TE 865 - Adventures in Social Studies Teaching

All of my life, even as a small child, I have been no stranger to controversial topics.  In the third grade, after having received the book “Where Do Babies Come From” with explicit instructions NOT to take it to school. I couldn’t wait to sneak it to school. Because, I figured, this is good information that everyone needs to know.  Of course, I was caught and my mother was told.  I couldn’t understand what the problem was.  It was the truth, wasn’t it?  What is the problem with distilling factual information.   Throughout my teaching career then, I have constantly gotten into trouble discussing “controversial” topics. One of the first came from debunking the myth during student teaching about Catherine the Great dying from having sex with a horse.  I was reprimanded from even bringing it up because I was in the South and in the South, they believed that Social studies was wholesome and should be d...

In my Spring classes at MSU, I have had to do more self-reflective work on my teaching and personal learning style than at any other time in my career.  So it was with surprise that I read the McNiff article on using narrative as a way to reflect on your personal educational theory since I feel that is all I have been doing this semester.  It has been a very personal semester and for some reason, that has made this journey seem “easier” to handle than previous semesters that were more theory heavy.  The reading is definitely important, but for me, I am not a spring chicken anymore and since I am black, there is a bit of redundancy in learning about how to properly engage African American boys and women.  Sit down, talk to them, learn their interests, teach to them.  It’s not hard.  We aren’t some foreign species, but that’s the way it seems that many literacy academics treat “urban youths.” It’s interesting how much of my upbringing is reflected in...

I talk about my mother a lot and rightly I should, she is an enormous influence on and in my life.  As a young girl, she moonlit at Montgomery Wards and got insane deals on electronics, since she worked in the TV and Stereo department.  So, of course we had Atari and Colecovision and the like, and I was an early whiz at Pitfall and most definitely, Pong.   But, in the mid 1980’s, she came home with this really, really weird video game system. I mean I LOVED my Atari and Colecovision and the like, but this was different.  This was a computer.  It was a Commodore 64. My life has never been the same.  One of my favorite games of ALL TIME is Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego ?  My all-time favorite.  I didn’t need to watch the show, I had it on my C64 and could play it to my heart’s content and I learned SO much about the World from my 1987 World Book Almanac, including how to use an almanac.   That’s not all. I made Donald quack a...