(a) "I, Alonso VIllanueva, affirm that I completed my independant component which represents 30 hours of work."
(b)-Sanders, Jody S. "Teaching Students to Recognize Bias." Middleweb.com. N.p., 02 Feb. 2014. Web. 12 Apr. 2015.
(c) My Senior Project Hours Log has been updated. The link is on the right.
(d)For my Independent Component 2, I mostly worked with a teacher Mr. Leighton at the school my mentor works at. For this component I investigated many widely used History textbooks that many schools use. Including the one I mentorship at. Despite these history books claiming not to be biased, I wanted to see if they actually are.
Interpretive
For my 2nd Independent Component I worked with my 2nd mentor VinceLHe is a social studies teacher at Walnut Grove Intermediate School. What I wanted to do was examine and investigate some of the more widely used History Textbooks and see if there were any biases with them. This mainly has to do with my Third Answer that states, "Having reliable primary and secondary sources is one of the best ways to effectively teach a History class." And one way a primary and secondary source, such as a history textbook can become unreliable is if they're biased. From what I found in my research, books like Prentice Hall's, "World History: The Modern World," leave out some key points. Such as in Section 3, Chapter 11 on the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America's response to the attack and how we entered World War 2. It leaves out and doesn't even mention that one of Roosevelt's responses to the attack was Executive Order 9066. The order that forcibly evacuated over 100,000 Japanese American Citizens into Internment Camps. Even though this was a mistake on the government's hands at the time and something America really doesn't like to talk about. Its something that needs to be learnt so that it may never happen again. Another thing I noticed was that quite a bit of history textbooks in the Southern United States particularly the states of Louisiana and Mississippi. The textbooks in these regions barely even touched and skimmed about the treatment of African Americans living in the South in the Post Civil War Era. They don't even mention the thousands of public lynchings that were preformed in the decades that followed the conclusion of the civil war. There's not even a word about the Jim Crow laws that restricted the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of African Americans. All of these events in time are a very important part of American History, and these books just flat out don't include them. No matter how shameful it may look now, our children still need to know about and learn these things as ugly as they are to talk about. I know I'm blabbering on, but History is something I am very passionate about. The lat thing that grinded my gears was the totally biased and over glorification of the controversial decision to drop the atomic bomb. Now the history books I looked into did a decent job of explaining why we made the decision to drop the bomb. However, it completely leaves out any counter arguments or skepticism or different perspectives about what other people thought about the dropping of the bomb. They just basically state that the bomb was a good thing because it saved millions of lives on both sides as a result. It really bugs me that many History books just spit out plain facts, they don't make the reader think about the decisions people made in the past. There's no aspiration of curiosity for the readers to dig deeper into the material. Thankfully though there are teachers like my mentors who inspire their students to ask questions about these events and make them wonder what if things had been different.
-This is one of the books I investigated and examined. One I found to be biased.
-This is my 2nd mentor Vince Leighton. He is the 7th Grade World History Teacher at WGIS
Applied
-This component helped answer my EQ by greatly helping me strengthen and back my Third answer. Having reliable primary and secondary sources is essential to teaching History effectively. Having biased sources truly undermines the source material you have to go off of as a teacher. Its like having a book with many pages of it missing, you'd miss out on key points of it. The same goes for History textbooks, because of their biases a lot of important things in our students Historical education is missing and it is a real problem. That is why in one of the best ways to teach History effectively is by having reliable and un-biased primary and especially secondary sources to teach History the best to your ability as a teacher.
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