In an early blog back in September, I examined the Learning Standards provided by the state of New Jersey for my subject matter. I was aware at the time that the latest round of revisions were being discussed and heard some good things about how the National Council For Social Studies College, Career, and Civic …
Continue reading “New Jersey’s Learning Standards for Social Studies, Part II”
Charles is one of my friends from Theme Music. I became a fan of his singing and songwriting before we met and before I had a clue of his involvement in public affairs. I have been fortunate enough to get to record with him on a bunch of occasions and just to be in his …
Last week I wrote about the ambitious Reconstruction unit that I created for my classes. This is the third post in a series of four? five? on the subject matter. I inserted the Structured Academic Controversy from Stanford History Education Group into my Friday blog, and will probably write the next segment on Friday. Today’s …
I’ve never been in particularly great physical shape. I also was never terribly overweight, but in my 20s I was around 170 pounds. Over the years I very slowly put on weight. For a number of years when I’d cross an arbitrary threshhold like 180, I’d start having some physical problems, inflammation, particular aches and …
Continue reading “The Glacial Movement Toward Becoming a Continent”
The past two weeks might have been the busiest of the year for me and here I sit on Saturday morning… a survivor. I’ll probably look back at some of this later in the year and recognize how good a lot of things were, but ground down into complete exhaustion, I can’t entirely grok that. …
I first became aware of Structured Academic Controversies through the work of the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG). I’m not sure who invented the protocol, but it’s an effective means of getting all students in a class to interact with primary (or secondary) sources, recognize multiple perspectives on a controversial subject matter, and develop their …
Continue reading “Stanford History Education Group: Reconstruction Structured Academic Controversy”
In my first year of teaching, I was approached to coach a new Mock Trial team, something that I had been hoping to do in the first place. Back then the competition featured a minimum of four cases (as opposed to today’s two cases). In our very first case, the team emerged victorious before getting …
It has long been a pet peeve of mine when I hear people refer to the “co-equal” branches of government. Sometimes that’s a layman, a journalist repeating what they’ve heard somewhere, but I’ve also seen it from history teachers. I recently posted the following mini-rant on the AP Government Teachers page on Facebook: I was …
Continue reading “The Three Branches of Government Are Not and Never Were Equal”
John Marks is an HHS 2006 alumnus who I taught in AP US History and AP US Government and Politics, and who played in several of my music shows at HHS. John holds the distinction of being the student most capable of procrastinating on a mountain of work and still managing to complete top-notch work. …
For my Reconstruction unit, I have crafted a tightly designed two weeks of material. There are three lectures in the ten days, which is one more than I usually do over that time period, but the material is so rich and incredibly important that I don’t want to take any chances that students will miss …
Fenster on Education