{"id":7727,"date":"2019-06-21T10:23:26","date_gmt":"2019-06-21T17:23:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/?p=7727"},"modified":"2025-08-18T13:11:00","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:11:00","slug":"prepping-adventures-the-big-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2019\/06\/prepping-adventures-the-big-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"Prepping adventures: the big questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

To the dismay of some of my colleagues, and the delight of others (and the total incomprehension of most), I am continually preparing the next class. So, even though it’s June and I’m teaching three classes that started last week, I am thinking seriously about Fall.<\/p>\n

\"\"Fall for us begins in August, so it’s not that<\/em> quirky. And next term, for the first time, I will have an intern. The SDICCA program<\/a> in San Diego County, in association with San Diego State University, matches Masters students with community college professors*. The intern will work closely with me the entire year, attending my classes and campus meetings, and learning from me as his mentor.<\/p>\n

This requires a certain meta approach from me as I design and teach my classes, particularly the on-site classes. This opportunity was one of the reasons I wanted to be a mentor. While my ego does not require a minion to learn things “my way” (on the contrary), I do require that things change up a bit to keep me on my toes. The necessity to explain why I do what I do, and to change things in response to someone else’s thinking, is a boon. Although I do change things in response to students all the time, the power relationship there is quite different than that between mentor\/intern, particularly as I intend to make clear I hope to learn as much from him as he does from me.<\/p>\n

\"\"But one thing I must “teach” is class discussion, my bugaboo<\/a>. I have only one class where I really do it, my early American history online. At the beginning of the week, I post a 5-minute video from a series that considers “both sides” of an issue, and ends with a question (for example, “Was the Constitution a democratic document?”). The first few days of the week, I allow students to respond with their ill-informed opinions, vent, argue, etc. Then mid-week I summarize their contributions and reframe them, asking new questions based on their input that nevertheless point them toward deeper, thematic issues that connect to the assigned documents. It works well for them, but requires a lot of work from me: it is very much instructor-guided.<\/p>\n

Although I have done this also in a classroom setting (using video clips from controversial issues in the news), I feel that these days some larger, philosophical issues should be considered. I do not want to simply increase polarized views by encouraging evidence-based arguments. My goal for teaching has always been to train a person see the news of the day and connect it to similar “news” from the past, to put today’s events into perspective. That’s what history is — context. THE context. It’s the way we know what the present might mean.<\/p>\n

When I didn’t know that my modern European History class would be cancelled last spring, I prepared a list of such questions, one per week. I wasn’t exactly sure what I would do with them, and I never got to find out. (Don’t get me started on how students are being told by equity-minded individuals to avoid European history, and how they are avoiding classes that require deep thought so they can more easily achieve “academic success”.)<\/p>\n

I tied each question to that week’s area of coverage:<\/p>\n