they are a small minority. Black people do most of the white collar and blue collar jobs.
Black people in the United States have had much greater obstacles because inequality con-
tinued into the contemporary era and because this is still a racially divided society that fa-
vors Whites.
I actually consider myself a conservative person. I take a practical approach to teaching.
The things I do are not revolutionary. I am a successful teacher because I worked hard to
learn how and because I am still working at it!
***JOIN THE CONVERSATION—TEACHING IS TEACHING- David Morris writes that he considers himself a teacher, rather than an historian or a
history teacher. “For me, teaching is teaching. Give me a package to present and I will
find a way to teach it. I taught math, English, and science in evening high school
equivalency programs. I know many educators argue that content knowledge is funda-
mental to effective teaching. But I consider it more important to focus on the process of
learning.” Do you agree or disagree with his position? Explain your views. - Charles Cronin is a preservice teacher who helped to review this book. Following dis-
cussion of David Morris’s “Teaching Story” in class, Charles sent the following e-mail
message: “Dr. Morris is saying that we have to try and find things that we have in com-
mon with our students. These connections can help to establish a trusting relationship.
He uses his experience as an immigrant from Barbados to establish connections with
the high school students he teaches. I have taken his methods class and he also used
incidents from his daily life to make similar connections with us. I am looking forward
to student teaching in the spring. It is my belief that if I can hold on long enough, that I
will be able to build the bonds of trust and experience needed to make me a successful
teacher.”
Question to Consider:
Do you believe it is possible to develop “bonds of trust” with students from backgrounds
different from your own? Explain.and Everything Else)? H: What Is Thematic Teaching (in Social Studies, Biology,
BIOLOGY, AND EVERYTHING ELSE)?
In his essay, David Morris spoke about presenting a “package” that allows students to dis-
cover the underlying “story.” I like to call this ideathematic teaching. As a high school so-
cial studies teacher, I used the first few lessons of the new school year to establish themes
classes would be exploring throughout the curriculum. Although I did this in different
ways over the years, my favorite way involved getting students to define theessential ques-
tionsthey wanted to study, questions that I would then integrate into units, projects, and
lessons.
To start, I distributed newspapers and news magazines to teams of students who were as-
signed to select articles that they believed signaled important issues facing the contempo-
rary world. Teams had to write down the headlines of the articles and their reasons for se-
lecting them. At the end of day 1, I asked at least one group to report on their deliberations,
then listed the topics of their articles on poster paper.
PLANNING 91