Page 152 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 6
Carolyn Hart, Intern
Entering into my senior year education classes, I was excited, yet slightly apprehensive. When I was in elementary school, my social studies classes all essentially were the same: A teacher would pull down her map at the front of the class, and instruct us to open to page 126 in our textbooks and begin reading. After the reading came the four to six questions in the back, your answers to which would give the teacher confidence that you may have actu- ally learned something. But my class and I all knew the same thing: we would most likely forget the answers to those questions about ten minutes after turning them in.
So, here I was, an eager, yet skeptical aspiring teacher, waiting to hear some- thing that would appease my concerns about teaching such a “dry” subject (which I thought it was, at this point). What I was greeted
with was my professor’s claim that “social studies is everywhere,”
and this textbook would reveal this. Throughout the semester,
I began to discover things: for example, a heavy reliance on a
social studies textbook is not only boring, it’s also fairly irrespon-
sible. In a subject so rooted in daily life as well as discovery,
limiting it to the confines of a few textbook pages does the subject
a complete disservice.
Geography and anthropology—the study of places and the study of human life—are so obviously intertwined into essentially everything we do. Living our daily lives, discovering new cultures, and experiencing different parts of the world are exactly what geography and anthropology are about—not memorizing facts in
HOW CAN I TEACH GEOGRAPHY AND ANTHROPOLOGY POWERFULLY?
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© Keith Knighton
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