Category Archives: Miranda Cozzone

Ethnic Studies

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Among the many new laws that Gavin Newsom has signed into law over the the past couple of weeks none have touched closer to a social studies teacher than the requirement for all public schools to begin teaching ethnic studies by 2025. Check out the New York Times article if you want more context. 

While this requirement does not mandate us as a private school to fulfill this requirement we have, as a department and with admin, been talking about this as a potentially very viable class at Carondelet. As we continue to expand our DEI initiatives as a school and within our department’s curriculum, as we recognize the ways that Catholics have been responsible for being exclusionary, an Ethnic Studies class (be it an elective or mandatory) feels right for the times. 


That being said I have many questions and feelings about the class:


  • Do we need Ethnic Studies to be its own class or should we just integrate the content into our normal history scope and sequences (World History, US History, etc)? Im some ways It is sad ethnic studies even has to be a class. If history texts were written more inclusively ethnic studies would simply be part of the scope and sequence of any history class. 
  • How much parent push back are we potentially looking at? I enjoy a salty conservative parent email from time to time but how many are we talking about here?
  • Who should teach this class? We have a very competent but very white department. We have to recognize that in an honest way and seek out new colleagues or mentors outside of our school and/or department in order to do this class the justice that it deserves AND to make sure all of our students feel as seen as possible.
  • What groups should be covered? This is a really heated topic right now even among supporters of Ethnic Studies curriculum. 
    • Should we only focus on those groups indigenous to the Americas?
    • How can “Asian-American” given the VASTNESS of the continent culturally, religiously, and linguistically be covered in a single unit?? How do you pick and choose groups within a group?
    • If we follow the norm of highlighting the African American, Asian American, Latin American, and Indigenous American experience who are we leaving out? What about Middle-Easterners, Jews, etc.?

Any way these are my wonderings for now…..do you have any insights, wonderings, or answers about this class? I would love to hear them! 

My Fully Self Paced Unit Was So Successful That Now I Question My Existence As a Teacher

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After Christmas break I surveyed my AP Psych class to find out what they wanted to do more of  in the upcoming quarter. I am sure that none of you are surprised to see that they wanted less “live” class and more self paced work. 

So to honor where they were and to also to give myself a challenge I created a 2 week self paced unit on Human Development. I thought a human development unit would make a  perfect self paced unit because the content is completely relatable when compared to other units on brain anatomy or statistics. 

Here is what I came up with  – Developmental Psychology Learning Menu. The learning menu consisted of:

  • 1 – Entire unit to read and outline

  • 3 –  formative multiple choice tests assessments 

  • 2 – 30+ minute podcasts with Flipgrids 

  • 5 – Crash Course Type Videos (some in Edpuzzle) 

  • A Jamboard 

  • A Schoology Discussion Board 

What did I learn?

  • Creating a self paced unit is a LOT of work on the front end. In order for this to be fully self paced all of the work needed to be ready at once. Instead of pacing out the work I chose to give it all at once so that students could choose the way they wanted to tackle the unit. Some did all the reading first and then did the learning menu, some went through the human development chronologically doing the readings and assignments accordingly. I like the way that each student got to choose how to pace out their own unit and I loved that some chose to do it in small groups. But to pull it off meant hours of preparing on the front end. I know I do not always have the time to plan lessons like this. I was more of a pace car than a coach. 

  • Students scored nearly the same on the unit exam as they did for units taught more synchronously. This is a Catch 22 for me – one one hand it makes me question if my entire existence as a teacher matters, and on the other hand I am proud of the way I was able to customize this unit in order to give them more control over their experience. 

  • Students engaged more with each other when I backed off of their discussion boards. The biggest sign for me that this lesson worked was not their test scores but they way they used the discussion boards and flip girds to give each other real feedback and encouragement. Granted I made them leave comments, I found their comments to me much better then when they knew that I was also commenting and monitoring, I am not sure what that’s about but I liked it. 

Where am I going from here?

  • Plot twist – our next unit will be almost fully synchronous. I am NOT abandoning the self paced unit forever but part of the reason why i think it worked was that it was novel. I think that if I did this for the rest of the year the engagement would slowly wane. After this next unit I will survey them to find out how they have the best of both worlds (synchronous and asynchronous) in the following units.

Where are you all with balancing these two types of units?


Eat a Peach – and other writing about food

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If I am not reading about teaching, I am reading about food. I find an incredible amount of overlap between people who care about food and people who care about education.  The food world and the teaching world both require an unreasonable amount of care for ingredients/content, a constant need to try new things, and sometimes require great efforts of convincing people (patrons/students) that what they are doing, though maybe foreign, is valuable. I recently finished 3 books about food

Eat a Peach –  David Chang
Brief synopsis – Chang is an unlikely chef and restaurateur. He was groomed to be a professional golfer and his parents, Korean Immigrants, did their best to talk him out of this profession. He is the owner of the Momofuku Restaurant Company and has been featured in Mind of a Chef on PBS & has his own show Ugly Delicious on Netflix. 

Takeaways/Thinking about teaching

  • Culture/Thoughts on being an outsider – David Chang calls himself a Twinkie “yellow on the outside, white on the inside” and talks about what it is like being an Asian American, not embraced as “white,” but also shunned by many of his more traditional Korean family members. On top of that cooking is inherently a Eurocentric career field as most chefs are trained in a French focused way. Though very much owning up to being a part of the “boys club” in the food world David Chang spent a lot of his career feeling like an outsider because of his ethnicity. 
  • This summer I spent a lot of time scrolling through Twitter and reading about what former students said were missing in their education at Carondelet. Many of their sentiments echoed Chang’s experience in the food world. In history we have a lot of control in how we curate a unit and I am reminded of the times that I have focused on content that was easy to create because it is part of the “cannon of world history” that is to say mostly white and European. I know a lot of us are thinking about these issues right now and I found his take on things really thought provoking. 
  • Access – When David Chang opened his first restaurant he did not want a wait staff or anything remotely formal. He admired Chipotle (recently opened as he was getting into the business himself) more than he admired the French Laundry because while both organizations had a goal of serving quality food, Chipotle was able to do this in a way that reached far more people than the exclusiveness of the French Laundry.  His goal was to create Michiliean Star worthy food in a fast food environment.
  • Sometimes in education I think people are “too inside” meaning that they forget what it is like to feel like an outsider because they are so steeped in the language of education. Working with our freshmen this year I am reminded of this on a daily basis. The things I just think everyone should be able to do and understand is not working. All of our students were impacted by school closures, many of them are dealing with the social-emotional issues of starting high school online, some of them are not at grade level and are dealing with heavy things at home, I few I just worry will not make it up to speed this year. Reimagining what quality teaching looks like right now is really important and something that I do not always feel like I am doing on a day to day basis which feels daunting.
  • Mental Health/Work Life Balance – David Chang is a workaholic who spent a majority of his time in the kitchen to avoid his own thoughts and demons (relatable). When opening Noodle Bar he signed a short lease because he so often thought about ending his life that he didn’t see himself being around in 5 years to run the restaurant. He attributes a lot of his early success to his poor mental health, until finally needing to confront those feelings in order to become a more whole person. 
  • I think work life balance (though most of us are not this extreme) is a really challenging thing right now being that since March the line between our homes and our classrooms are really blurred. This has been personally hard for me and I am sure many other people. I think just talking to other people about it and reading about how other people experience it has been really helpful in not feeling so alone in it. 

Two others I recommend:

  • Always Home – Fanny Singer 

    • Singer is the daughter of Alice Waters (foundress of Chez Panisse) and Stehpen Singer (well known wine maker on the Sonoma Coast). This memoir covers her childhood through young adulthood, her travels in Europe with her mother, and the legacy of Chez Panisse.


  • Burn the Place – Iliana Regan 

Regan grew up on a farm in rural Indiana. She came to cooking in a roundabout way and never went to culinary school. Her restaurant, Elizabeth (Chicago), earned a Michelin star for the past 6 years straight, she recently left the restaurant and opened the Milkweed Inn. The inn is actually  a rural plot of land where people stay in tents for the weekend and eat food foraged and harvested from the land. This memoir covers her childhood and her break out into the food world and is free if you have an Audible account!

AP Psych Training……Online Edition

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AP Psych Training
I spent this past week doing AP Psychology training through the University of Texas. It was a bummer to not get to visit Austin but a great chance to see someone else lead online learning, also Texas is seeing spiking rates of Covid so it was honestly for the best.
I am collecting my thoughts now while everything is still fresh in my head and am curious to get feedback from people who either teach AP classes or who have experienced online learning from the learner’s end if any of this resonates with you.
AP Training online/distance learning
·      First of all I made the mistake of signing up for a session in Central Time….whoops. Had no idea Texas was two hours ahead so starting every day at 6am was rough. Be aware of your time zones.
·      After hearing from teachers in different parts of the country it is clear to me that while I still have a lot to learn about online learning, Carondelet in general really did a good job in engaging students while distance learning was going on.  I could not relate to the misery (minus missing my students and colleagues) that so many people were sharing.
·      It is HARD to sit in a Zoom meetings for hours on end and actually give your undivided attention to a teacher (how did our students do this??). I was DEFINITELY guilty of getting distracted with my phone or turning off my camera to finish chores around the house. In some ways, I would have been better off sitting my but in a conference center for the week. If we are going to be online again next year, I have a lot of work to do to improve what I did last year in order to make learning meaningful. Breaks were very helpful, breakout rooms were a God send, and a balance of asynchronous work time was a MUST.
Teaching AP
·      Thinking about teaching AP feels like a totally different beast than teaching Big History. In Big History, we can pause, take longer on something students are in to or need help on, but there does not seem to be much room to deviate from the schedule and I am wondering how AP teachers handle that?? It will be a big learning curve for me.
·      Another thing I realize, at least for AP Psych, is that I cannot possible cover all of the content and that students will have to be in charge of learning portions of the material on their own. This feels like a new concept to me, wow. How do you know what they can and can’t do on their own? How do you know how much homework is reasonable??
·      Our teacher for the week flat out said that he teaches to the test. I feel mixed about this. On one hand it is honest and real on the other it kind of sucks. Teaching to a test is everything we have moved away from in the past few years. How do you all wrap your heads around this?
AP Psych Folk in general
·      Minus the California jokes coming from the Texas teachers every 10 minutes I found people to be extremely generous with their resources. Files and drives were passed around like crazy. This was even more valuable that the lectures we had. I hope that this is a common experience for other teachers at these kinds of conferences. It’s scary to do something for the first time, especially when you are only working from a text book and the internet and a reminder for me to pass it on when I am in the position to do so.
·      We received access to a Facebook group where AP Psych teachers offer their Google drives AND mentorship. I had no idea this existed and have already been able to connect with two teachers who have taught 10+ years with the same text book that we have. Why is this not more common??
Anyway I now have a lot of information to go through, but wanted to share my experience and get some feedback from you all about your thoughts on teaching AP and/or how you are thinking about a potential online learning environment should we have to go back to that at some point next year.

Mise en place – in the classroom

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Mise en place – in the classroom
I spent most of my break cooking and thinking about cooking.
Cooking has always been a hobby, but with the last weeks of the semester spent
working with my freshmen on their Little Big History Projects which consist
mainly of food topics I got to spend a lot of time thinking about the way that
cuisine intersects with history in really interesting ways. Amongst all of the
home cooking, I took two cooking classes learning to make French Macarons (I have been saying macaroooons my whole life oops) &
Pad Thai at Sur la Table. Most of my home cooking involves winging it and
fumbling around the kitchen, but these classes were spent with trained chefs
who brought a lot of insight into the cooking process. My biggest takeaway
concept: Mise en place.
Big News: My sister left the couch come with me make Macarons! All-expenses-paid-post-college-unemployment life must be rough 😭
Mise en place is a French phrase that basically means
“everything in its place” and is a concept that is taught in culinary 101 as a
way to help young cooks navigate a complicated recipe. It involves making
lists, prioritizing your work, gathering ingredients, measuring everything out
ahead of time and reading the recipe several times in order to know what is
happening when, and what if any special steps, tools, or time sensitives things
need to be accounted for in the recipe sequence.

I hope I don’t look this awkward all of the time….😅

Most of the time when cooking we are making things from rote
memory, or we are trying something new unsure of if it will work but enjoying
the process never the less. But that’s not always the case; for Christmas Day,
I made ravioli on my own on the day of for the first time in my life for my
whole family. On New Years Eve I made beef wellington with our good friends with
a cut of meat that cost nearly $60, yikes I am a budget shopper so this caused
me to literally lose sleep. The stakes/steaks, lol see what I did there, felt
incredibly high. I practiced making pasta for a week ahead of time which I’m
not sure I should be proud of or embarrassed by. One a side note – my family is
not shy to let you know if they don’t like something and my brother is
literally a trained chef –so no pressure. I could not have been successful if I
didn’t plan ahead.
So, how does this relate to teaching? Maybe for you not at
all, and if so I would invite you to stop reading here to save myself from any
further embarrassment of this not making sense. But the experience of cooking
during the holidays and the concept of Mise en Place has been milling around my
head especially as I think of ways to help my students as they begin to write
their Little Big History Project research papers.
Most of our students approach our assignments the way that
some of us might approach weeknight cooking; that is thrown together and half
assed. Most of us, like our students have the skills that we need to do
something, but not the bandwidth, resources, or ability to figure out how to
make it work with everything else we have going on. Many of our students, like
us, are gifted at BS-ing our way through a variety of complicated tasks. But
sometimes you just can’t do that, or you do so knowing that it was the best you
could do and that it was C work at best.
Think about the major assignments you gave last year, and
why some students were not as successful as they should have been. My guess is
that for many of them it was time management or not accounting for the
variables that they failed to think about ahead of time. I am specifically
thinking of a group that I did a podcast interview with in the 11th
hour of the due date.
The Little Big History Project is not 30-minute baked
chicken dish. It is a 3-hour Beef Wellington recipe. Last year I think we were
successful in giving our students the ingredients to succeed but this year I
want us to be more successful in helping them plan out this assignment and
assignments like it in the future. Given our student population, for the most
part the difference between students who excel and those who stay average is
more about planning/thoughtfulness than it is about academic skill level. As we
saw from the data of the PD day – for the most part our students are above
average.
They have great research and information thanks to Joan and
Michelle. They have the writing skills and historical thinking skills that they
have been taught throughout their years in school (albeit to varying degrees),
but most of them have not been taught to think out, plan, and break down, the
writing process. What to-do lists need to be made, what spaces need to be
created, what does it look like for something to be done, etc.
The conclusion of this is that I do not have the answers
yet, but do think that the idea of Mise en Place can be applied to some of our
bigger assignments. We spend a lot of time giving students the skills they need
to do an assignment but less time talking about how to actually approach an assignment
and I want to do that better for the sake of my students and for the sake of
myself who has to grade their work.

Thoughts on the Re-Do

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Earlier this month I sent an email with both an egregious spelling error and a punctuation error in the subject line.  I noticed the error about one minute after sending, but still too late to retrieve.  Here it is. 
So I had to decide what to do.  Should I resend and correct my spelling error, or let it go and hear my own bells of shame? 

I
choose to let that spelling/typo error just go without a re-do.  I felt like I would be clogging your email, and that you probably figured out sesmster meant semester.  I really wanted to resend, but it didn’t feel right. I hoped my reputation wouldn’t suffer that much.

Earlier that week I
also sent out an email with the wrong attachment, and because of a special schedule, the wrong times.  Again the decision- should I resend and correct times and attachment, or let it go and hear my own bells of shame?  I did re-do this one.  It was a MAP test email and had information
I did not want to be lost in the errors.  I couldn’t risk it. 
 

That same week, I was re-grading a bunch of student work done in a collaboration with Gaeby and Miranda on the Little Big History Project. I try my hardest to give students the opportunity to re-do without grade consequences, and I am always surprised more students don’t take me up on the re-do. Plenty do but by no means all.  This has puzzled me, because do you remember I said I really wanted to send a correction out right away.  All things being equal, I will re-do.  The juxtaposition of my experience with re-doing choices and students’ choices made me wonder if they do a cost/benefit analysis, too.  And what do they see as cost vs benefit?

The grade matters, even in a nontraditional graded course like TMS. If the grade will change, the benefit of the grade outweighs the costs in time and study for some students. I  wonder if one of the costs – facing the embarrassment of the error – is too great for some.  I really hope they don’t hear the bells of shame because I emphasize making mistakes as part of learning,  but I am afraid some do.   I wonder if some students just hope that their equivalent of my sesmster error will somehow suddenly make sense to me.  So are they hoping for a no-cost solution?  That hope is not very realistic,
because once I grade, I don’t look back without the redo.  It is a shame grades cant be conversations, but I guess conversations have a time cost, too. I can state a lot of reasons for my errors.  Multitasking, sugar overload, terrible typing skills, a get-‘er-done stance, over-reliance on spellcheck…
but I don’t claim carelessness.  I have felt some students are careless, but I also recognize everyone has limited time, and just have to put somethings on low priority.

Sometimes I feel they re-do because they know they can do better work. That is the cost/benefit analysis I want my redo offer to validate.  I feel so happy they are recognizing a chance to either learn or demonstrate learning. I
want students to be able to present their best work, but I also want them to have agency in their learning.  Teaching is complicated.

How do you get students to share their work…without the boring as hell presentations??

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Help! I need to make
more time for students to share their work with each other…without being soooo boring or taking up sooooo much class time. 
This blog is really
two parts – one part is about a helpful tool I learned at iNACOL, and the other is
looking wondering how you make time for students to share their work with one
another…….that doesn’t require the brain numbing 28 person individual presentation.
One of the most
helpful takeaways from the iNACOL conference was seeing the ways that other
teachers out there were trying to differentiate learning for their students. My
favorite of these was called “The Learning Menu” – not particularly earth
shattering or mind-blowing – but something that stuck for me and that I implemented
as soon as I got back for my very burnt-out-of-lectures-seniors. 

Here is mine: 

My “Learning Menu” is a Google Doc where students in my Psych class went through different topics in the Health Psychology field. Some sections provided choice, while others required them to learn some foundational knowledge, and concluded with a chance to demonstrate some deeper learning. If you are interested in seeing the Google Doc it’s here.

Step 1 – students worked on the first two sections on their own & we jigsawed the mental health conditions out in class the following day so students could learn more about the ones they did not watch the video for. 

Step 2 – students did boxes three & four followed by a day in class where we made wellness related goals for ourselves that had to be backed by the research from the videos that they watched for these tasks plus some others that they found online. 

Step 3 – students were given a choice about how they wanted to demonstrate their deeper learning (see choices above, and full assignment here) and were off to work on their own for a bit. 

The amazing part of this assignment is that I did not have to lecture (my seniors are over lectures AND me at this point in the semester) and I STILL felt like they learned as much if not more than if I had! Because they came to class having digested some content ahead of time. Our conversations were richer, students got to learn about different psychological disorders from one another, and class time was used more effectively overall – if this seems like it would be of any value to you I would love to talk more about it. 

BUT as they completed their deeper learning assignment I was excited by their creativity and realness with the assignment. It hadn’t dawned on me that because there was so much freedom with the assignment their final products would be so varied. One student interviewed his sister (a special ed teacher) to see how she practices self care in a stressful job. One student who rarely speaks in class talked about how he cares for a family member with bi-polar disorder & why talking about mental health is so important to him – just to name two. Cool right?

While I gave them a lot of personal feedback/kudos on their assignment, it seemed like a disservice that they completed these projects in a vacuum and didn’t have the opportunity to share out what they did. 

So, to my question – how do you get your students to share out their work in a way that is meaningful and engaging?? Twenty-eight separate presentations would be boring as hell, but I worry that if I asked them to share out in small groups they would be off topic (am I just projecting my former student self?) What tips and tricks do you find that works, and how do you do it without taking days out of the unit??

Let me know if you have any ideas please! 

Feeling (and over thinking) all of the feels of SEL

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This year in Big
History, Gaeby and I, along with the help of Sam Martinez (if you are not picking Sam’s brain, like what are you even doing professionally?), developed a way to get a glimpse into our students’ social emotional lives throughout the course of their freshmen year. We created a “Twice Weekly Check In” Google
Form where students spend a few minutes twice a week in class filling it out
and giving us feedback. Here is what it looks like;
Here is some of the feedback that I get at the end of each week;
This snapshot is
from the beginning of the year. I saw which girls from my 3rd period
were getting involved in sports, which girls might be struggling socially, and
which girls were still trying to get a hang of how things work academically around
here;


This snapshot was
from a couple of weeks ago as girls turned in their first major project in my
class. I can see that many of them are not feeling ready to turn in their
projects which is something that Gaeby and I were able to address with enough
time before meltdown mode. It also shows what else is on my students minds as
they work on this project; shadow visits and frosh council selection.


Here is what I am thinking a few months into this- 
Pros
  • Students don’t seem to mind doing this twice a week – it has become a routine!
  • I am able to adapt in real time to student needs (ie changing deadlines, making seating charts, changing instructional approaches) that I feel will benefit my students.
  • I am
    getting much better at having hard conversations with students because I am not
    guessing at what their needs are. I know and can get right to the point.
  • I have insights as to why work is not getting turned in or why a student’s performance might dip. 
  • The
    Freshmen hallway being moved upstairs is HUGE for me and makes casual check ins
    really easy. I try to make a point to take notes on some of the fun stuff they
    add to the list (like dog costumes & sports) and take some laps upstairs on Fridays to check in
    with students as they are packing up for the weekend.
  • I really feel like I know MOST of my students at this point.

Cons
  • COMPASSION
    FATIGUE – I do not always have the bandwidth to hold space for student problems
    when I am at my own limit so I worry about consistency.
  •  It can
    be really easy to forget to have students take the survey when you are caught up in a lesson or trying to get to the end of a unit on time.
  • I don’t always
    know what to do with all of the feedback I get and therefore have probably
    become a big pain in the butt for our personal counselors and ed support team with my many questions. 


Questions
  •  What
    days of the week are best to survey students?
  • Is this
    actually improving my teaching and if so how do I measure that?
  • Are students going to get burned out on surveys?
  • Might they have expectations of me checking in with them personally that I cannot always meet, and therefore disappoint them?

 Well if you scrolled down the page this far thanks, any thoughts or feedback is much appreciated!

Also, Here’s a quote that I came across today that I really liked;
“Every time you think of calling a kid an “attention-seeking” this year, consider changing it to “connection-seeking” and see how your perspective changes 
– Dr. JodyCarrington

I imposed gender stereotypes on my DLS students and I feel like a jerk

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When I found out I was going to be teaching Psych this
semester I was STOKED. This was my undergrad major, I have a passion for it,
and the sophomore girls that I taught in the past loved the class.
So I assumed that I too I would be teaching sophomore girls.
I imagined a class that explored the latest research on mindfulness, social
emotional learning, and self care on top of all of the great units in the scope
and sequence. Our girls are primed for this stuff since it is embedded in Frosh
Wellness and many of the programs we have on campus.
Before I left for summer I learned that this would NOT be a
class of sophomore girls but rather an elective class for seniors. Of the 28
students in the class 24 were boys. How did this happen??
Some of my assumptions about a class full of senior boys was
right – Yes they are excited to talk about some of the fascinating yet unethical psychological
experiments which traumatized children and animals. Their tolerance for gore is high and sometimes I feel like
what they want my class to be a place for watching and discussing Criminal Minds (which to be honest also sounds pretty okay).
I say all that to say that I started removing a lot of what
I had originally planned including some work with mindfulness and social
emotional learning because I assumed that the boys would not see it as relevant to their lives (which obviously says more about me than it does about them). I really went back and forth on choosing curriculum because I was sure
that they were going to think something like self care or meditation was soft, weak, & lame (this is of
course was made up in my own head and is not based on reality).
While I do feel like I needed to adapt this class as my
target audience had changed,  I had wrongly (but didn’t know it yet) told a story in my
head about who my students were, what they thought, and what we needed. So it
took every ounce of courage (I’m not even kidding, I was really nervous) to
roll out a daily mindfulness practice with them.
Here is how I rolled it out: I told them that we would be
practicing mindfulness daily (using the calm app, thank God for free teacher resources). They were invited but not required to
participate. If they did not want to participate they just had to put their
head on the desk and zone out. They were not allowed to give me their feedback
on it for TWO WEEKS. One because I was not in a place to hear their criticism
yet and two because I wanted them to really give it a chance before they
labeled it. On Friday I surveyed them and this is what I got (see below).  
To my shock not one person thought it was a waste of time and all of them want to continue it at least twice a week. I feel simultaneously super happy and like the biggest jerk for assuming what would and wouldn’t resonate with my students based solely on which side of the street they came from. 
What else am I wrongly assuming as a teacher? What stories do I need to stop making up in my head? What are the other assumptions I make that might be preventing me from opening doors to my students?

1 in 5 incoming freshmen hate history…..okay then.

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1 in 5 incoming freshmen
hate history…..okay then.
Recently I went back through the incoming frosh home surveys
to find that out of the nearly 180 incoming freshmen 20% of them stated that
history was their least favorite subject. Ouch. While I wouldn’t say that this
is a crazy high percentage, it is also significant that one in five of the
girls in my class will have said that history is their “LEAST FAVORITE”
subject.  

                       
Here are some of
their responses as to why,
“Boring”
“No clue. Just never liked it”
“Boring”
“The material does not keep my
attention”
“Boring”
And my favorite…….
“My least
favorite subject is Social Studies because I’m not all that interested and
fascinated by wars and big events that went on back in the day. Not to mention
there are a lot of terms that have to be memorized, which can be quite
despicable to study. I respect everything that went down in history, but I
don’t find too much joy in learning about it.”
(“despicable”……..lol who is this kid??)


None of the students who claimed to dislike history said it
was too hard or that they didn’t perform well on tests, they just flat out have
apathy towards it. Yikes.
What this means for the
history team as we start the year:
·      We need to assure and prove
to students that Big History is not on an endless memorization/test cycle.
·      We need to continue to build
projects that engage students who are not naturally inclined to the subject.
·      We need to do a better job
of connecting currents events to past events in order to make the past feel
more relevant. I mean that’s kind of easy given the plethora of crazy current
events.
·      In the end, we need them to
see that it is not a “world history class” that is going to change their lives
but that the skills we are offering them to develop just might!
What I am hoping for these
students in the long term:
·      In my fantasy world – students will become so engaged in
history they will count down the hours of the day until Big History and then can’t
wait to get home to do their homework.
·      In the real world – That these students see history as a
subject through which they can engage in and develop as readers, writers, inquisitors,
researchers, arguers, etc.
The good news is that about 17% of the same pool also said
that history is their favorite subject. Later in the fall they will be surveyed again. I am looking
forward to knowing if our new curriculum is making an impact on girls at both
ends of the spectrum. At the end of the day this data is not a subject by
subject popularity contest but rather a pulse on where are students are, my hope
is not to convert the history haters into history lovers, but to engage them in
a way that it will be impossible for them to say that history is boring.