Background
I teach eighth grade US/NC History in a suburban sixth through eighth grade middle school in Cornelius, outside Charlotte, North Carolina. The school is considered economically-advantaged in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. However, the recent recession has had an impact on the school. Our free and reduced breakfast/lunch percentages have increased from the mid-teens to the mid-twenties. I have about 130 students this year and they are divided into four classes. Due to the above grade level and at grade level distinctions given to Language Arts Honors (at least one year above grade level in reading), Language Arts Standard (below or at grade level), Math 8 (at grade level), and Algebra I (high school course), my students will also mostly be leveled (not intentionally). I will have two classes of above-grade level in both Math and Language Arts), one class of mixed levels (above-grade level in one of the core classes), and one class that is on or slightly below grade level. My on-grade level class may have students who actually read two to three years below grade level. Scattered throughout these four classes are Exceptional Education (EC) students who may have processing disabilities in Math and Reading. I will also have eight EC Resource children. These students are classified as EMH (Educable Mentally Handicapped), with IQ's of 50 to 75. These students are main-streamed with their regular classmates for Science, History, and electives. Each teaching team consists of four teachers. There are five class periods a day, consisting of about 75 minutes per class. We rotate classes each nine week quarter. So, our first-block class becomes our second-block second quarter, and our fifth-block rotates to first. It allows us to see each student in a different light and to take advantage of those times when a child may be a "sleeper" in first block but come to life in second block!
I have worked with my Language Arts teacher for six years. We are not always on the same team, but have always collaborated about what we do in the classroom, how we teach it, and what new innovative methods we can come up with to deliver our lessons. We were brought back together on the same team of four teachers last year. She knows that I am passionate about the reading process in my history classroom. I count on her to teach the writing process needed in eighth grade before I get into that area. If I am doing an argumentative essay, Lynn sets it up in her class before I actually get into it in mine. We plan our quarters together. By that I mean, for example, that if she is doing poetry,I can start searching for a few poems that I can share with my students from the history time period we are currently studying. One of my fellows shared a poem with our class called, "Sure You Can Ask Me A Personal Question," by Diane Burns. I want to bring this poem into the first week of school when I do a small unit on stereotypes and prejudice before beginning the unit of Native Americans. Lynn and I will collaborate on how I might want to introduce the poem and unit. Our collaboration benefits us all, I believe, in communicating a well-rounded lesson.
My students will engage in three novel units in my class throughout the school year. I use My Brother Sam is Dead during the first quarter, all students read this book. My resource students will have access to an audio copy through their resource Language Arts class. My third unit involves a selection of sixteen WWII titles, all of which are non-fiction but one. Titles range from Summer of My German Soldier, Night, Code Talkers, to Rape of Nanjing and The Pianist. I like the idea giving students options because it makes them responsible for what they choose. By that I mean the book fits their interest level. Students also choose their projects, which vary among multimedia, art, music, and writing opportunities. I believe that if they have to do an assignment of this depth, they should have a choice as to the final product that they, as students, design. I offer about 30 possible final products, but I am always open to new creations and suggestions. In fact, that is how my product list grows from year to year. If students approach me with unique ideas I rarely turn them down because I am curious to see what they will produce. If it is successful, I can include it in next year's list of choices.
How do I arrive at who does what? Students take an interest survey at the beginning of the year in my class. We tally the results together and discuss what this means for them down the road in my class. This certainly does not mean that they are pigeon-holed to do an artsy project just because they rate highly in the visual area; their options are still open. Choice is the key focus when you want students to do a quality project.
A couple of years ago one of my students asked me if I had read The Land. I was familiar with the author, Mildred Taylor, but was not aware of this book. I had read her Newbery Award-winning Depression-era Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976) and the sequel, Let the Circle Be Unbroken(1981). We were studying Reconstruction and he kept asking me if I had gotten a copy and read it yet. Not satisfied with a week of me telling him I had not had a chance, he gave me his copy and told me I had a week to read it! He was joking, but he knew I would take him up on the challenge. I loved it! It is a prequel to Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. The three books (there are actually seven in the whole series) are based on stories from Mildred Taylor's own family. These were stories she gathered from family get-togethers during her life. In the Author's Note in The Land, she explains that the main character, Paul Edward Logan, is actually based on her bi-racial great-grandfather. Dominic, the young man who brought me the book, was also bi-racial. He identified with Paul Edward's journey growing up in a complicated world after the Civil War. If he was this excited about the book, surely I could find other students that would have the same experience. Thus, I created the mid-winter novel study.
Having developed the spring unit on World War Two with the idea of choice in mind, I wanted to develop a similarly based unit on post-Civil War America. This would need to encompass the 1870-1900 time period in US History. So much was happening in the nation and I had to focus on theme more than on the overwhelming content of this time period. We have Reconstruction, a time period of rebuilding, slow simmering racial bigotry, new amendments that would be responses tohatred and the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement. The era of rebuilding meant Westward movement, a time of the transcontinental railroad blasting full steam ahead; a second wave of the Industrial Revolution just in time for the millions of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe to become workers in factories producing goods that would advance America to first place as an industrial giant; and the Homestead Act of 1862. Who could resist 160 acres of land for "free"? All you had to do is sit on it for five years and it was yours! But what was free came at a high cost, not just for the immigrants but also for the original owners - Native Americans. Before the immigrants from Bohemia or Norway or Poland could carve out a hovel to live in, the Native Americans had to be corralled, removed to reservations, and assimilated. The "free" land often turned out to be a nightmare for the newly-arrived families from Europe. Wickedly unpredictable weather, insufficient water supplies, lack of lumber for houses, unbearable loneliness, railroad monopolies manipulating land access and prices for goods sent back to the East, ill health, and lack of success in the promised land killed many and drove an equal number back to bigger cities. But many did stick it out and survived. These immigrants would help feed the world in the upcoming century. Their children and grandchildren would pay the price for poor farming techniques and appalling drought conditions a generation or two later with the Dust Bowl and the Depression. Native Americans were subject to the idea of Phillip H. Sheridan's "the only good Indian is a dead Indian" philosophy subscribed to by the US Cavalry and government, greedy railroad companies, and voracious new immigrants. Geronimo's last reported words to his nephew, "I should have never surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive," echoed the sentiments of three hundred thousand plus Native Americans as they watched their lands being possessed by land hungry immigrants from the cities and Europe.
The books I will utilize in this mid-winter unit will consist of the following choices:
- The Land by Mildred Taylor, 2001. Aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction for an African American family 1870-1890.
- My Antonia by Willa Cather, 1918, revised 1926. Immigrant survival and women's rights in the 1880's-1910.
- Geronimo by Joseph Bruchac, 2006. Geronimo's life as told to his adopted grandson, Willie, in 1908.
- The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin. A non-fiction book on the 1888 blizzard revealing that the free homestead came with a brutal price.
- Little Woman Warrior Who Came Home: a story of the Navajo Long Walk by Evangeline Parsons-Yazzie and illustrated by Irving Toddy, 2005. Written in English and Navajo, this is an account of the deportation of the Navajo 1864-66. This title will be for my EC Resource students.
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