It's TIME

This time of year, the January-February stretch, is easily the busiest time of year for a wrestling coach that also teaches American History & World History. It's an up early and to bed late kind of time...Friday I let my team out a little early from practice and one of my wrestlers jokingly commented to me "Coach, did you know there is daylight during the winter?" And I replied, "I didn't think the sun came out between November & March." Two things have made my existence during this time of the year much easier: the recent purchase of an Asus Eee netbook that I can take into my wireless wrestling coaches office and also the introduction of my TIME Magazine project (described in my last blog post).

The use of the netbook, which I purchased Monday at a sale on Valentine's Day, in just a few short days has helped me bring home work (wrestling and school work) that otherwise I would leave at school and do either in the early morning or after practice. We enter our grades through the CIMS grading system which I can now do at home at great convenience to me and my marriage.

The best development of the past two weeks was my introduction of the TIME Magazine project. At first the students were a little leary and frankly I think they thought it was corny. But once they got started they started asking questions about the TIME format, about the content and about the meaning of terms they didn't quite understand. They also felt the crunch of a deadline. On the Friday is was due you could see the publishing day rush of adrenaline. In some cases, group members chose to not show up (high school students think that it is quite acceptable to take their liberty of personal days on a Friday, especially during first hour) leaving the rest of the group without a cover page or a feature article or "Verbatim Page". The question came up "Mr. Anderson can we just hand this in on Monday?" They pleaded, begged and put on their best puppy-dawg faces but the answer each time was simply..."No! Improvise, Adapt & Overcome!" Their individual and group responses to the time crunch and the deadline were great to watch. Some groups withered on the vine and handed-in work they probably weren't proud of and some groups excelled in the face of adversity.

In the end, some of the covers, stories and pages that were handed-in were phenomenal. Some of the magazines actually looked and felt like real TIME Magazines. The time period we were studying, "The Renaissance & Reformation", was a great topic for the first edition. Leonardo Da Vinci graced the cover of one magazine and his Vetruvian Man was featured on another. A beaked doctor from the time of the Black Plague (1300s) was eerily hand-drawn on another cover. Inside the editions were fantastically laid out quotes on the Verbatim page from the likes of Martin Luther, Baltasar Castilogne, Niccolo Machiavelli, Michelangelo & Jan VanEyck. The World Page featured such events as the arrival of the Black Death @ Marseilles, the posting of Luther's 95 Theses and the painting of the Sistine Chapel. The page back of each edition is home to advertisements of cultural items from that time period but with a modern marketing spin. Some advertisements hawked such items as the Gutenberg bible, the Printing Press, "The Last Supper" and others invited audiences to watch Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet" or to visit the Tower of Pisa. I was impressed.

What the TIME Magazine has done is that it has provided me with a system for class that I was searching for. The new state curriculum has presented an enormous task of addressing so much history and so many benchmarks in such a short amount of time. The system that the TIME project provides (informational powerpoint, class notes, reading the text, online research and then developing the TIME edition) is invaluable as it allows for the top levels of Bloom's taxonomy to be implemented (analysis, synthesis & evaluation).

Where do I go from here? We did a follow-up issue this week on the beginning of the Global Age (Prince Henry the Navigator, the Triangular Trade, the Columbian Exchange & the Dutch East India Co.) and it worked well again despite a shortened work week for the students. Next week we will take a break and the students will develop Explorer Business Plans (next blog post) before engaging in a full class issue of TIME. In this edition, students will interview for their desired position as editor-in-chief, cover artist, advertisement creation, feature article author, political cartoonist and so on...We will create a full edition using a total class effort. Hearts will race and tensions will be high. I cannot wait!

Finally, if all goes as planned, each student will first develop their own edition on the Age of Absolutism complete with a feature article, verbatim page, the world page, editorial and cover page. And in the end they will get to choose any magazine they want to use as a template...I imagine I will see "People", "National Geographic" and "Us" magazines that detail the Age of Revolutions. It will be fun to Martha Washinton or a Napoleonic Age French soldier on the cover of an 18th century "GQ"!