I love it when a good plan comes together!

One of the cool things about starting a school from the ground up (ha ha! Literally! Whee I'm punchy today), is that you can make all sorts of wonderful grand statements about how you WANT it to be.

• "I want this to be the kind of place where all students are respectful to each other and to their teachers."
• "I want this to be the kind of place where academics take precedence, but we acknowledge that high school is also about a total curriculum, not just math, science and English."
• "Let's make English and Social Studies a partnership, so students are learning humanities, not just English and Social Studies in a vacuum."

It is this last one that I would like to address today. (Hmm, that was very speech-y. I don't mean it to sound that way, but since I've gone that direction, perhaps it's best to stay the course, what what?)

I truly believe that I am actually an English teacher in disguise. This drives my history students crazy. I love history, and I love teaching it, but I also think that I would love teaching English as well. It is as important to me that my students have good content knowledge when they leave my classroom as it is that they can express themselves through writing in a clear, concise and eloquent manner. They hate that. "But Ms. H, this isn't English class!!" is a popular complaint in my classroom. The idea of teaming with the English department to teach a humanities, or civilization course, as we're calling it (we will not be offering English 10 and World History 2 next year, it will be World Civilization 2), was a very exciting prospect for me, and frankly it was one of the (many) reasons that I decided to come to this school. We're not quite at the "Humanities" place yet, but we're definitely getting there.

This week I started teaching "The New Imperialism", and we started talking about "The White Man's Burden", a poem by Rudyard Kipling about one of the causes of Imperialism. And this is what I heard from many, many of my students in each class throughout the day. "Oh! We were talking about this in English!" Now seriously, how cool is that?!!?!?!?!?!!! Yay for the English teachers in our school! This, my little friends, is exactly what the whole civ program is all about - using English class to support content in history and using history class to support reading in English. I was so excited - SO excited!! - to hear the students make that connection. I think I may have scared the kids a little bit, but that's ok, they already think I'm completely nuts, so it's all good.