How to research a subject. It's a pretty fundamental skill and no one really taught it as far as I can remember until I took a college elective class on basic research methodology.
You know what is fun about schools? 90s fashion is great. I took the kids on an excursion today and a bunch were rocking the baggy faded print t shirts and that’s great.
The 90s are back big in Taiwan, it feels extremely weird.
US history, if you start from European colonization, is a lot less to cover than a lot of other current nations
It’s also pretty straightforward thematically- violent oppressive capitalist white supremacists fucking everyone else hyperlocally, then across our content, then our hemisphere, and now the world (taking over from the British there)
You may also rail against the quality of the education you received, like, fuckin', why aren't the Stonewall riots or the Reagan administrations "response" to the AIDs epidemic taught in schools
So, I have taught U.S. History to juniors three different years and I've never made it past 1972. The Watergate Scandal has effectively been the last thing covered in my U.S. History classes due in part to the challenge of economy of time with the schedule we're provided.
Generally students in America will take U.S. History [part #1] when they're in 8th grade, in which they'll cover colonial America all the way up through the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War. So, three years later, as juniors, they tend to jump back to U.S. History in the Gilded Age, which means over a period of roughly 36 weeks you have to cover 140+ years.
And you could theoretically do that. If you were just going over the content, say in an A.P. class, but the moment you introduce any essay writing or projects or presentations you have to provide students in-class time for those, which directly robs you of any time for a more expansive coverage of history. In addition, you have to give days over to formative/summative assessments, state-testing, holidays, and any other occurrence that halters teaching within the classroom.
or why is there a, like, fucking 3000 year gap between prehistory in China and then suddenly here's a paragraph on the PRC in 1949, are you fucking kidding me.
Now, this, I witnessed first hand my district actively push back on the suggestion of greater incorporation of Chinese history in world history at a district curriculum meeting for social studies. They wanted the social studies teachers gathered to feature more diverse regions of the world, with content that our students can see themselves in more (as opposed to simply a Eurocentric approach). When I attempted to infuse Chinese history into our discussion it was fought aggressively, as they don't see it as an under-exposed region of the world.
But I will share with you that I once asked a class of seniors "If you could be taught a social studies class on any topic, what would you choose?" and the overwhelming answer from them was "Chinese history." Kids want to know about China, our district mandated curriculum just doesn't feel that's a priority.
I would love to take you to brunch and just sit with you all afternoon about your experience, I was a shitty sub and I wish I could go back and interview all my teachers and really go over what how they feel the system is failing on an institutional level and what ought to be done about it.
I honestly don’t know what I would do about history. My gut feeling is that knowing “all of US History” is probably not actually that useful, I tend to think that history should be studied through the lens of critical thinking in the vein of literature, that issues and moments and cultural movements should be examined from the present and in the context of the time, but that’s just a fanciful idea that I made up with no actual back ground in history or education. I’m less confident in that angle when I think of all the misinformation that exists about American history that ought to be counteracted by just going through it comprehensively, but as you pointed out, then you just run out of time if your going to add in any of the deeper research and analysis.
And I mean, as someone who’s never taught history, even if you had a significant amount of time to teach “history” it’s a big subject you either vaguely wave your hand over everything or you only drill down on a few key things.
In retrospect, our history curriculum taught us how to learn history just as much as the facts - assessing sources, identifying biases but accepting that nothing is truly unbiased, etc
That way we got a toolkit to use with other periods or events
And that’s good! And not having a go at this thread, but like this is the actual point of school, give people the skills to be able to go find their own interests and drill down on that.
That’s like the entire reason I’m on about this in the first place, everyone’s so frustrated and despondent about time wasted in school doing things that didn’t ultimately turn out to be all that useful, with huge gaps in their skill sets that should have been addressed in the mandatory system that is ostensibly there to provide preparation and training for things people want to learn to do!
0
Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
I'm very excited/terrified about what next school year will be like when we have a phone ban because let me tell, you if you haven't been in a high school since smart phones became mainstream then you don't know anything about what it is like. It's bad.
How to find information yourself, and how to determine whether it's trustworthy. I had some great AP English teachers and librarians (in the limited time I was able to interact with them) who went over this a bit, but at the time I was in school it didn't seem to trickle down to mainstream classes.
Knowing where and how to look up info has been way more useful in my career than trying to memorize.
More women in history, especially the ones who actually did a thing and had all the credit given to men who had minimal contribution or sometimes none at at all they were just adjacent to the woman in question. Or were just disappeared from "main" history even though the things they did were pretty damn impressive, like China's Pirate Empress
0
Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
I'm very excited/terrified about what next school year will be like when we have a phone ban because let me tell, you if you haven't been in a high school since smart phones became mainstream then you don't know anything about what it is like. It's bad.
Oh boy, its a fucking nightmare.
And its one exacerbated by the fact that seemingly every parent wants their child to have constant, immediate connection to them via their smartphone.
Every god damn parent thinks they ought to be the exception to the policy and until the education system can just fucking shatter that belief system we're going to continue to have kids that are destroying their minds via their phones.
Zonugal on
+3
OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
I'm very excited/terrified about what next school year will be like when we have a phone ban because let me tell, you if you haven't been in a high school since smart phones became mainstream then you don't know anything about what it is like. It's bad.
Oh boy, its a fucking nightmare.
And its one exacerbated by the fact that seemingly every parent wants their child to have constant, immediate connection to them via their smartphone.
Every god damn parents thinks they ought to be the exception to the policy and until the education system can just fucking shatter that belief system we're going to continue to have kids that are destroying their minds via their phones.
And yet somehow the parents turned out okay without 24/7 access to their phones, particularly in class
Orca on
+1
Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
Parents are calling their kids IN CLASS to talk to them about random shit yet complain to us when their kids fail or don't do anything.
In a Monday op-ed published in The New York Times, Murthy wrote that “it is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.”
0
Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
Parents are calling their kids IN CLASS to talk to them about random shit yet complain to us when their kids fail or don't do anything.
are you FUCKING kidding me
I was not kidding that school has fundamentally changed from what you all remember since the invention of smart phones. If anything it is worse than what I am sharing.
I'm very excited/terrified about what next school year will be like when we have a phone ban because let me tell, you if you haven't been in a high school since smart phones became mainstream then you don't know anything about what it is like. It's bad.
Oh boy, its a fucking nightmare.
And its one exacerbated by the fact that seemingly every parent wants their child to have constant, immediate connection to them via their smartphone.
Every god damn parents thinks they ought to be the exception to the policy and until the education system can just fucking shatter that belief system we're going to continue to have kids that are destroying their minds via their phones.
And yet somehow the parents turned out okay without 24/7 access to their phones, particularly in class
Yeah, before these devices rewired our brains and society
0
OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
Parents are calling their kids IN CLASS to talk to them about random shit yet complain to us when their kids fail or don't do anything.
are you FUCKING kidding me
I was not kidding that school has fundamentally changed from what you all remember since the invention of smart phones. If anything it is worse than what I am sharing.
I knew it was bad, I didn't realize it was "taking calls in class" bad
Government actually was (is?) required but no one paid attention .... and it shows
Driving (in the US at least) would be good
Compound-fucking-interest and how debt fucks you would be goddamn great.
I am absolutely certain we covered compound interest in like, primary or early middle school, as part of an introduction to exponents
American math curriculum is baffling to me
We were taught in middle school
It honestly feels like a junior or senior year lesson because that's around when you're going to be picking up your own credit card and you start having to put it to use
I will go to bat for my secondary education tho, I think it was solid. Especialky history - from year 8 onwards a large chunk of history class was more about how to research history and evaluate sources, with the subject at hand being illustrative rather than 'the thing youre supposed to learn'.
Final three years we'd do deep dives on extremely narrow periods and locations, it felt like falling into a crevice where there were always more depths to discover.
School in its ideal state should be about learning to learn, about giving you the skills to critically evaluate the world and find out more about it on your own. Slicing the school day ever more finely in an attempt to cover incredibly specific knowledge and practical experience relevant only to the current snapshot of society is, imo, missing the point.
Government actually was (is?) required but no one paid attention .... and it shows
Driving (in the US at least) would be good
Compound-fucking-interest and how debt fucks you would be goddamn great.
I am absolutely certain we covered compound interest in like, primary or early middle school, as part of an introduction to exponents
American math curriculum is baffling to me
We were taught in middle school
It honestly feels like a junior or senior year lesson because that's around when you're going to be picking up your own credit card and you start having to put it to use
Timing is everything!
I didn't have a credit card until I moved to the US at the ripe old age of thirty-mumble
Government actually was (is?) required but no one paid attention .... and it shows
Driving (in the US at least) would be good
Compound-fucking-interest and how debt fucks you would be goddamn great.
I am absolutely certain we covered compound interest in like, primary or early middle school, as part of an introduction to exponents
American math curriculum is baffling to me
We were taught in middle school
It honestly feels like a junior or senior year lesson because that's around when you're going to be picking up your own credit card and you start having to put it to use
Timing is everything!
I didn't have a credit card until I moved to the US at the ripe old age of thirty-mumble
I got one of those intro credit cards in the mail probably when I turned 18
I'm told they hand credit cards out at random to kids in college
All of the things that Zon and Tim are saying about phones are exactly my experience. And like both them I want to state that as bad as it sounds it's so much worse at the same time.
I had started requiring students to turn off their cell phone and leave it in a box in my office if they needed to borrow a chromebook or something from me. Because otherwise the chromebook would forever disappear until I went scouring the campus to find it in some random classroom or the parking lot. Nothing else worked for collateral, I'd end days with kids' keys, IDs, airpods (so so many airpods). Kids would offer wallets or cash or articles of clothing like shoes and I'd refuse those on principal. Only cell phones meant that it was likely I'd see the loaned device by the end of the day.
If you can imagine a poor or bad reaction to that, I experienced it. Anger, despair, rage, bargaining, racial slurs, threats. All of it.
There were kids that freaked out over turning off the phone before handing it over. It didn't matter that they wouldn't be in the room with it. Like, full on panicky meltdowns.
And then there's the PARENTS. Who simultaneously demand their student be reachable by phone every moment of the day with no delay and that the school prevent any harmful videos or pictures of their student being circulated via social media but also refusing consent to search the phones when those things are happening and blaming us all the same.
I think it would cool if more American schools threw in a paragraph or two that was just like "Hey so Indians did actually make it out of the 1800s," that'd be pretty neat
+19
Raijin QuickfootI'm your Huckleberry YOU'RE NO DAISYRegistered User, ClubPAregular
I took a business math class my senior year because I just needed a math credit to graduate and I didn’t want to put any effort in so it was me and a bunch of the HS scrubs who were barely graduating.
We learned compound interest in that class…nobody outside of me and maybe one other person could understand it or how to calculate it. I did a lot of homework for people in that class just to help them graduate.
0
Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
I think it would cool if more American schools threw in a paragraph or two that was just like "Hey so Indians did actually make it out of the 1800s," that'd be pretty neat
I can't verify this part of current history curriculum but I make it a point every time I order library books to get every Indian author or books about their cultures I can.
Raijin QuickfootI'm your Huckleberry YOU'RE NO DAISYRegistered User, ClubPAregular
If I think back to my history classes I do NOT recall being taught much about native Americans outside of how they interacted with Europeans and they SURE as hell didn’t even begin to cover any of the atrocities or how fucked up the concept of reservations are.
Broad stroke here, but just how to be an adult. That covers a lot that was already mentioned here.
Taxes
Finances
Actual government
Job applications and interviews
Basic car maintenance (oil, tires, etc) not as an elective. A required course. And before we say overthrow the establishment and create walkable cities, yes, but let's be realistic.
Culture of people and places that aren't dead white dudes and how to interact with that respectfully.
Insurance!
Digital media literacy.
It's nuts that after 12 years of memorizing facts and learning the regular scholarly stuff, you're just suddenly a legal adult that has to handle all those.
We were taught about Native Americans, but I lived in North Michigan, with a town named after a Chief and Native students so that definitely played a factor.
Media literacy, critical thinking, basic home finances and basic financial literacy, social literacy (aka people are different and this is ok here’s how to interact with them without being a dick), mindfulness with good self-coping skills, actually useful talks regarding the Big 3 (Death, Sex, and Drugs).
Havelock2.0 on
You go in the cage, cage goes in the water, you go in the water. Shark's in the water, our shark.
0
HacksawJ. Duggan Esq.Wrestler at LawRegistered Userregular
Parents are calling their kids IN CLASS to talk to them about random shit yet complain to us when their kids fail or don't do anything.
are you FUCKING kidding me
There's a certain type of parent that is ludicrously entitled to their children's time and attention. My mother, for example, will sometimes try to call me when I'm at work, and will get angry when I tell her I can't answer because I'm working/busy. I'm sure it's only going to get worse as her mental acuity declines with age. I can't even imagine how bad it is for teenagers who live and die by the whims of their own entitled parents in an age with an omnipresent constant digital connection to all people and things.
+1
Raijin QuickfootI'm your Huckleberry YOU'RE NO DAISYRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Actually, I remember we did have a special section of class dedicated to the Calusa tribe…I believe. They were the tribe that was in the SW Florida region before white people ruined it all.
Posts
I have this section in my library.
I teach this.
The 90s are back big in Taiwan, it feels extremely weird.
It’s also pretty straightforward thematically- violent oppressive capitalist white supremacists fucking everyone else hyperlocally, then across our content, then our hemisphere, and now the world (taking over from the British there)
I would love to take you to brunch and just sit with you all afternoon about your experience, I was a shitty sub and I wish I could go back and interview all my teachers and really go over what how they feel the system is failing on an institutional level and what ought to be done about it.
I honestly don’t know what I would do about history. My gut feeling is that knowing “all of US History” is probably not actually that useful, I tend to think that history should be studied through the lens of critical thinking in the vein of literature, that issues and moments and cultural movements should be examined from the present and in the context of the time, but that’s just a fanciful idea that I made up with no actual back ground in history or education. I’m less confident in that angle when I think of all the misinformation that exists about American history that ought to be counteracted by just going through it comprehensively, but as you pointed out, then you just run out of time if your going to add in any of the deeper research and analysis.
That’s like the entire reason I’m on about this in the first place, everyone’s so frustrated and despondent about time wasted in school doing things that didn’t ultimately turn out to be all that useful, with huge gaps in their skill sets that should have been addressed in the mandatory system that is ostensibly there to provide preparation and training for things people want to learn to do!
Knowing where and how to look up info has been way more useful in my career than trying to memorize.
Oh boy, its a fucking nightmare.
And its one exacerbated by the fact that seemingly every parent wants their child to have constant, immediate connection to them via their smartphone.
Every god damn parent thinks they ought to be the exception to the policy and until the education system can just fucking shatter that belief system we're going to continue to have kids that are destroying their minds via their phones.
And yet somehow the parents turned out okay without 24/7 access to their phones, particularly in class
are you FUCKING kidding me
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/surgeon-general-safety-warning-social-media-apps-1235040971/
I was not kidding that school has fundamentally changed from what you all remember since the invention of smart phones. If anything it is worse than what I am sharing.
Yeah, before these devices rewired our brains and society
I knew it was bad, I didn't realize it was "taking calls in class" bad
Government actually was (is?) required but no one paid attention .... and it shows
Driving (in the US at least) would be good
Compound-fucking-interest and how debt fucks you would be goddamn great.
no joke
the fact that your first 80% of payments on anything with interest are .... interest, killed me when I discovered it
I am absolutely certain we covered compound interest in like, primary or early middle school, as part of an introduction to exponents
American math curriculum is baffling to me
but calling them in the middle of the day for random bullshit????
The problem is it's taught earlier than when you start managing money or need to know about it so its easy to forget and not realize it's applicable.
{Twitter, Everybody's doing it. }{Writing and Story Blog}
We were taught in middle school
It honestly feels like a junior or senior year lesson because that's around when you're going to be picking up your own credit card and you start having to put it to use
Timing is everything!
which is often due to parental engagement
which is a whole other societal problem that's only getting worse!
Final three years we'd do deep dives on extremely narrow periods and locations, it felt like falling into a crevice where there were always more depths to discover.
School in its ideal state should be about learning to learn, about giving you the skills to critically evaluate the world and find out more about it on your own. Slicing the school day ever more finely in an attempt to cover incredibly specific knowledge and practical experience relevant only to the current snapshot of society is, imo, missing the point.
I didn't have a credit card until I moved to the US at the ripe old age of thirty-mumble
I got one of those intro credit cards in the mail probably when I turned 18
I'm told they hand credit cards out at random to kids in college
America loves debt
I had started requiring students to turn off their cell phone and leave it in a box in my office if they needed to borrow a chromebook or something from me. Because otherwise the chromebook would forever disappear until I went scouring the campus to find it in some random classroom or the parking lot. Nothing else worked for collateral, I'd end days with kids' keys, IDs, airpods (so so many airpods). Kids would offer wallets or cash or articles of clothing like shoes and I'd refuse those on principal. Only cell phones meant that it was likely I'd see the loaned device by the end of the day.
If you can imagine a poor or bad reaction to that, I experienced it. Anger, despair, rage, bargaining, racial slurs, threats. All of it.
There were kids that freaked out over turning off the phone before handing it over. It didn't matter that they wouldn't be in the room with it. Like, full on panicky meltdowns.
And then there's the PARENTS. Who simultaneously demand their student be reachable by phone every moment of the day with no delay and that the school prevent any harmful videos or pictures of their student being circulated via social media but also refusing consent to search the phones when those things are happening and blaming us all the same.
We learned compound interest in that class…nobody outside of me and maybe one other person could understand it or how to calculate it. I did a lot of homework for people in that class just to help them graduate.
I can't verify this part of current history curriculum but I make it a point every time I order library books to get every Indian author or books about their cultures I can.
Taxes
Finances
Actual government
Job applications and interviews
Basic car maintenance (oil, tires, etc) not as an elective. A required course. And before we say overthrow the establishment and create walkable cities, yes, but let's be realistic.
Culture of people and places that aren't dead white dudes and how to interact with that respectfully.
Insurance!
Digital media literacy.
It's nuts that after 12 years of memorizing facts and learning the regular scholarly stuff, you're just suddenly a legal adult that has to handle all those.
Steam - Talon Valdez :Blizz - Talonious#1860 : Xbox Live & LoL - Talonious Monk @TaloniousMonk Hail Satan
{Twitter, Everybody's doing it. }{Writing and Story Blog}
The fact that civil engineers don't know about Robert Moses is bad for example.
There's a certain type of parent that is ludicrously entitled to their children's time and attention. My mother, for example, will sometimes try to call me when I'm at work, and will get angry when I tell her I can't answer because I'm working/busy. I'm sure it's only going to get worse as her mental acuity declines with age. I can't even imagine how bad it is for teenagers who live and die by the whims of their own entitled parents in an age with an omnipresent constant digital connection to all people and things.