World History class - where are the books??
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Anonymous
| DC is a high school freshman taking World History, and just spent 6 hours this weekend doing a writing assignment that consisted entirely of answering questions about history by going to a list of about 4 websites to find the answers, or using some obvious cut and pastes from such sites that the teacher put on Schoology. The websites were totally random and not great sources for this particular information. If the point was to dig through hundreds of web pages for factoids, then I guess the teacher succeeded, but this certainly isn't the best way to learn about history. It seems that every assignment is like this all year. There is no textbook - the teacher just posts a bunch of general websites or copied texts from websites and has the kids dig for information on the internet. I studied history in grad school and I'm horrified because searching websites for facts has nothing to do with the actual field of history. Some of the sites the teacher provided aren't even very good or well-written. Is the whole county like this? Are there no actual history books, or history articles, or any kind of real history text written by historians? |
Anonymous
Yes, that is how it is. We have rented textbooks from Amazon. |
Anonymous
Please share the names of the textbooks. |
Anonymous
NP. Used textbooks are so cheap ($20ish) that we just buy them on Amazon. |
Anonymous
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This is by design.
It is a horrible way to teach as many websites are completely inaccurate or politically biased. |
Anonymous
| Why? Teachers are told that only weak teachers use textbooks. They are a crutch is what I was told by many admins. Meanwhile, I have to pay tuition to my son’s private school in order for him to use assigned textbooks. |
Anonymous
| We have textbooks in our World 2 class, but we don't use them exclusively. Gone are the days of reading 5 pages in class and then answering questions. We use a combination of the textbook, various websites, Edpuzzle, videos, etc. in our classes. |
Anonymous
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Teachers don’t randomly select websites.
What websites would you have selected? As long as students meet the standards of learning for History class the teacher’s job is done. https://www.doe.virginia.gov/teaching-learning-assessment/k-12-standards-instruction/history-and-social-science/standards-of-learning |
Anonymous
| For AP WH, we have a textbook (uploaded as a PDF by chapters, but we bought it used per the BTSN recommendation). It was about $15 on Ebay, used (looks new). |
Anonymous
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When I was in high school, my American History teacher assigned chapters to read. But, more important SHE gave the LECTURES on the history and added interesting anecdotes, etc.
Not only that, she began the year by putting detailed outlines of her lectures on the overhead projector. As the year progressed, the outlines became sketchier--in other words, she taught us how to listen and take notes by illustrating notes. By the end of the year, her outline on the projector was just main events. We were to take notes on what she told us. She was a wonderful teacher. Not only did she teach us history, she prepared us for college lectures of any subject. We also were required to do a lengthy term paper with footnotes. Mine required lots of research at the library as the subject was more contemporary. It was a demanding class, but turned out to be quite valuable. |
Anonymous
Teachers are pretty much banned from using textbooks. Welcome to FCPS! |
Anonymous
| My kid in AP world history came home with an enormous textbook. |
Anonymous
What textbook? |
Anonymous
We did that too for all of our kids. Sometimes ebay |
Anonymous
OP here. I'm a teacher too, so I understand the enormous pressure to believe the nonsense "pedagogy" that FCPS pushes down its teachers' throats. But if we allow ourselves to use critical thinking skills, we can see that reading 5 pages on the internet and answering questions is not any better than reading 5 written pages and then answering questions. At the very least, those written pages were coming from reliable, peer-reviewed sources and not some anonymous content creator on the internet. Also, it's a myth that back when we had textbooks all teachers did was read aloud from the book and do fill-in-the-blank. Only the bad teachers did that, and bad teachers are not any better without books than they were with them. Most of us used the book as a resource and did a variety of other activities in class. The use of random internet resources is just a substitution of a lot of cheap, low-quality materials in place of reliable, informative text. |