Since my Unit 2 test last Wednesday, I've embarked on a new project in chronological world history teaching that I think is working out better than I had anticipated.
My Unit 2 was awkward. It was an ill-fated attempt to use the textbook, as I decided to teach the Prologue to the book - looking back now it is a bizarro tribute to democracy and judeo-christian tradition as the foundations for the modern world as we know it. Even if such is the case, the treatment in this section is really biased at best and at worst utterly confusing to teach as some sort of "prologue" to modern world history.
My teaching of this section reflected this. I was jumbled, unclear about what exactly the point of learning this was. If I were to ask myself why we were really learning this it was, well ... its the first part of the textbook. The worst part was that I could barely explain why we were learning it. I didn't even get to the point where we put the different pieces together until the study review. I caught myself explaining everything the day before the test and I thought to myself I should be doing this every day.
Of course I know better than to just teach from the textbook, but to be honest, I'm completely burnt out on lesson planning, or planning in general. I have quickly become the result of the idea of a 1st year teacher being entirely left to plan a year of World History given only an 11 year old textbook without any guiding curriculum, assistance, or other resources to create quality lessons. I am pretty much out of tricks.
This doesn't mean I'm not still trying. It just means that I've, perhaps positively, accepted the reality that this is going to be an uphill struggle, and that I can't expect myself to pull off a teaching masterpiece every day. I've tried, and I can't.
I have learned, however, that the textbook is not the answer. Textbooks suck. They suck the life right out of history. They are like the enemy, and anything the enemy says is acidic bile to be violently spewed from one's brain in the minutes after your test. I know this, I've been a student.
So I've decided to take a new direction, to do my best to walk the middle ground: somewhere between the soul-less drudgery of the textbook lessons, with all of the question and answer worksheets, graphic organizers, and searching out a verbatim answer that students rarely understand - and the exciting, activity-based realm of history as a life-experience, learning to view the world, and the past through the eyes, or even better, perspectives of others. This is where students learn to think outside of themselves and mature as they slowly open their minds to the remote possibility that others might have had it worse off than them.
I feel like I've gotten a glimpse of the prior, and it is brutal. It is the history I hate (to teach). It is when things don't quite make sense because the textbook becomes the authority not the student.
I feel like I'm slowly getting a glimpse of the latter. I've been using a History Channel video called the "Dark Ages" to introduce my students to the Middle Ages. Its been good to help students come to know multiple players, places, and events because it provides them with tons of visuals and context references for them to sequence and process material. It isn't perfect, but with frequent stops and multiple reviews, I feel like the big picture of why we are learning this is slowly unfolding while we are learning, as opposed to the study review.
I feel like I'm trying to put it all together for my students every day. I think they understand and appreciate my transparency, they are definitely more receptive to the content than they've been, and I can tell by the increased participation in key students that the ideas are getting through better.
Of course, I'm giving an open note quiz tomorrow so we'll see how it goes. I'll post an update in a week or so.
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