HIST 398 Blog

 This week I advocated for multiple students in my classes by helping them finish missing assignments. My school is fully remote and a policy that the school implemented is Support Day. The day itself started out being on Wednesdays, was changed to Friday, and now will be moved back to Wednesday. The idea of Support Day is to help students with their workload. Teachers are not allowed to introduce new content and students are given time to work on assignments. In my classes, for students who have finished all their assignments, my co-teacher and I offer things for them to do to relax like watching a movie, listening to music, chatting with their friends, or playing Among Us. After 2 weeks with Support Days, I realized that a handful of students still had not turned in assignments from earlier this month. to support those students, I sent them emails letting them know which assignments were missing. Some students responded immediately and turned in their assignments. During the Supp...

 My cultural identities have shaped myself as a teacher. I am white woman. I am Catholic. I grew up in the suburbs and now I live in Chicago. This has shaped the ease, or in this case difficulty, of the curriculum that I am teaching. The first unit I have taught in my 2 sections of ESL World Studies has been on African Empires from around 600-1500. I barely learned about this topic in my high school and college classes and experiences. It was a steep learning curve creating lessons for this unit. I began by reading the textbook to get a general idea of what I would be teaching. But I wanted to know more than the textbook so that I would have the most information available to give my students the best experience. So I watched a six part, six hour documentary called Africa's Great Civilizations by Henry Louis Gates Jr and read every source I could. So despite not knowing much about the topic, I learned and have been teaching it. A personal interest of mine is art history. I like to u...

 This past week, I took over my first two sections of ESL World Studies. The unit I started is on African Empires from around 600-1500. But I immediately noticed a problem when starting to write my unit and organize the curriculum. That problem is that there are so few resources on Africa at this time. From my brief research on the era while creating this unit, some of that is due to the lack of resources from Africa during this time. Many factors of African history are just unknown like the exact origins of the Ghana Empire. Many manuscripts from Timbuktu have been lost or are literally hidden in the desert. There are few teaching guides on these topics and even fewer quality videos on Youtube. If you search the Roman Empire on Youtbue you will get thousands of videos and many of them being of good quality. If you search the Songhai Empire on Youtube, you get a handful of videos and barely any reaching the same production quality as videos on the Roman Empire. By even doing this u...