Personally, I love good novels. Who doesn’t? They do, however, present all kinds of problems as teaching devices–authorial perspective, literary affectations, introducing themes you haven’t prepared students for. But when a novel hits, it usually hits hard. I had a banner experience this past week with Harold Frederic’s classic book The Damnation of Theron Ware,…

Just finished a great “webinar” seminar with Ed about blogging and teaching, the take home point of which was this: I’ve got so much to learn! (Thanks Cengage Learning for hosting.) There were 40-50 folks in the webinar and it quickly became a rich forum for exchanging ideas about how to use blogging in the…

I had a teacher once who always tried to tie the theme of that day’s lecture to a current event, hoping it would serve as a hook for us, her students. Sometimes it worked (David Koresh is a memorable example as an entry into the use of violence as a proper or improper form of…

Who here has had any luck teaching students to write? Come on, be honest. And if so, please tell me how you’ve done it. Every semester I start with the best intentions. I’ll go over writing for several days. I’ll let them do re-writes. I’ll painstakingly edit their papers. Every semester the numbers get me…

When I was in graduate school, I TAed for a class on the Civil War. The prof usefully told us that the class would have almost nothing to do with the battles or the military strategy of the war or the generals, and everything to do with the context, the politics, and the ramifications. A…

I sometimes refer to the Great Awakening as a time when my students really need to wake up. The honeymoon of days 1 and 2 is over and the class has started in earnest–we now have tests and papers to think about! Once you say that, Jonathan Edwards becomes more interesting. This is especially true…

“Where shall I begin?” asked the White Rabbit of the King in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop” was the King’s reply. When it comes to American history, where shall we begin? The answer I put forward in HIST, my textbook, was…

A few months ago, we had a vigorous debate on this blog about “uncoverage,” the method of teaching that doesn’t try to cover everything in the textbook but instead picks a few topics or event and dissects them deeply. The theory is that students won’t and don’t remember everything they are asked to understand in…

I begin every lecture with a song from the era we’re about to discuss. Sometimes the song has a story associated with it. “Solidarity Forever” has its moment, “Sweet Home Alabama” is a good reflection of the Southernization of American culture in the 1970s, “Born in the USA” gets at the bifurcated nature of American…