Hello, all--
First off in today's post I feel it appropriate to take a moment to acknowledge the tenth anniversary of 9/11. My heart goes out to the loved ones of all the victims, as well as to all the servicemen and women, and their loved ones, as well.
It has now been ten years to the day since the 9/11 attacks, and there has been a lot of discussion in the media surrounding how we address this historic event in our collective memory, in the media, in physical memorials, as well as in classrooms around the country. What's somewhat interesting about teaching 9/11 is that our legislature hasn't yet included 9/11 in the state standards, so there's no law about covering (or not covering) 9/11 as historic content; although it's been ten years since the attacks, it's still so new that our interpretation of it is still "under construction", even moreso than historic content reaching further back in time. So what's a teacher to do?
In keeping with my philosophy of teaching history (and current events), I have decided to give my students an opportunity to decide what, in their opinions, is the "best" way to remember (and study) 9/11 by comparing and contrasting different sources. On Friday, I assigned a short article from my college-level American Government & Politics textbook to 8th graders as homework; the article is entitled, "Terrorism and Information Awareness", and presents readers with the debate surrounding "national security" "v." "civil liberties". I've asked that students read the article and write a minimum of one paragraph in response to the ideas presented. Tomorrow (9/12) our daily journal entry will ask students to reflect on 9/11 and its aftermath; I reserved the COW (laptop cart) on Wednesday so that we can look at online news sources from around the world (e.g. CNN, Fox News, NPR, MPR, BBC, India Times) and compare/contrast the various angles taken by reporters.
I hope these activities will provide my students with an opportunity to participate in the public discourse surrounding the issue(s), as well as to reflect on both the losses and the future.
And now on to the week in Social Studies...
7th Grade: 7th graders watched a series of short video clips about the late 1800s and paid attention for what they all shared in common; we continued reading The Surrender Tree, and pretested over countries in Central America (quiz next Friday, 9/16).
8th Grade: 8th graders handed in their "break-up letters" to King George III, and watched a series of short video clips about the U.S. Constitution and did a variety of learning activities to help solidify our second set of vocabulary terms. All the vocab terms from last week had to do with different systems of government (e.g. autocracy, democracy), and students took their quiz on Friday. Next week 8th graders will be pretested over the third set of government-related vocab terms.
This past week, all 7th and 8th graders wrote their first letters to our pen-pals in Honduras! We're waiting on Ms. Abbott's 6th graders to finish up with their letters and then I'll put them in the mail! Very fun stuff. (Next week we'll write another set of introductory letters to our pen-pals in China!) Students always love writing to pen-pals; it's a wonderful way to learn about world geography and to foster international connections, friendships, empathy, understanding, and respect.
Tomorrow (Monday, 9/12) I will discuss with all 7th and 8th graders this year's year-long research project, which is an in-depth study of a country (not the U.S.) that is of interest to the student.
As always, please feel free to contact me with questions, concerns, or constructive feedback.
Thanks for reading,
Leah Hood
