[Instructor] So. What are the best uses of current events and political cartoons in our classroom? Now Jeff Milke does what's in the news almost every day so he obviously already knows this... but.. current events, I think are also something else that are not very well used in the normal history classroom. Some teachers, like Jeff's mentor teacher, every day starts with what's in the news and the kids can bring up any topic. Some teachers start or end with what's in the news in their classroom one or two days a week or everyday, but the news can only be related to what they're studying. There's two different schools of thought about that. Mr Goddard's school of thought is that anything that gets kids to talk and gets them to read the newpaper is worth discussing in the classroom. The other side said we need to keep our kids focused on what we're teaching and current events should reflect what it is we're teaching. So whatever stance is yours is the stance you should go with. But let's talk about how the others of you use current events in the classroom. Any of your teachers do that? Aaron? [student] Jen uses a current event every week and she has the student just find something in the newspaper... it doesn't have to pertain to what's going on necessarily in class but a lot of them seem to be about the debate or the presidential race right now. And she kind of has the student find the language of the article and present and read off the article and she kind of interprets what's going on in the article for the students, which I have mixed feelings about personally... - So what might you do differently? - Well I don't think necessarily one a week is enough... I think that should be increased to three times a week, or every day. And I don't necessarily agree with interpreting the document for your students. I think letting them read it and then having a discussion about it would probably be the best way to do it rather than every other sentence interpreting what the article is saying for your students. [Instructor] Okay. And I would agree with your stance on this. I think it's real important for students to come to the class with a current event that they have already interpreted - there's no reason for us to read it - they need to interpret it. We as the teacher, however, need to be very clear about their interpretation. So at that point when you're saying, "you did a good job; I really like that you brought up this point..." ..."there's some other things we may want to think about here..." and get that conversation rolling. Anybody else have teachers that... none of you use ... on a regular basis? Or does it just occasionally crop up? [Student] Well because Mr Rascoe teaches Civics and Econ it always comes up daily and he usually will ask local news first and discuss something that's happened locally because that seems to get more student attention; but he can be ... sometimes he'll be once a week, five times a week, since he's started having me do it every day it's been more consistent ... but early on if he felt like it he'd do it if not, he'd just have them get right to their work. So it wasn't that consistent. And at Sunny Brae, they were beautiful current events stuff... they did beautiful current event stuff at Sunny Brae as far as they had to discuss the source, they showed the source on the board, what news site they got it from, they had a class dicussion on it, and it was a weekly thing every Friday. Everyone knew when their turn was... it was great. [Instructor] So, remember: consistency is really important. When I taught high school, every Friday was current events day. And that's what we spent Friday doing. We talked about current events that may be brought up during the week in more detail; new current events; we had current event quizzes; we played current event games; we played current event trivia... so I think it's really important we use current events particularly since we are having students who really aren't capable of understanding current events because they don't know their history very well. So a good example of a current event exercise would be understanding the history of the Boston Tea Party in context to the current Tea Party Movement. Because, of course, the Tea Party Movement talks at length about their origins with the Boston Tea Party. So what I've done here for you... we're not going to read it now but you can certainly use it when you want... I've asked the question: "What was the Boston Tea Party and does it have any relationship to the current Tea Party Movement?" Much of what is below is condensed and adapted from a conversation I originally had with Ray Raphael about this topic and then that he went on to write. Most of you know Ray - he's a local historian with national prominence. So basically, it just begins with what we KNOW about the Tea Party, and is actually accurate. And then the myths about the Tea Party; and then each of the myths are sort of "busted". So this information is here for you. I've presented it in a couple of my classes and the students love it. You could actually present all this information in your classroom. There are also three really good lesson plans. These three are all really great: "The Tea Party Movement (Take Our Country Back)" Which is at (I love this website by the way) the "Teachable Moment" website it's really a great one for current events; The New York Times, "The Life of the Tea Party: Comparing Social Protest Movements"; and from the Huffington Post, "The Tea Party - What's In a Name?" All three are very, very good and they give you some more resources about teaching on this particular topic. Now, I'm not going through these current event resouces because I want one of you to pick one of these resources to go through and look at each of these sites. I'm only going to recommend every single one of these! These are great! When I really want the best unbiased news I go immediately to the Guardian. The Guardian probably is considered, by many people, the best newspaper in the world. Certainly, you'll find out more about America in the British Guardian than you will in the United States because they publish things about the United States that we don't publish. So if, for instance, you wanted to look at the Sedition Act which we talked about at the beginning of class, this would be a place to go - probably they've published something about it that our newspapers have not. So all of these are really great... The New York Times... online is really good but this is the "Today's Paper" you can get on a mailing list and every single day the New York Times will pop up and say "What's in the News Today" and you click on it and today's paper will be there with all the headlines. You can use that in the classroom or you can use that to get information that you need to inform the way you teach. Now, resources for teaching current events... lots of them available: The New York Times Learning Network is terrific; Teaching Current Events with Newspapers and Magazines through C S Northridge is actually quite good; the Constitutional Rights Foundation - which I told you about at the beginning of class... at the beginning of the year... I told you all that you should join - their stuff is fabulous! But Current Event Jeopardy is still the single most popular way I see it taught and kids love it! I have seen in many, many schools that Friday is Current Event Day and Current Event Jeopardy Day. And not only are they learning current events of what they learned in the week in Jeopardy, but also the historical topics of the week in Jeopardy. I've also seen many student teachers adopt their assessment, their pre-assessment study, always through Jeopardy. So the day before an exam, they do Jeopardy. Or if there's an exam on Monday, they do Jeopardy on Friday - with great success. You can go to this website, down here on how to put together a Jeopardy game on current events and I highly recommend it - I've never not seen it be a huge success in the classroom! And like I said, for some teachers they just make it their constant way of assessment; the students get really competitive; a good way to have a really good time with it. You can have an on-going running Jeopardy score throughout the semester. And, of course, part of current events are political cartoons. I remember as a kid, I couldn't figure out what a political cartoon was! I'd read them, and I didn't understand them... and the reason I didn't understand them was because I didn't understand the context or the content... so I find that when you start really using political cartoons in the classroom the kids get really excited about them once they figure out they can figure out what they're saying. So we have to train them to get a better idea. This is a great lesson plan it's called, "It's no laughing matter: analyzing political cartoons" You go into this website and you don't have to do anything with it - it's all completely put together for you. You can also use this website here - Library of Congress website - to search for materials to use in the classroom by standards: either Common Core, or State, or organization standards but this great website talks about what makes funny cartoons seriously persuasive; and then it gives you a learning activity; the Cartoon Analysis Guide; Learn More About Political Cartoons; Resources for Teachers... there's just tons of information here and I highly recommend this learning activity, it's very, very good. So, if you want to start kids out on political cartoons, you can start with that. Or, you can start with this great website: this is a PBS Lesson Plan - Analyzing Election Cartoons which might be something that you can throw in really, really quick before the election in 13 days. I like this lesson plan a lot. And then also, "A Brief History of Political Cartoons" this lesson plan uses this website as well... It's about two page, would be worth running off for your students a nice two pages on a brief history of political cartoons beginning with Ben Franklin's "Join or Die" which most of you are aware; talking about Thomas Nast; it's pretty easy to read and you can abridge it, if you thought it was too long. "On this Day...Political Cartoons from History" is great, too. A lot of teachers like to do "On this day" and you could do an "On this day" political cartoons once a week... these are great, great hooks. You can start with a political cartoon, have the students quietly think about for one minute about what it says and then open discussion. Students really like that. Any questions about current events and political cartoons? No? Then we'll move into our fourth question for the day... How can we broaden our use of primary resources in our classrooms? (Documents, oral history, photographs, et cetera.) Now, what I've done here... I've spent hours, really going through what I think are... there are millions of sites on primary documents... but I've gone through and looked at what I think are some of the best... that I've used...and put them up here for you. For general document collections: I'm sure all of you are aware of "American Memory" if not, this is where you can find everything - absolutely everything. "Teaching with Documents from the National Archives" - excellent. "Harp-Week" one of my most favorite places to go anywhere on the Internet. This is amazing! All the editions of Harpers from the 1800s forward are online. And there are front covers of Harpers magazines that are some of the best political cartooning I've ever seen and the articles are great here. So Harp-Week is a great website for you to go into if you're teaching about a topic, say you're teaching about the Nullification Crisis in South Carolina in the 1830s... you could go into Harp-Week and find out if there's anything on there... any articles, any cartoons - it's just a rich, rich resource on the Internet. One of the best I've used. Also the Yale Law School Avalon Project contains everything you might ever want to know about the law and documentation. One thing I forgot to put on here... it's not the primary document, but it's a great thing for you to consider when you're looking up Supreme Court cases is the Oyez. I know I've referred to this before. What does Oyez mean? It's Latin. And when is the term used? [Student off camera] When the judge is coming into the room? [Instructor] "Oyez, oyez!" - in the old days - "Attention, attention!" It's just basically, "Listen, listen!" And if you go into Oyez, it will give you every Supreme Court case... what was the major question, what was the answer, how did each Supreme Court Justice decide, and, for modern cases, if they have any verbal translations, or any newscasting of the Announcement of the Finding it will be on there as well, in about one page. [Student off camera] And they also have a link to read the full statement. [Instructor] It will also give you the minority - the dissenting agreements... it is, without question, the best website that I've used for legal things. Yale is good, but it's far more detailed. Oyez will give you a quick statement. Cornell's good as well. Letters. All of these are great: "Letters of Note: Correspondence deserving of a wider audience" "Palaeography: Reading Old Handwriting" - this is a great one if you want kids to actually read from the original sources; and my all-time favorite one is this one which I have seen taught twice: "Martha Ballard" ... actually this is part of her diary online It's designed for kids to actually "Do" History - so the historical detective discussion we had last week really fits in here. You can go in and you can have the kids try to read Martha Ballard's diary in her own handwriting, and then it has it actually translated for them and I've seen kids have a blast with this! Junior high school kids in particular. At first it's, "I can't read her writing!" And then it's, "Well she's got a real problem - she can't spell!" And then it gets into all sorts of discussions about how the language has changed over the years in particularly the spelling. If you've not read "A Midwife's Tale" (which is a great Pulitzer Prize winning book) that's fine, because you can also watch the film which is online and is quite good. The book, although, is worth it. The kids don't have to read the book, but you'll have to tell them a little bit about Martha's life which is fascinating... it's the only full diary of a midwife living in the era of the New Republic. Great website. And then we have a bunch of incredibly good websites on speeches. And this is a good time to look back on old Presidential speeches, the UCSB website is extraordinarily good on this. Oral history...now, I'm a huge fan of oral history and I'm also a trained oral historian. I don't think we do enough oral history. When I used to have a big research project for my survey courses, before my classes were so big, they all had to do oral history. And they all came back saying it was one of the most exciting and interesting things they'd done You can have your kids use oral history for homework every week. Let's say that the homework topic you're discussing for the week is Vietnam. Have your kids go home, see if they can find a friend, a family member who can talk to them about Vietnam. Not the experience of Vietnam, because a lot of people will not want to talk about that necessarily, but what do they think about Vietnam, when Vietnam was going on? Did they support the war? If so, for how long? Did they change their mind about the war? You can have, on literally any topic, the kids can go home and do an oral interview with somebody at home, or somebody in the neighborhood, on the topic you're talking about. Kids love doing that and it gives them a chance to see other people's perspections. Oral history is very useful in the classroom and there are some really good descriptions here of how you can use oral history. Photographs - really outstanding. At the bottom here, a note about photographs! If you're going to use photographs, I want you to think really carefully about what you see here. This is, post-Katrina, AP "A young man", (who just happens to be black) "walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday." This one here - two white people. "Two residents wade through chest-deep water after 'finding' bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area..." What do you see here? Bias... racial bias. Very clear. You have two photographs showing the exact same thing, but white people are "finding" and the person of color is "looting" You have to ask the kids - what message do you get? The kids aren't just looking at photographs, they've got to look at the captions. Same thing with political cartoons. They can't just look at the cartoon, they've got to look very carefully at the caption. And they've got to look for bias in those things. I just love these two pictures. They're very useful and you can find them online here. If you want to go online, that's the website for them. Any questions at all about these sort of primary documents? [male student] Where do you think local history can fit into this? Because, ever since my Senior paper, that's an aspect that I've been dying to put in... I've been thinking hooks is the best place... it's not explicitly in the Standards but I think it's important to make that connection. they can go down to Old Town Eureka where this actually happened... where the Chinese were kicked out ... or where other things went down that we talk about in class... [Instructor] Well, you're moving to Boston and you're going to get a job in Boston... you're going to have more local history than you'll know what to do with. But here - we've got a ton of local history. And some of it, unfortunately, not so pretty. Which makes for great hooks. So let's take Humboldt County, since that's where we are right now. So when you study in the 8th grade curriculum American Indian issues, then you bring in Indian Island. When you study in the Gilded Age about immigration, then you bring in the expulsion of the Chinese. When you talk about World War II, you're going to talk about Japanese incarceration... not necessarily in this area, but in the State of California. So the way you bring in local history is you use it as a case study for your given topic. So, during World War II, what was happening in Humboldt County? You can take a whole day or two, or you can have the students do research on it. We had... (I know she moved to Oregon and I don't know whether she's still alive) ... Kay Gott Chaffey who was one of the major women pilots during World War II, in the WASPs and she was, for years, when she was still young, she was able to go around to talk to kids in schools about what she did as a pilot. And she trained men to use some of these planes that were coming out new during World War II. So you find out if there's any local people in the community that have some history and would be willing to talk to you. And how do you go do that? You can go to the VA... there's usually a VA facility somewhere... you go to nursing homes... and you can bring kids into nursing homes... for years, Ron Perry at Eureka High School, had an oral history project going where he taught the kids for two weeks how to do oral history - ran them through projects, had them do sample oral history with each other from class - and then took them for two straight days to a local retirement community where the kids did one-on-one interviews with Vietnam vets there and then they turned it into a book. And then the book, each year, was dedicated and given to the library and ten kids took the book to the local elementary schools and read the stories about the veterans, on Veteran's Day, to the kids. Brilliant idea to integrate into your classroom. There's all sorts of exciting things you can do with oral history. Okay. What is History Day and should we get involved? I think that everybody here knows what History Day is ... this is what the program is I know that Noah this year is trying to bring in History Day. He's had some ups and downs because it's never been used at his school... Troy's got really big pressure, because the Director of History Day is his mentor teacher so there's no way he gets to avoid History Day! But...History Day... I've seen it be really rewarding. And as co-director of History Fair at UC Santa Barbara... (there's only been two History Fairs in the United States so far - an ongoing one in Chicago and ours in Santa Barbara for four years, which folded after I left) ... I've been involved in the concept of getting kids involved in history at the high school and junior high school level for years and years and years and I really recommend that when you leave here and go to wherever school you get a job, that you talk your administration or faculty into being involved with History Day. The biggest problem is