Making the Revolution Relevant

Powdered wigs, breeches, and tea are not not exactly the most exciting topics to anyone. While the road to the American Revolution is one of my favorite topics to teach, it can sometimes be a struggle to make it relevant to students. Below are five video clips I use to make the time period more tangible.

1. Tarring and Feathering

Classic chicken suit picture.

When I was in school the only concept I had of tarring and feathering was the lame picture that is in every history text book that looks like a group of school boys are harassing a guy in a chicken suit outside the local wing stop. When the HBO mini-series John Adams came out in 2008, I couldn't wait to use this scene in class to illustrate the brutality of the act. It is hands down my favorite clip to show now. 

2. The Town Meeting

The Patriot is about as historically accurate as Disney's Pocahontas but I usually use a few choice scenes from it. We do a town meeting simulation and I use this one to set up the debate between loyalists and colonists. Mel Gibson's quote about tyranny at the end is a great discussion piece. 

3. Too Late to Apologize

This video is a close second to the tarring and feathering on my list of favorites. I teach the Declaration of Independence as a break up letter between the colonists and the king and this one fits in perfectly. It is also a great example of parody to use when I encourage students to use it in their projects. 

4. Signing the Declaration

This is another clip from the John Adams series. One of the misconceptions that people have is that the founders immediately broke out the fireworks, hot dogs, and watermelon when they signed the Declaration of Independence. This scene is brilliant in showing a more realistic version of the emotions of the signers.

5. Gentleman's War

This one is just straight up fun.

Beyond the Bubble

"An absence of creativity characterizes the testing industry. At one end of the spectrum are multiple-choice tests that rip facts out of context and penalize students for not knowing things they can instantly Google."

Beyond the Bubble is an interesting looking site I stumbled upon that focuses on assessing historical analysis. It is put together by the history education folks at Stanford and has some high quality DBQ style activities that focus on different aspects of historical analysis. The number of assessments is somewhat limited at this point but each one is accompanied by resources including rubrics, examples of student responses, and supplementary videos. 

Getting Parents Involved: The Technology Breakfast

When I went 1:1 with no textbook last year, the students were generally on board and excited but I often faced resistance from parents. The major concerns were about the technology requirements that I was asking of students and how students were supposed to study without textbooks. Generally, I found a lot of parents had no idea what I was talking about when it came to Google Documents, the cloud, blogging, etc...

To overcome some of those issues I decided to organize a technology breakfast for parents in which we invited them in on a Saturday morning. We gave them a continental breakfast and did mini-sessions on how we are using technology in the classroom and how they could use it to support their kids. I made it collaborative for anyone on the staff who wanted to present and limited each session to 15 minutes. I just finished wrapping up our second annual breakfast this morning and had about 50 parents sign up. Parents were very excited and learned a lot. Several kept saying that it should be mandatory for all parents to attend because it was so enlightening and important.

The breakfast has had 3 major impacts:

• The most important impact of course is that parents are now informed about what we are doing and can support their kids.
• We now have involved parents who are championing the case for instructional technology and have become outspoken supporters of teachers.
• Colleagues who are apprehensive about or against using technology have been influenced to step out of their comfort zones to incorporate more of it. 

In the future, I would like to continue to expand it and get students involved and reporting on how it has impacted them. 

On the Road- October Adventures of a History Nerd

Bunker Hill Monument

October just flew by and I realized that I went the entire month without a blog post. I actually spent 3 out of the past 4 weekends on the road mostly doing teaching and history related things and have finally caught up with things back home.

I got to visit Boston for the first time for a four day workshop for history teachers and it was great to actually see all of the locations that I have been teaching about for years now. Boston is a great town and it was my second recent trip to New England in which I was floored by the hospitality of New Englanders. A few of us wanted to walk the Freedom Trial and one of the group leaders who was a local spent his Sunday afternoon guiding us on the trail and giving us all the little details that only locals would know. We also got to stop by the oldest bar in Boston where Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty used to hang out. 

I loved the Puritan symbols on the 300 year old headstones.

My second favorite president sat in this pew in the Old North Church.

U.S.S. Midway Museum, San Diego

I flew out to San Diego the second weekend of October to attend my grandfather's funeral. This was the only personal trip I took this month but my grandfather's life was full of its own unique history. He was a Chicago firefighter for 30 years and had joined the army at the outbreak of WWII even though he was underage by using the ID of his deceased older brother. At the funeral I also found out another interesting tidbit when I came across a professional looking photo of him in full firefighter gear that I had never seen before. It turns out that the photo was featured in a Playgirl type magazine back in the 50s or 60s. After the funeral I had time to check out some of the ships preserved in San Diego Bay.

Star of India, San Diego Bay

B-52 Park in Orlando

Over the last weekend in October I trekked up to Orlando to present about teaching human rights at the state social studies conference. The near miss of Hurricane Sandy actually resulted in the most pleasant Florida weather I can remember and I was able to take my wife and son to hit Disney after the conference each day. I spotted a B-52 from the highway and insisted that we go explore it much to my wife's dismay. My son had a great time running around it and climbing on the massive wheels.