UAA History 590 ASDSA 11
Thomas Rushford
Jean Mitchell
Reflection Paper
The class was very interesting. It was hard at first for me to understand what you were conveying to us. I know it was because I teach third grade in a Title One school with a 54% bilingual. The bilingual part has 34 % Hmong population. I have a different academic language used with my colleagues at school. The language we use is relating to Standard Based Assessments and making yearly progress for Leave No Child Behind. We are constantly asked if we are getting the students at grade level. Social Studies and Science are not stressed at our school. Time is reallocated in reading, writing, and math. The stories I chose are from our reading series that I can teach History threw. That is the way I can teach History in the classroom.
The other issue is the experiences of the students in our school. Some have never left the Muldoon area. Some students have never been in a restaurant, not even McDonalds, seen a parking meter, nor been to a museum. We are able to write grants to go to the museum here in Anchorage. It is a challenge to teach them America’s place in history. With the use of books and computers in the classroom, students can be transported to other parts of the world and in a different time era. Pictures do paint a thousand words.
It was refreshing to think about American History through the eyes of Thomas Bender. It gave me a global sense of what happened in American History. It gave me a sense of the academic world that we sometimes forget when we are teaching primary students.
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