“…the social world is always a part of the classroom, that classrooms themselves are social spaces and essentially microcosms of the world outside their wall. All learning, then, happens in a social context because we are learning with and from one another.” –Joshua R. Eyler, How Humans Learn, p. 66 In the above passage, Eyler…
At the beginning of each semester, I, like most others, spend some time evaluating my syllabus to assess if it meets the needs of my students. While over the years I have placed many assignments and activities on the chopping block, I continue to schedule a midterm and a final exam. When I first became…
Our students need to hear a historical perspective on the eighties, nineties, and aughts in order to understand the present moment in America.
*Author note: these are my prepared remarks (with some slight modifications) for a roundtable at the 2019 American Historical Association Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois entitled “The American Revolution in World History: A Teaching Roundtable.” For the last eighteen months I have worked as a social studies teacher in Highlands County, Florida as I researched…
During a recent session on the Dawes Act a student asked me how long American Indians had been in North America. I gave her the most honest answer I could. “Always.” I could tell this wasn’t what she was looking for. She was hoping instead for a longer diatribe speaking to Beringia, coastal routes, and…
[Originally posted on Process History on September 5, 2017.] Near the end of the spring semester, my department asked me to teach a summer session of U.S. History since 1865. I had a short time to think about what I’d teach and how I’d teach it. For me, it was important for students to “do” the work…
Historians of the American Civil War have authored an impressive and increasingly complex history of the common soldiers who waged the conflict. Explaining soldiers’ motivations to enlist, charting a steadfast commitment to their respective national causes, unfolding their multifaceted views on race and emancipation, and placing citizen-volunteers within their mid-nineteenth-century contexts, the rich scholarship on…
Derek Attig’s “Tips for Making the Most Out of Conferences” got me to thinking about what advice I would give to a humanities student or others on this topic. So, today, I want to briefly share some of the things I have learned over the last fifteen years about conferencing, and more importantly networking. This…
No, really.
“Ms. Cotton, writing my paper was actually interesting,” my student said, with an air of incredulity, as she entered my classroom for our final meeting of the term. “Well, that was the whole point,” was my reply. Students have become accustomed to viewing school as a “grind,” days of sitting in class, taking notes, cramming…
I can still recall sitting in an Honors World Literature I course as a sophomore in 2005. The course, which covered most literature from the ancient world until the 17th century, was one of my favorites in college. I loved the course partially because my professor seemed to genuinely care about the material being discussed…
As we are all aware, the current news cycle is exhausting. Each day we are showered with stories about corruption, dishonesty, violence, sexism, natural disasters, and racism among many others. Social media provides a medium for individuals to respond immediately to any news story in real time. At first glance, it appears that the internet…
Preparing students for exams used to stress me out. I used to do what many novice teachers do: I had students come up with a list of questions they could ask the day before the exam. This was an unsatisfactory experience, to say the least. These exam prep sessions were exhausting. I answered a ton…
The timing of the Civil War is suspect. While we might trace the conflict to April 12, 1861 and the shots fired at Fort Sumter, one could argue that it began in Kansas four years earlier. Still others would argue that the civil conflict was raging in 1850, 1820, or in 1787 as delegates wrestled…
Looming Civil War explores how nineteenth-century Americans imagined the future, particularly the sectional crisis and Civil War, to understand how collective forecasts formed, spread, and made history. After researching a host of sources, including political speeches, economic predictions, sermons, literature, military records, music, diaries, private correspondence, and artifacts, I learned that two, competing temporalities framed…
