Project Description
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One of the foremost challenges that I face as an eighth grade U.S. History teacher is making the material relevant for my students in their daily lives (as well as in their future lives). So many times I have been asked these (or some version of these) questions by my students: What is the point of studying history? Why do we need to know about the past? Why do we have to learn about a bunch of old guys that lived a long time ago?
After careful thought, I have come to realize that these questions are questions of relevance. Relevance has been defined as being “connected with the matter at hand”. Many of my students cannot see the purpose of learning about the past because they cannot see its connection to their own lives. In many ways and in many classrooms history seems to have become a list of meaningless facts that students must memorize in order to perform well on a test. If this is what the study of history is supposed to be, then I don’t see the point either. For history to become relevant for my students, it has to come to life (focus on the human aspect), be engaging (be told like a story with conflict and an element of the unknown), and have application (give my students something that they can take away to use in their current lives or in the future). These three areas will be my focus for my U.S. History classes this year. |