September has to be the busiest month of the year. New courses, committee meetings, student organizations, campus events, research, writing, conference prep. What did I leave out? For college faculty, the demands of the fall semester seem to pile up. Even the most dedicated teachers face the temptation to reduce course prep time in the…
“Since the beginning of time…” We’ve all read student papers that begin with this absurd opening. But I’m sympathetic. Writing is hard, and writing a good first sentence is particularly challenging. I wrote a post last year about teaching like we write, recognizing the importance of clear introductions and conclusions in all forms of communication,…
Let me just start by saying I don’t think I am a bad lecturer. Still, reading a recent post by Petra Clafin on the dangers of misguided Q & A during lessons gave me flashbacks. Clafin focuses on math classes in secondary education, but the pattern pops up while teaching history on the college level…
My relationship to the U.S. history survey is quite unique, at least in comparison to my colleagues. Most of my colleagues began their careers teaching the survey as grad student T.A.s, grading tests, leading discussion sections, perhaps giving a lecture or two. As teachers, they model their survey courses after the professors they assisted, copying…
Many unseasoned (and plenty of seasoned) teachers hate giving lectures. I never feared lectures because I have a background in third-person historical interpretation and this made the transition from talking to the public to teaching a lecture-style class easy for me. I’ve spent years developing methods to engage different kinds of audiences and it has…
I’m conducting a semester-long experiment with my upper-level American Revolution class this semester. I have had hot water and tea bags available all semester and we have talked repeatedly about tea as an example of British identity in the American colonies. I told them on the first day of class that I would put out…
More often than not, I encounter Hallie Q. Brown’s 1926 publication of Homespun Heroines and other Women of Distinction in the footnotes of the publications that I read on African American women’s history. In fact, I heavily cite this work in my ongoing dissertation likewise calling upon it as encyclopedic reference for details on the…
This semester I am teaching colonial American history for the first time. It’s a 300-level class, capped at 50 students, meeting twice a week. As I began planning my syllabus last year when I got the assignment, I was expecting it to be a lecture course. But then I saw my enrollment numbers: only twelve…
The fall semester started off with a bit of a bang last week when The Economist published a review of Edward Baptist’s new book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. The comments to the piece were wonderful (a rare occurrence) and many posters there and on Twitter mentioned…
I am very excited to be blogging with Teaching United States History and to become part of this vibrant and thoughtful community of teacher-researchers. I look forward to stimulating posts and conversations. I have decided to adapt one of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People for my approach to classes this year: Begin…
