I love social studies.

I think history, economics, and civics are three of the most fascinating and useful subjects in the world and I bring this passion into my classroom. After all, if I cant get excited about my subject, why should my students? As a history teacher, I believe in guiding students toward making connections. I want them to develop and understand a clear and coherent historical narrative: to make connections between events and people and institutions, to understand the forces of cause-and-effect and change-over-time. At the same time, I want my students to develop a sense of historical empathy: to make personal connections, to understand that history is not just the study of what happened but also the study of how it happened and of how people understood, explained, and lived with what happened. I want my students to understand, intellectually and emotionally, that their lives are the way they are due to historical eventsevents created by flawed people much like themselves who often did not completely understand the implications nor foresaw the consequences which resulted from their actions. I want all my students to understand that their present is the consequence of those historical events so that they are better prepared to act as conscious historical actors themselves once they leave my classroom Teaching history for me hinges on the balance between teaching content and teaching skills. The two are obviously related: historical inquiry involves the ability not only to grasp a certain amount of information, but also to classify, organize, and analyze it and then to clearly convey ones conclusion.. Accordingly, not only do my classes teach the students various ways of acquiring, analyzing, and evaluating information, they also afford them the opportunity to confront new ideas and different points of views One way I accomplish this is through the inquiry method. I have found this method increases student engagement by posing an interesting question (Was the American Revolution truly a revolution? What was the real reason the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan?), and then forces students to confront multiple points of view, analyze the different viewpoints, and then draw a conclusion from them, thus combining both content and skills work. In summary, then, I am very committed to providing a learning environment that is both exciting and rigorous, one that empowers both student and teacher in pursuing learning. I devise various assessment strategies that allows me to fairly assess student learning regardless of the student's learning styles. Above all, I treat my students with the utmost respect, creating an environment where students feel safe to candidly discuss topics which they might otherwise be hesitant to address. For all my classes, regardless of size, I pride myself on learning the names of all my students and treating each student as an individual. Students reward my commitment to them by committing themselves to the class as a whole as well as to the furtherance of their own education.