I'm ready to teach again tomorrow. Very, very ready. I noticed something, though, when I went back through the textbook to make sure my lesson was complete and accurate. I didn't like what I saw...the textbook is SO incomplete! It does a halfway decent job of telling students WHAT happened, but there's no detail...what good does it do to tell the students that Carnegie, for instance, believed in the Gospel of Wealth if there's no mention of WHY he believed in it? Chapter 14 briefly mentions that Carnegie was a poor Scottish immigrant and worked his way to wealth, then it briefly mentions in Chapter 15 that he believed in Social Darwinism, laissez-faire, and the Gospel of Wealth. There's nothing in there to connect the dots though. Sure, that's my job as a teacher, but what if I didn't have the educational background to know that his upbringing influenced his belief system? Also, I see nothing about his support of education for the lower class, or, for that matter, his need for a large labor pool of literate (and grateful) unskilled workers? Ugh, it makes me want to get on a textbook review committee because this book is so weak when it comes to encouraging critical thinking!
I can tell that my first year of teaching is going to be extremely time consuming. I'm not going to be one of those new teachers who relies on the textbook because I already know that it's not good enough for my students. Not that the textbook is bad, per se, but it is very incomplete. I find value in it because it provides me with a basic framework...I, like Leah, use the textbook as a basic road map. However, we do our homework so we can take lots of little side trips to points of interest along the way. You miss a lot of stuff when you take the freeway instead of the old country roads. I want to know my material inside and out, and although I can't expect that of every student, I at least want to give them enough information to make them realize that the world is much bigger than the textbook leads them to believe.
I really hope that I'll get to teach modern history...I absolutely love pulling in outside resources and connecting them to the students' interests. For instance, I've embedded a film into my PowerPoint (by Thomas Edison!) to illustrate vaudeville theatre and a recording of Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" to illustrate ragtime music. An old black-and-white film and a sound recording might not be too exciting, but it should be just a little cooler when I pull Beyonce and Guitar Hero references into it :) I know I won't necessarily have the luxury of teaching what I want to teach, but it's nice to dream. No matter what I do, I'm going to go the extra mile to make sure my students aren't shortchanged.
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