Tie it together

I have never been one to enjoy history. I spent most of my time in US History in high school wondering if Mr. Gibbs, the basketball coach who taught the class and who was also nearly 7 feet tall, would hit his head every time he went through the door to the hallway or if his vision 'from up there' could see our papers from afar a little better than Miss Howard, who was barely 5 feet--in all directions.

My interest was piqued a little when I enrolled in the two survey semesters of American Lit at Indiana State, using the Norton Anthology, the same one (but an earlier edition) as we are using today. The correlation really hit home, however, when my teaching assignment changed to ALL junior English classes. Mike Harter and I decided that since all of the juniors were in his classroom for US History and in mine for American Lit, we could create some interesting team teaching opportunities. Since the small school scheduling didn't allow us to actually team teach at the same time, we had to use different strategies.

When Mike taught his unit about the Civil War, the juniors read The Red Badge of Courage. The Transcendentalism unit butted up against that same time period as it was discussed in Mike's classes. I remember well a group of students groaning as I talking about Walden Pond and the Transcendentalists, telling me that they had already heard all of this in Mr. Harter's class. My response? "Well, now you get to read what those people were writing and you will know where they were coming from while they were doing it!" Smile.

Mike and I even created a research paper which focused on an aspect of US history. He taught the content portion of the paper; I taught the research, documentation, paragraph structure, outlining. When the papers were submitted, he graded the content; I graded the composition. One assignment, two grades.

I know that larger schools would actually assign two teachers to a class such as this, but since we were too small, we had to 'make do' with what we had. We often talked about the fun projects we could undertake if we would actually put our two classes together to make a Humanities class, or a History through Literature or Literature through History course. What fun that would be!

The point is---a good lesson to learn is that most writing, whether poetry, short stories, novels, or essays, reflects the time period in which it was written. That is why the Regionalism, Realism, Naturalism units are among my very favorites. I like the 'slice of life' that the selections represent.

My husband and I have two dream vacations. One is a trip on the East Coast where he can explore the battle fields and I can visit the Whaling Museum, Walden Pond, Edgar Allan Poe's gravesite, and Emerson's home. We have already planned a trip this summer to Virginia and Washington DC with my daughter (an English teacher/librarian) and son-in-law (a history teacher)with a stop at Gettysburg on the way. I see one dream vacation in the future!