Category: Teaching Reflections
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A Year in Middle School
This past year of teaching has been a wild ride. At the end of the 2017-2018 school year, I resigned from my position at UT Elementary and took on a new role teaching eighth grade US history. The school year that ensued was hard in a lot of different ways. Middle schoolers are wonderful and…
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Historical Thinking in the 5th Grade
What do our historical knowledge do our fifth graders bring into the classroom with them? How do our kids make sense of the worlds around them? These are the questions we set out to answer last week in our historical thinking unit. Part I: Timelines At the beginning of the year, I recreated our…
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Challenging the Dominant Narrative
This year in Ms. Green’s class, we’ve started a conversation that will last the whole year. We’re talking about what it means to challenge the dominant narrative. The dominant narrative is the story that’s usually told, and that most people are comfortable hearing. In a US history context, this dominant narrative says that rich white…
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Slavery, Apologies, and Stumbling Through the 5th Grade
I love teaching social studies. I love it because I believe that it really, truly, matters. I love teaching it, but there is so much of it that I just don’t know. In my first year of teaching, with each unit I struggle to just stay one step ahead of my students and the curriculum…
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The Conversations Adults are Afraid to Have
Two and a half weeks into fifth grade, and we have already defined some pretty hard words. Some of the first words added to our dictionaries were institutionalized racism and privilege. These are words that I’m not even really comfortable defining. Honestly, most people aren’t. Last week we watched a Flocabulary video about the week’s current events,…
Ms. Green's Class 