First day!

Welcome to US History I!  To get you familiar with us and the course, you need to read the Course Expectations Handout, which is linked up here.

A big shift!

For those of you who are not my students but who follow this blog, I wanted to give you a head's up that my teaching assignment has changed. As a result, this blog will no longer be about AP World History, and instead will be shifting to US History from 1700-1900.  I will leave up all the past resources and past lessons for any and all to view, but the focus of this blog will shift to support my 9th grade class.


Here we go!

Ukraine project update

Tonight, use hashtagify.me to check out some of these hashtags to see which two you'd like to use.

Hi folks-

I'm out at a conference today.  So in class, you have two things to do.  First, go to the spreadsheet and continue to watch promotional videos.  Then get back together into the groups that divided the questions about Ukraine.  Go to the questions you labeled "closed" and find and post answers to them in the google doc.  You can do them together as a group or break them up, whatever floats your boat.  I'll have the voting page up on the blog later this afternoon. Tonight, for homework, cast your votes.  Voting will be open until the start of class Thursday.

May Madness Round 1!

Off and running with May Madness

For tonight, you should be looking into your leaders.  Do some research, figure out who this person is and what he or she did to get into this competition.

Your promotional material/presentation is due on Tuesday, May 27, as is your short biographical sketch.  Don't forget that you'll need a bibliography to accompany the biography!  You should format it using Chicago/Turabian style. A quick reference for the style can be found here.

Where do we go from here?

Now that the AP exam is over, the class will be shifting to two simultaneous activities.

The first is the traditional May Madness game, where each of you will take on the rolls of "great" leaders from world history and have a tournament to determine which was the "greatest."  The description of the project is linked up here, and details about the rounds are linked up here.  Much of the work for the tournament will be your homework and will be completed outside of class time. We will draw names for the tournament on Monday.

In class we will be working on a current events project.  The class will select an area of the world and an issue in that area.  The regions are aligned with those we've been looking at all year long, and the issues reflect the themes of AP World's curriculum.  After the region is identified, the class will generate a list of questions that need to be answered in order to be informed about the current issue the region is facing.  The class will then find answers to those questions.

Students will then be tasked with finding where the conversations about this issue are taking place.  Is it being discussed on Twitter? Facebook? Instagram? Newspaper comment boards? UN security council minutes? Students will then analyze the conversation to determine who the responsible players are; join the conversation, become a credible participant in the dialog, seek to present solutions/ways forward, and get feedback on their ideas.  We will flesh this out more as we go along.

For homework this weekend, visit each of the following links for each of the topics below, read the short articles about the issues, and come into class with a set of priorities about what you want to get involved with!

1) Boko Haram and the kidnapping of girls in Nigeria
2) Chinese aggression in the South China Sea
3) Russian aggression in Ukraine
4) Israeli/Palestinian peace prospects
5) Protest/unrest in Venezuela