John Hope Franklin 1915 – 2009

I had the privilege of working with a group of teachers several years ago as part of a Teaching American History grant titled American Rights and Race Relations: The Legacy of Brown vs. Topeka. Together for three years, the group studied the century before the 1954 Supreme Court case, the actual case and the half-decade [...]

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Tip of the Week – Teaching Financial Literacy

The current issue of Social Education has a great article discussing how to teach kids about the current economic crisis and the need for effective financial literacy training. The author, C. Frederick Risinger, argues that we as social studies teachers believe that financial literacy is important but seldom actually teach it as part of our [...]

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Learning it just ’cause

It’s been a perfect storm of personal interactions, TED Talk videos, stuff I’m reading and odd memories over the last few days. And all of it is leading me back to concerns I have about how a lot of K-12 people do school and what the K-12 community values.
March and April is state assessment season [...]

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Cool free world history course

I first tried teaching world history back during my student teacher days to a bunch of overachieving college prep seniors. It didn’t really go that well. My content background was weak, my technique was poor and I didn’t have access to any real materials or resources.
I got better.
But it would have been so much easier [...]

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Nixon goodies

The web is providing so many cool things for historian teachers. Digitized photos, Google Earth, online lesson plans, WebQuests, primary documents, video clips, audio clips . . . it doesn’t stop.
I just ran across a handy site called Nixon Tapes. You can probably guess what digital resources are available there.
Nixon Tapes is the only website [...]

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