Letter to APUSH Teachers

Dear Teachers,

I hope this message finds you healthy and as relatively happy as can be.

I miss my students and I make sure I tell them as much as possible.  I’m asking them to communicate with me if they are having trouble with connecting and working online.  I have their cell numbers and they have mine and we are connecting through group chats and one to one texts.  

I’m also asking them to have some kind of fun but that they need to be safe and stay home.  My son is playing more online games with his friends than he ever has but he and I are working on his summary/outlines and analyses.  Then he and his classmates and I are getting together for formal and informal Zoom meetings.

Finally, I want them to use this time to learn about handling adversity and moving forward.  As you know some of our students have dealt with adversity throughout their lives and some have not.  Either way, we can learn how to make the most of a unfortunate situation.  

At the same time, I want them to see history unfolding before them.  I want them to think about how this compares to other times of adversity.  During World War II, I tell them, 140 million people lived in the US while only 16 million served in the military and about one million saw combat.  About 90% were not in the military and only one in 140 were in battle.  I ask them, what did "the rest of us" do?  What do we do now?  We need to do our part I tell them and that’s to be great students and do what can keep ourselves and our families healthy and safe...

We’re “teaching” from Zoom meetings and I’ve been continuing to use my blogs.  Here is my APUSH BLOG.

We are about four weeks away from our APUSH test (on May 15 at 11:00 AM Pacific Time) and I wanted to make sure you were able to move forward.

First off, I wanted to make sure you were aware of the bottom line regarding the test and then I wanted to share resources I have built for my students.

For those of us on the West Coast, the test is on May 15 at 11:00 AM.  The test is 45 minutes long and consists of ONE DBQ.   The students then have 5 minutes to upload their answer.  The DBQ is shorter as it is only five documents of which one is a type of visual document.  Students can take the test on any device and can handwrite the answer and take a photo of it to upload it and turn it in.  

The test is also OPEN NOTES, which as many of you can imagine is a good/bad thing.  Here is the UPDATED RUBRIC.  As you can see, the rubric is now 10 points with the students being graded normally on the thesis and the context but the differences and added points are focused on the way the students use the documents and outside information and how many documents and what is considered outside information.

Regardless, I am asking my students to review as we have in the past because we NEED TO KNOW THE CONTENT and we need to be able to CLEARLY EXPRESS WHAT WE KNOW.  Our DBQ PROCESS is only slightly altered for the fewer documents.

In the end, good luck with teaching all of this!  As I ask my students, please take care of yourselves and take care of your families BEFORE you take care of school.

As always, if you have questions please let me know.  At the same time if you have your own good resources and processes or have found helpful resources and processes, PLEASE SHARE THEM!

Thank you and good luck,

Bob

Resources

Coronavirus Overview

Overall Test Schedule and Information

Taking the Exam Information

FAQ’s

Tips for Taking Open Note Tests

YouTube Review Videos

Gilder Lehrman Resources

My DBQ’s and Schedule

My Review Schedule

April 17—Time Period 3— The Changing Ideals of American Womanhood, 1770-1865

April 24--Time Period 4—TBD (I will share and email as I make them)

May 1— Time Period 5— TBD

May 8— Time Period 6— TBD

May 15—Time Period 7— TBD

April 8, 2020 In the Fog

We are in the fog, literally.  The sunny morning has been replaced by a cloud that has nestled itself around our home in the Sierra Nevada foothills.  The normally expansive vistas are blanketed by grey.  I know they're there, but I can't see them.  I know the snow covered peaks and ridges and the green hillsides are out there because I have seen them.  I saw them this morning. 
However, I don't know when the shroud will lift but I do know that it will lift.  I have experienced this before and I know the sun will shine.  It could be a matter of minutes or hours or it might be tomorrow morning before we see the panoply of color that usually greets our gaze.  It won't be never.
Fitting.
This morning's fog showed me ironically how clearly we had been enveloped by a cloud for the last few months.  We've been living in a fog.  The upheaval of the coronavirus has removed clarity from our lives.  I live for clarity.  If I can't see it, I can imagine it.  I can't see the mountains but I can imagine them.  I know they're there. 
I thought I knew the future.  I am a teacher.  I teach high school history.  I teach seniors who were on their way to graduating.  I teach juniors who were supposed to go to Angel Island this Spring.  I teach sophomores who were supposed to go to Yosemite for their field trip.  I thought I was good at predicting the future that I knew was out there for them.
From time to time I would tell them that the future was not preordained.  I used George HW Bush as an example.  He was a senior in high school when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.  His life course was completely diverted.  Instead of going to Yale and studying economics and sociology when he graduated with his classmates, he went to the Navy and became a dive bomber pilot.  His plane got shot down and he was the lone survivor of a raid on a Japanese base.  His future was completely different from what he had planned...
Our present is different from what we had planned.  Tell me something I don't know.
Well, that's the future...
Back to the fog.
This morning I realized as I looked out at the fog that the grey and lack of color and lack of detail completely fit my lack of certainty.
When are we going back to normal?  When are we going to back to school?  When will we get our lives back?
No one knows.  No one.
People can speculate and they do all the time.  The president said it'll be Easter.  Some say 18 months.
When will the fog lift?  When will I see the mountains?  When will I see the future?  When?

Happy New Year! The Emancipation Proclamation

The Emancipation Proclamation is always fun to learn about at any time of the year, but I always come back to it at the New Year as it officially went into affect on New Year's Day of 1863 after having been proclaimed on September 22, 1862 after the Battle of Antietam.
There are a number of levels at which to teach the Emancipation Proclamation with the most straight forward level revolving around the question, "Did Lincoln free the slaves?"  The Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), which is aimed at helping K-12 teachers and students learn about historical literacy, has a STRONG, QUICK LESSON PLAN that focuses on answering the above question through background, the Proclamation itself, and the opinion of Frederick Douglass, all with guiding questions and a helpful graphic organizer.  SHEG requires a free registration but has a ton of great lessons that will make the registration worth your while.

The other end of the spectrum takes us to the HOUSE DIVIDED and LINCOLN'S WRITINGS resources from Dickinson College, which are built and maintained by Professor Matthew Pinsker and his students.  These resources are also specifically aimed at K-12 teachers and students and helping them understand history and its questions.
In the House Divided, Pinsker has an EMANCIPATION DIGITAL CLASSROOM, which has a slew of resources and links upon links.  Beware, there are so many links that you might find yourself losing hours (In a good way!) before you realize it!  There are timelines and tons of visuals and even a teacher's guide to Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" as well as a DBQ on the Emancipation Proclamation itself.

From Lincoln's Writings, Pinsker has ranked the 150 most teachable Lincoln documents, Numbers 17 and 2 are the first and final drafts of the Emancipation Proclamation.  For both the FIRST DRAFT and the FINAL DRAFT annotated transcripts can be found here, FIRST and here, FINAL, along with audio files, visuals, and close reading videos of the text, context, and subtext of the two documents, here is the video for the FIRST DRAFT and here is the video for the FINAL DRAFT.

Between these two sources are tons of ways of teaching the Emancipation Proclamation at different levels.
Have fun and let me know what you think as Learning is My Business!