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Brian Jacks - Short essays
a. I am the right person to be teaching U.S. history because· I love American history and I can sell it to anybody. I have a vast amount of knowledge about U.S. history and can be a valuable resource for anyone who needs to learn more about the subject. I have lived through many of the important periods of American history and can provide a first hand account of the momentous moments that have defined us as a people. Finally, I have traveled to 49 states and visited many of the historical sites that make American history so interesting.
b. A classroom success story. Teaching U. S. history in Hammond, Indiana. In 1993, I was teaching American history at Hammond High School. I organized a debate on a topic entitled, "Columbus, Hero or Villain?" The class was assigned various roles that reflected the different types of people that would have had access to Christopher Columbus during his voyage to America in 1492. There was the Portuguese slave trader, the Spanish King, the Native American, and a shipmate of Columbus. Each person in the class was assigned one of these roles and was required to act it out in class. This went quite well and many students told me that they learned more about Columbus doing this than anything else they had ever done in regard to Columbus.
c. With the help of McRAH, I now feel prepared to address the following challenge in my teaching. The biggest challenge in my teaching has been a lack of student and teacher engagement. Simply put, I have been bored and my students have been bored. This will change; however, this year when I get to teach American history for the first time since 1995. In addition, the McRAH institute this summer gave me an intellectual framework to plan out the year. I developed a project during McRAH that, although significantly modified, will increase my interest and my students' interest in the subject matter.
d. Respond to the following quotation in terms of your instructional goals for the academic year 2002-2003:
"Historical memory is the key to self-identity,·to one's connectedness with all humankind; and all American students must have equal access to well-prepared history teachers and to engaging, balanced, accurate, and challenging curricular materials."
The search for self-identity is always a pertinent part of my instructional goals for any school year. I will incorporate this search for self-identity this year by using Colonel Joshua Chamberlain's speech at Gettysburg in July 1863, when he said "we are fighting for something that has never been fought for in the history of the world. We are fighting to make men free." The search that Americans go through to develop their self-identity and a sense of liberation is but a microcosm of a larger search for the American self-identity and national liberation. In other words, Americans are a work in progress, just as America is a work in progress. As such, I will use all my efforts this year to use material that tells a story about the struggle to achieve the promise of America, which is that all men will be regarded as equal. Wars in particular are instructive in illustrating this American struggle to vanquish oppression, yet we never seem to vanquish the oppressor.
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