Historical Investigation, Day 1 - Class Recap

The White House in Washington, D.C., 2011.

Hello everyone,

Thank you for doing your homework and visiting the blog! As I said in class, I think this is a really helpful resource for students, staff, and parents to be able to follow along with what is happening. After every class, I will write up a recap and post it. Most of the time, your only homework will be to read over the blog and be prepared for what is coming next in class. With that, let's get started!

Soundtrack: "Changes" by 2Pac. I always choose this song to start off a new class with, because I like the idea of our room being somewhat different from your other experiences in high school. This song also has all sorts of lyrics that relate to American Studies, like the line "instead of a War on Poverty, they got a War on Drugs, so the police can bother me." Check out the full lyrics here.

AGENDA 2/11/14:
Introductions/Attendance
Letter to Class/Mr. Fritz
The Blog
Create Ground Rules
News Briefs/Historical Investigation Work

Homework: Check the blog and post a comment! Keep working on your historical investigation! The first news brief is assigned to Nana.

Introductions/Attendance: At the start of class, I introduced myself and apologized for being two weeks late in arriving to start the semester. Had I known that I would have had a class, I certainly never would have booked the vacation I was on! With all of that said and done, I am absolutely delighted to be at Westview for the rest of this school year.

I took attendance and tried to ask everyone how they wanted me to address them. It will take me some time, but eventually, I will know everyone's names, I promise!

Letter to Class/Mr. Fritz: After attendance was done, I passed out a letter that I wrote to the class, explaining all about who I am and what sort of expectations I have. Hopefully, most of it was interesting information! I like passing these out and signing them all individually. To me, it represents that I really am interested in everyone in my class.

After reading the letter aloud, I asked everyone to write back to me in a similar sort of fashion. I gave a bunch of possible questions to answer as prompts and about 30 minutes or so to complete the assignment. I LOVE reading these and writing back to everyone! Thank you for your effort - I can't wait to learn a little bit more about who you are!

The Blog: Next, I introduced this website. If you are here, you have the web address down correctly! I also demonstrated how to post a comment, which is homework. This should take about one minute. Quite possibly the easiest homework assignment of all time. Please remember to keep checking back, especially if you were confused about something in class, or missed a day!

Create Ground Rules: Ahh, yes. The awkward process. You did not do too badly with this! The rules that you came up with and agreed to as an entire class are:

1. Respect
2. Be responsible
3. Promote a safe environment
4. Try your best
5. Embrace diversity in willing to work with everyone

I will be working to make sure everyone, including myself, is following the ground rules! Thank you for participating in this exercise.

News Briefs/Historical Investigation Work: To end class, I talked about the "news brief" concept, with is basically a current event that will start each class. If you are assigned to do the news brief, all you have to do is find a story that has recently (say, within the last week) happened in the United States. A good resource for this could be CNN.com. After you have found the article, either print it or comment/email me the link, then be ready to just talk about what is in the story in class. No writing, no presenting, no standing (unless you want) - just know what the article is about, because I will ask you questions. Hopefully, this will be a good way to look at what is currently happening in the US and relate it to what has happened in the past.

Finally, I came around and chatted with a few students about where they are in regards to the historical investigation project. Much more to come on that in the coming days, but I did want to just get a general sense of where you were. Next class, we will get back to working on it!

Thank you for reading! See you next class!