Social Education articles from October 2007

Social Education archives from October 2007

Editor's notebook.(Editorial)
October 1, 2007... Students learn most when they are interested and enthusiastic. Achieving this student involvement can be a daunting challenge for teachers who are under pressure to have their students acquire as much information from their voluminous textbooks...

Deciphering handwritten documents.(Letter to the editor)
October 1, 2007... If I might make an editorial suggestion: Teaching with Documents is one of the most valuable sections of your magazine. The May/ June 2007 issue contains a letter from Stephen Decatur to Secretary of the Navy Paul Hamilton. This letter would...

How to teach about "aligning elections" using the internet.(Surfing the Net)(Viewpoint essay)
October 1, 2007... Are you tired of the 2008 presidential election already? I think that many of us are. However, I can suggest a way to teach about the upcoming election that will be helpful to secondary teachers of history, civics, and U.S. government and to...

Supreme court preview.(Looking at the Law)
October 1, 2007... During the 2006-07 Supreme Court term, it was the 5-4 decisions that garnered the most attention. Twenty-four of the term's 72 cases were decided by this narrowest of margins--the highest percentage of 5-4 opinions in a decade--even as the...

Friends of the court: using amicus briefs in the classroom.(TEACHING ACTIVITY)
October 1, 2007... Background In every case before the Supreme Court, the parties who will be arguing the case submit written arguments, known as briefs, in advance of their oral arguments. The parties in a Supreme Court case are usually the petitioner (the...

Guardians of the past: using drama to assess learning in American history.
October 1, 2007... Not long ago, I decided to minimize the stressful emphasis on assessments in learning in my 11th grade American History and Government classes and put the fun back into teaching. Tired of the repetitive aspects of teaching the required state...

Learning early twentieth-century history through first-person interviews.
October 1, 2007... My third-hour American history class in Dearborn, Michigan, is comprised of 21 eleventh-grade students of multiple ethnicities, religions, and backgrounds. Nearly two-thirds of the students are of Middle Eastern descent, with some from families...

Promoting historic preservation in the classroom.(Personal account)
October 1, 2007... Since 1998, my classroom has doubled as a training ground for students to experience archeology, research, service learning, outreach and political activism, all within the history curriculum. In 1998, I began teaching a class I called Research...

"Denmark 1943": using music to teach Holocaust rescue.
October 1, 2007... Addressing the topic of rescue efforts poses particular challenges for teachers planning Holocaust curricula. While the issue leads many students to develop an engaged empathy with rescuers, teachers must avoid overemphasizing what was a...

Learning history through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
October 1, 2007... Consider these two scenarios: 1. A student is in a rush to get lunch so that she can finish her homework before her next class, so she cuts the line in her high school cafeteria. Immediately the students around her begin to protest. 2....

Reading in the social studies: using subtitled films.
October 1, 2007... Involving reluctant and low-achieving students with reading is an essential step to increasing students' content area knowledge. One way to increase students' engagement with text is by linking social studies content with foreign films that...

October 1957 memorandum related to sputnik.(Teaching with Documents)
October 1, 2007... On October 5, 1957, the headline on the front page of the Baltimore News-Post proclaimed "RUSS 'MOON' CIRCLING EARTH." Beneath it, the newspaper asked readers, "Horror or Progress?" The article that followed, written by International News...