TE 910B: Social Studies
Fall 2013
Instructor: Leif Fearn
lfearn@mail.sdsu.edu
Greetings, everyone. The overriding objective of these several sessions
about the social studies is that everyone, including the instructor, will
have a good time engaged in and with the social studies. Depending on
the group with which I have engaged over the years, TE 910B students
self-report that they find history boring, economics undecipherable,
native peoples culturally monolithic, geography merely locational, the
news biased, the United States Constitution a preamble, the Declaration
of Independence a lie, biographies mere hero worship, and a sentence a
complete thought-subject/predicate-big letter-dot.
We have the several sessions allotted for 910B to consider that what’s
boring about history is history teachers, economics is largely a waste of
students’ and teachers’ time, religion is the species’ primary cultural
marker, personal finance is among the most important take-aways from
school, there are lots of native peoples who all have names and live
mostly like the rest of us, geography is only partly the ability to find
Cleveland on a map, the news is biased but that’s not the point, the
United States Constitution is the nation’s scripture, the Declaration of
independence is easily the best prose about liberty ever written,
biographical study is about why, and writing a sentence has nothing at
all to do with its parts or whatever “complete” means. (And that
sentence is not run-on.)
Big objective. I will do my best, but we are in this together, so we all
have to work at it. That is where the good times come in because if we
manage to turn at least a third of us from the first paragraph into
residents of the second, we may be able to save the country. Do the
arithmetic. A third of us are 7. If those 7 teach the social studies
properly for ten years at 25 students per year, we affect the citizenship
by a factor of 1750 people, who consume the news intelligently and vote
knowledgeably because they know how. If half of those people have
two children, and they teach their children what they know about being
intelligent and responsible citizens, there are 1750 more responsible
and knowledgeable voters, which is 3500. Not so many, perhaps, but
the number goes two ways, which means 3500 smart and responsible
voters and minus 3500 of the ones who’ve been voting in favor of the
rhetorical civil war that is now three generations old.
Okay, maybe all that is pretty silly, but I believe it, I’m the instructor,
and that is the basis on which this class rests. If I didn’t believe it, I’d be
off by myself reading good books for three more hours each week, or
writing for three more hours each week, or exercising my gym-rat
compulsion, or just sitting alone on the deck of a river cruise boat on the
Seine with my lovely bride of nineteen years. I’m here because I owe it
to the profession that glues the country together.
Carl Rogers used to say that what college professors ought to do is write
what they believe so their students can read it and not be bored by their
professors saying it again, over and over. So I’ve written it. Do with it as
you wish. I do not hold anyone responsible for thinking or believing as I
do, but I do hold everyone responsible for thinking and believing. That
is where we begin.
Topical Schedule
Wednesday
August 26:
Introductions, the class, the book, the
authors, the introduction (RWS),
responsibilities and other stuff that
have to be dealt with first
Wednesday September 2:
Biographical Studies
Wednesday September 9:
Biographical Studies
CAT
Wednesday September 16:
History
Wednesday September 23: History
Wednesday September 30: World Religions
Wednesday October
7:
CAT, Biographical Studies, History, and
World Religions
Wednesday October
14:
The United States Constitution
Wednesday October
21:
The Declaration of Independence
Wednesday October
28:
Personal Finance
Wednesday November 4:
Geography
CAT, the draft
Wednesday November 11:
Native Peoples
CAT, honing the draft
Wednesday November 18:
CAT, getting close
Writing Literacy
Wednesday November 25:
Holiday
Wednesday December 2:
Media Literacy
CAT due
Wednesday December
Writing Literacy
9:
Responsibilities
1. There are ten “features” in our social studies journey (nine social
studies and one literacy). After reading each of those features, or after
the class session about each of those features, every member of the class
is to email me (lfearn@mail.sdsu.edu) with responses to one or more of
the following questions: What do/did I notice? Of what does it remind
me? How does it make me feel? Those are Reader Response questions.
We will come back to them with some regularity. It starts with
Biographical Studies.
2. Everyone in the class is familiar with high-stakes testing. There is a
high-stakes test in TE 910B, as well as in first grades all over the
country. The high-stakes test in TE 910B is just like the high-stakes
tests in the third and fifth grades – perform well and all is well; perform
less-then-well, and you don’t get a teaching credential, or to move on.
Your job in the third grade is to prepare eight-year olds so well that
everyone passes. My job in TE 910B is to prepare everyone so well that
everyone passes. Our high-stakes test is called the CAT. It is due on or
before (preferably the latter) December 2. There are five sessions in the
schedule regarding the CAT. You will be prepared to perform well.
3. Participants in TE 910 have to attend to get what is in the class. Not
here, that part is over. There are no notes to acquire in order to catch
up. If there were, I’d merely put the notes on a website, and you could
read the notes and the book, have a one-day workshop on the CAT, and
do something else with three hours every Wednesday afternoon. We
have all taken classes like that. This isn’t one of them. Be here.
4. This is a class for which the grading system from fourth grade
applies. In my 910B, people have to be in class, they have to be engaged
in the social studies, they have to communicate with me about the social
studies, and they have to do the CAT.
5. Writing, ah, writing. There are two parts to our attention to writing.
I pay attention to what and how you write. I don’t grade it, for reasons
we should have understood about writing in the third grade. But I do
notice, and I do offer feedback. That is how people learn to write
better – write, share, get feedback, and rewrite. That is one part. The
other part concerns teaching fourth and seventh graders to write. If
their teachers do not understand what teaching writing means (as
opposed to recommending, encouraging, promoting, reinforcing, and
conducting “mini” lessons in some sort of workshop, and putting up a
bulletin board with Friday’s writing on it), the students will continue
practicing how to write the way they write, which isn’t very good. This
is a social studies class, not a writing class, but I will get the teaching
part of writing started.