Marching ahead

The end of March is fast approaching (though not fast enough for me!)! We started the week with quizzes and the Great Depression. We are learning about how the Depression impacted peoples lives and reading real letters written by children to Roosevelt asking for help. We also learned about FDR's New Deal, and wrote responses to those children from FDR's perspective using the New Deal. In Psychology I introduced a project in which they have to identify a famous psychological experiment and present it to the class. We also looked at Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment as a model for this. Zimbardo has followed this up with a wonderful book I read called The Lucifer Effect.

(Dr. Philip Zimbardo)

Tuesday was round two of Parent/Teacher Conferences. I had way more parents than last week, and we had nice conversations about how their children were doing in class. I had the students reflect on their learning in a written format ahead of time and shared those reflections with the parents. Despite wiping out my energy for the week with a 14 hour day, it was a good night. I also stumbled onto this great animation that shows the history of the US in a map!

(Still of the animation)

Wednesday was a wacky day... The Sophomores were out of the building going a job shadow and the Freshmen were all on a field trip. In addition, all the juniors were taking a state required Science test in the morning. So in the afternoon we had classes with juniors and seniors only. It was definitely a weird day. Throw in how exhausted I was from Tuesday night and it was a bit like the twilight zone. The 9th graders field trip to Lewiston to experience culture and counter stereotypes is one that I would have liked to go on. I think it was a great experience for 9th graders in our rural school to see what Jewish, Islam, and Christian cultures are like as well as how they integrate in the public schools there.

On Thursday I took my AP U.S. history class to the Margaret Chase Smith Library and Museum in Skowhegan, Maine. The facility is now organized through the University of Maine, and I have been taking my AP classes there for a decade! One piece of the AP Exam is something called the DBQ or Document Based Question. This is where a student is given a question and 9 excerpts from historical documents. They then must use the documents to write an essay response to the question. For this field trip, my students are exposed to lots of primary source documents. There job is to pick 6 and then create a question that ties the documents together as if it were a DBQ. I call this assignment, Create Your Own DBQ. During the field trip students are introduced to the role Senator Smith played in U.S. history as the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress and to have her name before a major political party as candidate for President of the United States. Students learn about how she was the first person to stand up to Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare with her Declaration of Conscience speech in 1950. The Staff of Director Dr. David Richards, Collection Specialist Angela Stockwell, and Museum Assistant John Taylor do a fantastic job! They are knowledgeable, helpful, and work very well with students. I can't say enough great things about the service they have provided over the years. Its always nice to walk through her house that is a living museum and the historical timeline of Cold War era artifacts. But I really love the Library part where we get to look at real letters and other documents from the time period. The Field Trip wouldn't be possible without the generosity of the Library. We have no money in our budget for field trips, but luckily the Library pays for field trips through their endowment. As a result we get a solid 3 hours of immersion in the Cold War and just a nice day overall!

(Senator Smith and Me)

(My students researching)

(Newspaper headline from the Senator's run for the Presidency)

We finished the week with a normal day on Friday but there is plenty more to come next week! In our prep for the Model UN Conference we will be doing a simulation next week. World War Two will come into focus for us next week as well!