C4Ta #1 Blog

William Chamberlain is a 6th grade teacher at an elementary school in Noel, Missouri, and an adjunct professor at Crowder College. He has done many presentations on technology use in the classroom. His blog, Why do I have to learn history?, he struggles with a question one of his student's had asked him: Why do I have to learn history? He said he did some research on his own to see if anyone had given a good, substantial answer to this question but he wound up empty handed. Mr. Chamberlain says he always loved history because of all of the different connections each separate event make, but he still could not come up with a solid answer on why we have to learn it.

In my response to him, I told him how I have always asked the same question. I used to think that history

didn't apply to my everyday life and that we should just focus on the "here and now". However, over time I have been told two statements that I believe really justified the student's question to Mr. Chamberlain:
1. Without history, there would be no present or future.
2. We need to learn from our past to make a better tomorrow.
I explained to Mr. Chamberlain that I felt both of these statements helped me answer the same question that he received from his student.

The second blog of Mr. Chamberlain's that I read, TigerCorp Part 2: It's Lending Time!, was about how he and a few of his students loaned some money to a few lendees. He did this through service-based learning. He had one representative from each of his classes sit down and decide on three of the lendees they had chosen. They chose three and each of the loans made helped three different people on three different continents with things they were not able to financially handle on their own. Mr. Chamberlain said, "The choices the students made not only reflect our cultural diversity but also our local agricultural culture here in Noel."

In my comment back to Mr. Chamberlain, I applauded him for creating such a unique lesson for his students. I also told him his post introduced me to the concept of service-based leaning and had intrigued me enough to do some research on it and possibly incorporate it into my future classroom.