Chris Ammer- Secret #3

First off I'de like to say that I enjoy the wierd rhyming poem things that are at the beginning of each chapter. They're kind of lame but I enjoy them. They all most sum up the whole chapter in a short rhyming paragraph.

Now onto the gooey informational center of the chapter. This chapter is spot on. Keeping kids engaged and actively involved in class is HUGE. I teach history and more often than I'de like to admit I have some students say that its their least favorite subject and its pointless. I would always counter that and say history is the most important subject because its the reason you have everything you do, its even the reason you're here today.

Trying to combat students lack of intrest in history is difficult. One way I do this is by trying to keep my lectures enthusiastic, which is quite simple for me because I love history, and two keeping students involved. I was teaching my 9th graders about the gilded age in American history, the 19th century. I was talking about how the industrial was a huge turning point in American history when students started asking questions about technology. This is that point in catroons when the light blub went off over my head. I thought to myself "these kids have a huge technology gap, they have no idea when things were invented." So that night I immidiately began planning an activity for the students that involved no doubt their favoirte peice of technology, the cell phone.

The next day I started off with a short lecture on how I had realized their technology gap. We discussed things like how television or radio did not exist yet, and how if you wanted to talk to somone you couldent just text them you had to write a letter, which cost a decent ammount of money at the time. Then we looked at some letters written from the time and discussed things that were talked about in the letters. Students were suprised that it was not day to day stuff like "i had tacos for lunch." People wrote about major life events because writing letters was a big deal, we saw things like job loss or people gaining wealth, or even deaths in the family. Then I had students pretend they were American citizens of the time and had them write their own letters to made up people discussing their pretend new life. All in all I think the lesson went wonderfully. The students were engaged and whether they wanted to admit it or not they learned quite a bit about technology of the time and were quite curious about the subject. I like to think that they are now a little more thankful for what they have, but I wont get my hopes up.

This is the most important secret that we have read so far. Rules and classroom management are important but if your students are actively involved and interested in what you have to say then they wont even realize that they are in school learning. They will be so involved and interested that those 45mins will fly by so fast they wont have the chance to even think about misbehaving