1
The Common Room / Re: Teaching Family History in Schools
« on: Monday 27 March 06 09:20 BST (UK) »
Yes, I am very fortunate indeed to be teaching at a very well-off school, where parents are almost all professionals and in upper-income brackets, in traditional nuclear-type families with few irregularities (which in itself is an irregularity, I suppose!) I also didn't ask kids to indicate if their parents were divorced. They didn't need to show that their real parents were not the ones living with them. And if they chose to lie about their relatives (e.g. say that their step-parent is their real parent), there's no way I could really have known.
The curriculum requirements I was trying to fulfill were not accurate historical research, or how to do research and cite sources. Rather, the standards I had to fulfill state "students will relate literature to their life events" and "students will transcribe information from oral, written, and technological resources into various tables, charts, and other formats." Currently, the educational buzz-words are "cross-curricular" and "interdisciplinary integrated approaches." And so the family tree held its appeal for these reasons.
(True, I could have told students to write a paragraph on how they feel about their novel, to draw a timeline of the main events of the novel, or research the author's biography, but they've done all that before - by Grade 9, these are boring to them. So while I recognise there were alternate ways to fulfill these standards, I took the chance, and am pleased I did IN THIS circumstance.)
The curriculum requirements I was trying to fulfill were not accurate historical research, or how to do research and cite sources. Rather, the standards I had to fulfill state "students will relate literature to their life events" and "students will transcribe information from oral, written, and technological resources into various tables, charts, and other formats." Currently, the educational buzz-words are "cross-curricular" and "interdisciplinary integrated approaches." And so the family tree held its appeal for these reasons.
(True, I could have told students to write a paragraph on how they feel about their novel, to draw a timeline of the main events of the novel, or research the author's biography, but they've done all that before - by Grade 9, these are boring to them. So while I recognise there were alternate ways to fulfill these standards, I took the chance, and am pleased I did IN THIS circumstance.)