Super Bowl XLV is over and Valentine’s Day is here! I am more in love with this program now than I was 10 months ago when I started.
My dad sparked my love of learning social studies when I was just a little girl. Super bowls were just another football game. The bigger event in our house was Presidential election night! Oh, the excitement! I would sit hip to hip with my Dad and we would pretend that we were political Pundits. I’d ask questions. He’d answer them. At the age of eight, I was the Genealogist; looking through old family records, hunting up clues to a family-used cemetery that had fallen out of living memory. Looking through the photos and hearing the stories of my family was amazing. Later that summer, I became known as the family Archeologist as I ever so gracefully tripped over a buried head stone. Eureka! I’d found the cemetery! But my absolute favorite learning moments were when I would bring home history tidbits and engage my Dad in conversation. He would inevitably say something contrary and we’d argue. After a minute or so, he would say, “Prove it!” And the game was on! I would rush over to the 29- volumes of Funk and Wagnall’s Encyclopedias with their 10-volume Annuals or skim through the collection of atlases and state road maps. My favorite source of information was our yearly collection of the World Almanac…..way before the time of computers…… Curses, if I couldn’t find it and had to go to the library. But once there, I would open the long drawers with their neat little cards. I would skim nimble fingers over the cards, flipping through them expertly, knowing that each card represented a glorious tome of knowledge. Ultimately, I would find the information, triumphantly march up to his recliner and prove my point with evidence! Oh, the elation!
Those moments of success were the impetus for my love of learning and to this day, when I experience an “a-ha” moment…I get that giddy feeling all over again. As I hone my practice of teaching, I hope that by engaging my students that they will feel the “a-ha” moments and will learn to love social studies as much as I do.
