1970's

The 1970’s did a great job at teaching. The best activity was simulating Vietnam using a giant board of Vietnam. I was on the Vietnam side. It was a lot of fun because we got to move our men after every strike from the U.S. This made it easy for us to evade their attacks. No matter how much both sides shot at each other and the many people that were killed, neither team could win. This made a very good comparison to today’s war in Iraq. The biggest event in the 1970’s was the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. America seemed weak and vulnerable because it had lost its first real war. 55,000 American soldiers lost their lives in the Vietnam war. Some people say for nothing. Same with today’s war in Iraq.
We had a lot of fun learning about Disco. We watched a segment of Saturday night Fever. We all really liked it and glad we could see it. When we did the writing about it afterwards I wrote about how even though there was still some segregation shown, disco helped bring the various cultures in America to a common ground. The culture in the 1970’s seemed very different from the 60’s.

1960's

The 1960’s was a really fun class. We learned a lot about hippies. It seems that 1960’s was a really fun place to live. I wish I could have been alive for that. Obviously the best part of the 1960’s activities was tie-dying our shirts. It was a really fun activity that got us out of the class room and doing some hands on stuff. I made a pretty cool shirt that had green blue yellow and neon green. I made an awesome stripe pattern that came out a lot better than I though it would have. It was a lot of fun watching the other classmates make there stuff also. Some people did socks. While we were outside Eric played some Hippie music which was awesome to listen too. I kinda liked it and I bet it would have been awesome to be at Woodstock or any other 60’s concert. Speaking of Woodstock Eric put together a really nice slide show about it. When you look at all those pictures if makes it seem like the whole world was there. It was pretty interesting to find out that only .2 percent was hippies. I though there was a lot more than that. We also learned about the many drugs that became popular among hippies in the 1960’s, and the hippies openness to sexuality. Over all the classes were good and tie-dying was a lot of fun.

1950's

The 1950’s group did a great job at teaching the class. They followed up on communists and went into deeper detail about what they were and how they were affecting America. I thought it was amazing how scared everyone was that the communists would take over America. They told us that if you were even suspected to be a communists they would say it out loud and you would loose you job and people would look down on you as a criminal. This is similar to today, if your are suspected to be a terrorists then you would be investigated and maybe even taken to guantanamal bay. Nobody knew exactly who the communists were but everybody accused everyone else just as long as people didn’t think you were one.
Another big area the 50’s group covered was racism. They did a demonstration to represent the Rosa Parks incident. They asked everyone with slippers to sit on the ground behind the people with shoes who got to sit in chairs. Then we watched a movie in this arrangement. After the movie we talked about what if felt to be in these positions. I had shoes so I got to sit in front on the chairs. It felt good but I did feel bad for the ones who had to sit behind. This is what they wanted us to see. The people who were wearing slippers didn’t like sitting behind us. They felt that wearing shoes didn’t make us better people. Which is true and that’s why the black people wanted an end to racism.

1940's teaching experience

When I first heard we were going to be teaching the class for three whole days I was a little frightened. I didn’t know what to expect. As we started planning for our lessons and deciding what we were going to teach. It started sound fun. We were going to be in charge for three whole days. Well the first day came around and we began teaching the class. For the most part everything went well. I think we were pretty prepared and for the most part we had a very successful lesson. The same was true for the second day. Our third and last day left a little to be desired. I felt we could have been a little more prepared for teaching then we were. We knew what we were going to talk about but we just didn’t know how. We ended up improvising and not doing the best job we could have. Some things I gained from this experience were one, being prepared, two keeping order in the class room helped the lesson move along quickly and three don’t try to wing it. It’s always much better to come prepared.