17-26 February

Apologies for the missing entries.

I was out sick at the end of last week.

On Monday, 24 February students worked with Ms. Kokes from the College and Career Center on Career related work.



Other classes have been engaged in an ongoing activity that will result in an essay that answers the question:

What was the Progressive Era?

Students worked in teams to create analytical posters that described the various reform(er)s of the era. Each group presented their findings to other groups.

Last week, each student was given a graphic organizer and asked to review their notes, and the posters to plan an essay.

Tuesday/Wednesday students worked on drafting these essays. Students will have a few minutes on Thursday/ Friday to finish the drafts.

Next students will engage in a peer review and revision activity. Mr. Zartler will then give some feedback on the drafts before students are assigned a final draft due date.

Thursday / Friday 13/14 February

Each student was assigned one reform or reformer from the list available at: http://www.regentsprep.org/Regents/ushisgov/themes/reform/progressive.htm . Each Reform or reformer was color coded was that students could form teams researching similar issues or people.

Students then did a "meet and greet" (aka Tea Party, but there was no tea) to meet at least ten (10) other reform(er)s.

After discussing commonalities, students created groups of similar reform(er)s. Each group shared all of their reform(er)s.

The share around then tried to answer the following questions in order to create an analytical presentation poster that is due next class.

What do these have in common?
Who is involved?
Who benefits?
What happened/ will happen/ happens?
When? When did id happen? For what duration? Is it current? What has been the impact?
Where may not apply (or it may).
How
How was it accomplished?
How did it affect people?
How is it similar to other (related) Progressive Reform(er)s?

Why was/ is this important?

Tuesday/ Wednesday 11/12 February

Class discussed note taking techniques.

The guiding question for the day was What changes happened during the Progressive Era? Why did these changes take place?

Class viewed the following multi-media lecture, 

Part 1

Part 2

and spent time skimming pages 222-227 of History Alive!

Tuesday/ Wednesday 4/5 February

We began with a timeline of the progressive era including the following dates:

Presidents
William McKinley 1897 - 1901
Theodore Roosevelt 1901-1909
William Howard Taft 1909-1913
Woodrow Wilson 1913-1921

We continued watching the Presidents of the Progressive Era documentary. The guiding questions for watching this video are: How did the President(s) make things better? How did people make things better?

After reviewing the notes students took during the documentary, students began studying pages 222-227 of History Alive! in order to more easily identify achievements of the progressives during this period.

Monday, 3 February

We continued our study of labor in the 20th Century by focusing on the history of the minimum wage in the United States.

We considered the tension between individual freedom and societal good inherent in the conflict over minimum wage.

Then Mr. Zartler introduced the "Progressive Era" roughly the years 1901 to 1920.

We then began view the documentary The Progressive Era Presidents. We discussed how this documentary takes a "rich, white man" view of history.