Today, as a formative assessment, I started class with the request that students draw Bryon's big decision from Chapter 10. In the chapter, Bryon discovered that his best friend was currently a drug dealer. This happens at the heels of rescuing another friend from a drug den of a hippie house who was on a bad LSD trip. The friend happened to be the younger brother of Bryon's new girlfriend. The results of the activity were interesting.
In college we learned that everyone has schema, prior knowledge and history, and that schema colors the way we interpret information. The novel, That Was Then, This Is Now, is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even after students conducted webquests about these eras and reported back to me about trends of that era in technology, many students still drew Bryon using a cell phone to call the police or a pushutton wall unit phone. I was tickled to see that on so many students' papers.
The message I gleaned from that is that students still see the world, past or present, as it is today. This means that we educators have to work harder to help students understand the time period we are teaching and what anachronisms are.The "how" is the big question.
Once, many years ago, when they were in their late 50s, I invited my parents to visit my class as guest speakers about life as an African American in the 1960s. The experience was powerful for my students, my parents and even for me. The power of having visitors speak to students about an era they were studying as witnesses to history was very strong. I cannot put my parents through that each year, but it does give me an idea--- skype? Video interviews. Live show n tell? I am getting an idea for a very cool lesson and project... stay tuned.
