will start to see connections and references in everything you do with the information you learn in this class." Boy was he right. He also showed us examples of that by showing different youtube clips that had references about the content we were learning at the time. It is also great to show how the past connects to the present. One thing that is a possible opening day activity would be to have the students write down a current event that they are interested in and then show a similar event that happened in history.

History has the potential to be one of the most interesting classes a student can take or one of the most miserable. By connecting the students lives to historical events, and showing how much of today's lives are affected by history, we can make history come alive. So when you mind goes blank and you question your career choice, just remember why you became a teacher. We became teachers to make a difference in our students lives and hopefully instill a love of learning. By making things interesting, you can say "this is the best class you will ever take" and really mean it. 

ITLS 4015 Post

Well, multiple classes are now fighting for my blogging abilities; so here is a post for my Technology for Teachers course. If you referred to my first post on this site, I explain a lot about why I want to become a teacher and my ideas about it. But for this purpose I'll restate some of them.

I believe school is something that everyone should be able to enjoy and do well at. It is my goal to incorporate life skills such as writing, speaking and presenting and how to study effectively. I hope to be able to do this through projects and special lectures designed to aid in these topic. It is also a teachers job to make sure their students are understanding the content, if this means staying after and giving extra help I will be willing to do so.

Teaching is something that I always knew I was going to do. I hope that I will be able to succeed and help teach the new generation of students.

Pain, lots of pain: An in-depth look at writing.

Writing in History includes analytic essays and that is about it. Professors hand us a book, tell us to read it in three weeks, and then to write a four to six page paper on it.

Okay, here is what is wrong with that. 

Number one. Three weeks to read a book that is, on average, 300 pages, while taking fifteen credit hours, working twenty hours a weeks, and pretending to have a social life is just impractical. Don't even get me started if you want to get a normal amount of sleep and not be considered a member of the waking dead society. Forget about it!

Number two. These papers almost always turn into a battle of interpretation between you and your professor. History professors are notorious for slamming you if you don't pull out the exact points they feel you should be focusing on. News flash--I am not a mind reader. Gosh.

Number three. Four to six page papers are long. Rambling will most likely happen in order for you to get your page quota. And let me just tell you a story about the actual writing of these papers, humor me.

So you have had this assignment for three weeks now, but life happens and you still have one hundred pages left to read. Well the paper is due tomorrow, and it is now five o'clock. You crack open the book and sit still until you have finished, you don't even let your self have a bathroom break. That is a luxury and you will reward your self later. Finally, you read the closing pages, and nervously glance at the clock...9:00. Okay. You know have maybe two more hours of good brain time to work on this beast of a paper, but of course it is nearly impossible to write. You see 12:00 roll pass....1:30....2:43...you still have two more pages to write....3:52....so..tired....4:22....okay, one more point and the closing paragraph, I can do it.....5:16...6:38...FINISHED. time for bed. You rest your head down for an hour and then get up and head to class. 

Okay history majors, we all know that we've had an experience just like this. Tell the truth. Mine was for a French Revolution class and my paper was about the influence religion had on French culture during the eighteenth century. There, I told you mine.

Why do we do this to ourselves? But more importantly why do teachers do this to us? Well how else are they going to make sure we grasp the concepts. History is a subject of ideas. So many times we get thrown a multiple choice test that assesses our ability to regurgitate dates and facts than to really assess our learning. Essay writing is a necessary evil. Hopefully by allowing students freedom by not putting into place a page requirement and allowing students to pick the topic or book they are interested in will make the process less painful.

As teachers it is our job to assess student learning. So assess it, don't tear it apart or judge it strictly on your opinion. Did they have a strong thesis statement that was explained with examples and details? Or did they not. Leave your opinions at the door and judge their level of learning.

So here's the conclusion. Writing = pain. But pain causes growth and endurance. Lets make it painful in a good way and allow students to learn.

Take a look, its in a book.

Lessons are the life of teachers. They prepare, give, and revise them on a daily basis. But lessons can be taught and learned from more than the teacher at the front of the class. 

"We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly re-spawn while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is."

Stories have been since the beginning of time, a way to learn. Cave paintings, songs, fairy tales all have a deeper meaning in history than simple entertainment. 

"Of the river's secrets, however, today he saw only one that seized his soul: This water ran on and on, it always ran, and yet it always was there, it was always and ever the same and yet at every moment new! Lucky the man who grasped this, who understood this!" 

Students can gain so much from reading these stories. Whether it be from a Charles Dickens classic, a graphic novel about the Holocaust, or a fairy tale that promotes a warning, the lessons are as true as they were when first penned. They may have changed a little over time and taken on a new meaning but by bringing in stories from different periods of history it can grab those students that aren't being reached in the normal way of learning.

"Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day." 

These quotes are from books that touched my life. George Steinbeck's East of Eden, Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, and Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. I was introduced to these authors during high school and guided to others from friends who had a passion for reading as well. Stories have been such a large part of my education and have made me a far better person because of the lessons they teach.

Stories are history. They are vital to understanding the people of the past. Reading and comprehending not only the story, but its deeper meaning is how we can get to know the people that came before us. Plus...its fun. But don't take MY word for it.

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.