Intro to the Course for Students and Parents

Now that the year is starting, I want to explain some things that are new to the Modern World History Course this year.

First things first, I strongly encourage students and parents to read the Course Syllabus. It is linked under the "Links" column on the right-hand side of this page and will be kept up-to-date with any changes as the year progresses. There you will find an overview for the course, our thematic units, and our 10 Themes for the year, which are aligned to the National Council for the Social Studies' 10 Themes.

Something new this year for all of us will be the four different learning targets. Each grade students receive will fall under one or more of the following types of learning targets: Knowledge, Skills, Reasoning, and Project/Products. I'm also no longer weighting my assignments, so students should find it easier to keep track of their own grade as the quarters progress, which you can do by checking out the "Assignments Tracker" for each unit, which I will keep up to date regarding when students receive these assignments. The vast majority of my assignments are due the day after they've been assigned (unless I've told students otherwise). It may take longer for assignments to get posted in the ProgressBook, but once they're there and marked "missing," students have a week to turn them in late before they turn into a '0,' after which they may no longer make them up. I encourage you to set up alerts in ProgressBook so you can receive notification via text or email as soon as an assignment appears missing. Directions to do this can be found here.

Thirdly, another new thing this year is the Geography Daily Preps. My goal is for students to have daily preps each day highlighting specific countries, which they should be writing about each day at the beginning of class. Students should pay attention to Pilot to know which days we went over each country. I'd also encourage your son or daughter to practice for our geography quizzes by playing the "Country Games," which are organized by continent on the "Geography Games" link to the right (or click on the big map on the top right of the blog). As of now, I plan to have students take these quizzes during class at the end of each week, so I will try to keep posted and up to date what quizzes we will do in the upcoming week.

As always, please reach out to me via email if you have any questions, which is the easiest and quickest way to get in touch with me. I'm very responsive to email and will do my best to get back to you in a timely manner regarding concerns about your student.