Final Grades

I’ve kept a list. I’m checking it twice. And now I’m trying to decide who’s been naughty (you D- students know who you are) and nice (the line between A- and A seems so razor thin at times). As I grade the final exams and the website creations, I’ve been struck by two points. I plan on attacking each point next semester as I turn from the second half of the US history survey to the first. (so look out in late December for posts about teaching the first half of US history).

1. Facts matter. I know history isn’t about names and dates – that it’s all about how we interpret and make meaning of the past. But in history, facts matter. My students need to know when Martin Luther King Jr. lived. They need to know when the “gay manifesto” was designed, and they need to know what Reagan actually did during the 1980s as president. I have the damnedest time assessing that material, though. The two exams were flops (student grades were pretty awful even though most of the questions were based on the titles from Major Problems documents, and my students knew this). So for next semester, I know I need to find new ways to assess fact acquisition and knowledge.
2. Pop culture rules. My students created a series of wonderful blogs connecting historical events, figures, ideas, documents, and concepts to contemporary culture and politics. Some of them linked to the film Inception; some to the television shows Glee or Modern Family. Some found episodes of Family Guy and connected them to various strands of US history from our class. In the realm of politics, gay rights was the #1 interest, but over and over, they fixated on popular culture. This suggests to me that popular culture is the new lingua franca (rather than citizenship or democracy). I feel nervous about how to use that information for the first half of the survey in the spring … but we’ll just have to see what we can do. Perhaps I’ll formulate lectures around pop culture myths about the American past (colonization, the Revolution, slavery, the Civil War, etc). Maybe each class will begin with a few clips from modern shows or movies and then get into the realities and changes of the time.

We’ll be off the blog world for probably a week or two and then figure out how to assemble a teaching team for the spring. If you are interested in blogging through your courses here – especially if you are using Hist and/or Major Problems, shoot me an email. It’s been a great term.

Thanks to Kevin, to my amazing students, and to you technology. You made it possible for us to “interface.”