According to Dynneson, history is considered to be a humanities

because it is open to interpretation. (51) This is true because I have been

given different interpretations of why the Civil War took place. For example, I
remember that in high school one of my history teachers told the class that
the Civil War took place because Abraham Lincoln wanted to free the slaves.
In one of my early history classes at Sac State my professor told the class
that Lincoln started the war because it was a political matter because the
south was getting in the way of the norths government and they had to stop
them. However, last semester in my History of Economics class the
professor took a more economical approach and told the class that the north
wanted to stop the south from profiting from the cotton industry so that the
south could really on them for supplies and money; he specifically said that
slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War. Dynneson also emphasizes that
the process of history consists of three important operations in which
information is collected, organized, and interpreted (52). I totally agree
because as a history teacher you should do all three of these operations if
you want your lecture to be as accurate as possible. If a teacher was to just
go online and download the first PowerPoint or lecture notes that were given
to him/her than there would no point in teaching history. What if a student
rebuttals what the downloaded PowerPoint or lecture says? How is a teacher
going to respond if he/she did not take the time to collect multiple sources,
organize them, and interpreted her own understanding of what she found?
This has happened a couple of times in some of my courses, not just in my
history courses, where the teacher or professor presents a PowerPoint to the
class that was downloaded from an academic website and when a student
rebuttals the information given the teachers looks supervised and confused
(unprepared). In both of the PowerPoints, for example, that I made for two of
my lesson plans I had to analyze what type of information I was going to
place in each slide and where was I going to get all this information from. I
went online and I downloaded around seven or eight different PowerPoints
and a couple of videos in order to get a bases of what each PowerPoint was
going to have. What I noticed is that some of the downloaded PowerPoints
had two much information while others lacked in information, so what I did
was I took information from each of the downloaded PowerPoints that I felt
where the best fit for my own PowerPoints and constructed what I felt was
the best slides for my classroom. Another thing that I hate is when teachers
just read off of their or borrowed PowerPoint slides to the class, this shows
me that the teacher is lazy and that she does not care to teach. I feel that
slides are there to help students outline their notes and not teachers;
teachers should know the information without looking at the notes. Following
this Dynneson also argues that Many [historians, in recent years,] tended to
move beyond political and economic history to include issues and events

such as everyday life and the roots of contemporary problems such as in

the study of religion, education, and social reform (53). I remember that
most of my teachers have done this and maybe it is not intentional of them,
but I feel that all of these social subjects are part of history and without them
there is no history. I believe that in each of my lesson plans and PowerPoints I
have or will incorporate social subjects like religion, education, and social
reform. Another aspect that has changed in history that the book mentions is
the use of technology specifically with computers. I remember that
throughout my elementary years and part of middle school years my
teachers did not accept their students to use the computers to get
information for a project, rather he/she wanted their students to get all of the
information through books from the school or neighborhood library. Another
important factor that the book mentions is the use of primary and secondary
sources as a historian. I agree and I am implementing this into my lesson
plan as part of a homework assignment. I feel that the earlier a student
knows the difference between a primary and secondary source the easier
their transitions to college history course is going to be. I, for example, was
not introduced to primary and secondary sources until my college yeas which
made it really difficult for me to distinguish one from the other. (55) The book
also mentions that history is not just about past events, but about human
character that has been tested by the trials of life. Schlesinger (1992)
argues that values lessons may help students on moral and ethical grounds
when caught in a dilemma (55). This is true because if history has taught us
anything is that human characteristics change and evolve with time, and
what at one point we saw as right, like women being taught that they should
only thrive to be good housewives and mothers, we are now taking a
different approach. The book also mentions that world history lacks
popularity in secondary schools. I felt the same way when I was in secondary
school and because of this is I decided that I wanted to do my unit plan on
the renaissance because I want my students to experience more than just
American history. I think that this should change and secondary schools
should push to add in more world history into their curriculums and teachers
should make the effort to incorporate different cultures, events, and religions
into their unit plans. When reading the history instruction section of the book
I came to realize that I might change my dynamics of how I am going to
teach and set up my exams. According the book, students complain that
their history teachersuse lecture and recitation instructional methods that
require students to listen and to recall an endless series of names, dates,
and events (59). What I think I am going to do is maybe change my lesson
plan to add more group activities and minimize the information on the
PowerPoints. I might also focus more on certain events or individuals of this
time so that they are not overwhelmed with too much information. I might

also incorporate some lesson plans together and give my students the most
important facts (dont make a lesson plan for Elizabeth I, but incorporate this
lesson into the King Henry VIII lesson plan. And lastly the book also mentions
that geography is also an ever changing subject, especially because of global
warming which is changing the landscape of the world such ass land
exposer, ocean rising, water temperature changing, etc. I also feel that
without emphasizing geography into a history lesson than you are not
teaching history correctly. Geography is a big component in my unit plan
because if I dont show them in what area of the world renaissance was more
prevalent and why it happened in this area than the students will not
understand why the California standers has incorporate it into the schools
curriculum.