Final Blog Reflection

1. The technology that will be most useful to me is the stock market simulation Rick introduced to me. It provides a great way for students to actually understand how the free market works and, more to my purposes, how the free market has been known to collapse (either due to internal or external pressure).

2. I will use this technology to help my students get their hands dirty. If students don't *feel* a topic, they will not learn it except as a hoop to jump through. Students can learn to trade stocks, form corporations, and appeal to the government for assistance, thus teaching them the nature of today's economy in all of its messiness.

3. My goal as a teacher is to give students independent learning skills so that they know how to analyze truth claims. I am a history instructor; most of my students will not pursue history as a career. Therefore, my job is to use history as a venue for showing students how evidence can be used and misused. One of the ways this class will help me do that is through the class wiki assignment. I want all students to feel like they have a vested interest in the outcome of the class; they are part of a community, and communities help its members.

Final blog post for class: Haunting moral questions

The more I think about how best to teach history, the more I realize that if our history doesn't *haunt* the students, then it's not very effective. By haunt, I only mean that the lesson material resonates in their bones, that it isn't merely the cold analysis of a science or math class. After all, most who teach history would suggest that at some level, we're teaching students how to be good citizens, how to be active thinkers. In essence, we're teaching them a kind of morality (and those involved in education know that that's hardly right-wing nuttery--the quasi-socialist Goodspeed made a name for himself by discussing the "Moral Foundations" of education).

So how to break that resonance barrier The key is that students need to *actually* see how the topic they're studying is part of contemporary discourse. I've considered a few ways. I'll use specific history units to illustrate, but these techniques can be applied across the board with a little ingenuity.

1) Re-enact the Salem Witch Trials without informing the students before hand. Have one of your more dramatic students play the role of Bridget Bishop, for example. Make sure she does a *good* job, enough to scare her fellow students a little (you might also want to pick someone who has a pretty strong rapport with her fellow students--the kind that endure one class period of insanity :). After about 5-10 minutes of that, inform the students what just happened. Have them write down a "journal account" of what they saw.

2) Have students compile a soundtrack to a favorite war--the Civil War, the Vietnam War, etc, using contemporary songs to illustrate various battles, episodes in the war. They form groups and must agree on the final song selections (requiring that they sharpen their debating skills). Have them present their soundtracks to the class and defend their song choices. This helps them to conceptualize the wars in ways that they genuinely understand.

3) Model a totalitarian government. One student is chosen as a chairman who exacts all control over the grades of other students. If they are late, fail to tell the chairman where they will be at a particular time, or do not pay due deference to the state, then they lose points. The teacher acts as the #2 man, basically advising the chairman on how best to maintain control over his people. And make sure you're *serious* about this. Send people to check up on where each student says they're going to be. It's complicated, but it provokes the students into understanding exactly what the 20th-century totalitarian experience was about.

This, in my mind, is the best way for students to start asking the great moral questions about human nature, the role of government, and the reality of war. Just some Saturday morning thoughts.

Last week's blog post

I'm now finishing up writing my first multiple-choice examination. Especially in history teaching, these exams are infamous for being mind-numbingly difficult and worse still, largely irrelevant. Here's how I work to ensure the relevance of my questions:

1) A focus on cultural literacy

I look for the terms that are used in common, educated discourse about a particular topic. This way, I'm emphasizing knowledge as a part of community discussion rather than for its own sake. I want students to walk away from the exam with the ability to recognize once-obscure names as a part of a larger milieu: "I remember answering a question about so-and-so, etc." This will help them not to feel like fools when having conversations on the topic.

2) Direct it back to the Big Ideas

Even when using obscure names, those obscure names should reveal something about Big Ideas. If they do not, then according to the dictates of cold, historical logic, they should remain obscure. For example, most people don't know the name Anthony Johnson from Russell Stevenson; however, if they understand that Anthony Johnson was one of the first African-American slaveholders in America, then he helps to evoke a larger thought process about the birth of race slavery in America.

3) Truth will out

Multiple-choice exams are good b/c they don't give the student the opportunity to haze their ignorance in a lot of moralizing and platitudes. But for them to succeed, But it also leaves the students vulnerable to their own misunderstandings. It definitely reveals how little/how much they know of the facts of history, even if it's raw knowledge. Multiple-choice exams are therefore quite important for determining if they have the requisite facts running around in their head in order to have an intelligent conversation about the topic.

Multiple choice exams can be highly useful if used properly but utterly ridiculous if not. Next up: grading final essay exams.