My First Blog

Hello all and welcome to my first blog.

I am a social studies teacher at Greer Middle School in South Carolina. The school encourages the use of many cutting-edge technologies, my favorite being the Promethean Board, and now I’m jumping on the blog band-waggon.

As a sixth grade social studies teacher I am often asked questions in class that I do not have the time to talk about. Sometimes the questions are too far off the current topic, or are not addressed in my standards and so I cannot spend precious time talking about them. I hope that soon I can encourage my students to ask those questions here, or post the answers to questions posed in class.

 When we studied Ancient Egypt the students had many questions that I could not always spend a whole lot of time answering. We have to cover the three kingdoms of Egypt (old, middle, and new) as part of our standards. I spent about a week covering the three kingdoms, that would be over 1,500 year of history in a week, or approximately 300 years a day, 60 year a minute. As a result, we skip a lot of very interesting bits of history. The students do not get to have the answers, and I cannot go into as much detail as we would like.

 Soon we will be covering the Ancient Greeks. That is a hugely popular topic, and one I love to teach. One thing that bothers me is that the Greek Myths are not a part of the standards (in fact Greece is ONE substandard, as opposed to the SIX subtandards the Middle Ages get). The students love Greek Mythology, as do I (it probably helps that my wife is an English teacher and loves myths as well), and I get a lot of questions about the myths that I cannot go into. The English teacher on my team makes sure that she teaches some Greek myths at the same time, which is nice, but it feeds the fire of the students curiosity. I hope that when we get to Greece the students will come here to ask me questions and get excited about Greek Mythology, and learning about history.

 I hope you enjoyed my first attempt at blogging. If you have any questions please feel free to post them and I’ll answer them as soon as possible.