Teaching is amazing.

I feel exhilarated after teaching a class that has gone

well and the students indicated that they understood it. I remember the first time I
had that feeling during my first teaching internship at Caesar Chavez Middle School.
The class was on American history. I had one student in particular who asked
excellent questions regarding how the allies paid for the Second World War and how
American financial policy changed since the great depression. He was particularly
interested in the change from the gold standard to the fiat standard we use now. I
answered his questions as best I could and it felt great. I left class that day with a
sense of elation for the rest of the day. Since then I have taught many lessons. I
have learned to always plan for at least two lessons incase students are struggling
with the way that I am teaching or find it uninteresting.
As a history teacher, I want my students to make connections between
events and theories. I want my students to develop and articulate clear and
coherent narratives in class and in their assignments. I strive to teach them how to
understand the forces of cause-and-eect and how politics change over time and
why. I utilize a variety of teaching techniques ranging from simple techniques like
using charts and diagrams and other visual representations to show relationships to
more complex techniques like having students apply their knowledge to make
predictions about future political decisions by world leaders. My students regularly
mention that they find the timelines and guided notes we produce in class useful.
One of my favorite types of timeline is the five-layer dip, where students construct a
timeline with dierent categories layered on other in dierent colors. An example of
this would be a twentieth-century economics timeline that places the second world
war, the great depression, facism, appeasement, and imperialism in relation to each
other. The visual impact of seeing how these events and trends relate is powerful,
and allows students to understand that the sequence of events is important and
complicated.
I also want my students to develop a sense of historical empathy. I feel that it
is important for students to understand that history is not just the study of what
happened but also a study of how events unfolded and of how historical people and
groups understood, felt, and explained what was happening. One way I try to help
my students do this is with role-playing games. One instance in which this was very
eective was a discussion students had on the civil war in which a student role
playing as an abolitionist said that the US should be striving to be an example to the
world and that in a perfect world, slavery would not exist. A student role playing as
a pro-slavery southern senator responded that in a perfect world southerners would
not have been raised in a society in which slavery was seen as acceptable.
Everyone stopped talking and took a moment to think about that. That one
comment helped the class come to terms with why southerners defended slavery as
a good thing and since then that is how I have tried to explain this to students when
we cover the civil war. I like to incorporate as many primary source readings as I can
into my lessons as a part of the students homework. One of the things I want them

to get from my classes is how to evaluate materials for bias and reliability. I
encourage my students to question these sources, to look for who produced a
source, what context the source was created in and whether the source will provide
them with accurate information on a particular issue. Primary sources are always a
good way to improve students understanding of historical events. If I can help my
students put themselves in the past and truly imagine what life was like and how it
aected the future, I feel I have succeeded.