1.5—Course Assignments (8 min video)

Transcript

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All right, well in this last lecture for this week, we’re going to talk about some general and practical tips for this actual series you’re going to be working through the rest of the school year. First of all, let me just kind of mention that the general scope and sequence where we’re going in terms of lessons, and look at that in the materials that you have before you. But I want you to notice that this Modern History series is going to kind of go over the same time period that we looked at in American history, but look at what’s going on over in Europe specifically. So we’re going to spend a long time taking a look at the progress of ideas and culture throughout the 16 and the 1700s, before we get to more modern times, such as nationalism in the 1800s, or especially the 20th century, and then of course early 21st.

We’ll get to those things towards the end, but we’re really going to heavily focus upon foundations and how is it we came to think the way that we do. That’s huge. You need to understand those foundations, understand why we value what we value and why the world is the way that it is now in the current year.

In terms of practical things and things like that, you’ll notice that you have a reader. This has several readings on it or in it, that is. Some of them are short, some of them are not so short. Let me give you a few pointers about the readings. The readings are not actually designed to keep you busy. They’re designed to have lots that you can actually do. Some of them are kind of suggested as being acquired, some of them are seen as optional. But the whole point of the readings is for you to take your time, for you to actually kind of carefully read what you’re reading, consider what it’s about. I usually give you a question or two to consider while you’re actually reading these things. But you’re not really reading to necessarily learn a whole bunch of information. You’re not reading to answer some kind of test question. You’re reading to think. You’re reading to discern. You’re reading to actually experience firsthand the people of the past. And so take your time with these. Don’t necessarily worry about reading everything. Of course, you’ll have guidance and direction from either your parents or whoever is teaching this course to you, but take your time in the actual readings.

I also encourage you, I encourage this with all of my students whenever they’re reading, have some place that you go to read, some place comfortable, some place maybe that you can bring a hot drink with you.

And also, when you’re reading, read with a pen and a journal in hand or to the side. Be ready to write things down about what you’re reading. Be ready to ask questions about what you’re reading. Try answering your own questions, or if you need to, go and ask others about what you’re reading and get help if you need to. But the point is this, just take the time to discover what’s there, what we’ve actually put together for this series. The other thing that you’re going to be doing besides the readings will be, of course, the exams. Typically, an exam will have, say, around 10 questions in it, and the exam questions are designed to pull out your knowledge of what we talked about.

you’ll need to have a working knowledge of the who and the what and the when based upon our history time period we’re talking about that particular week. But you also need to kind of understand, okay, how do these things connect? That’s called understanding, in fact. And you also understand what’s the application or the point of this stuff. We would call that wisdom. So when it comes to answering the test questions, you need to be prepared, which means you need to have done the work behind them watching the videos, and especially having written notes and also reviewed your notes.

You wanna answer the test questions without looking at your notes. But you also wanna apply a great work ethic to answering these test questions. You wanna take your time with them. You wanna take the time to give thorough answers, to give detail, to really think about what the question is actually asking you. And often I’m asked for not just what happened, but I want you to make connections. I want you to think about them. I want you to consider especially the progress of ideas and culture and things like that. Besides exams and besides readings, you also have another task you’ll be doing that’s called a portfolio. Portfolio is really kind of a unique thing. It’s meant really to be a scrapbook for this year in history. You don’t have a textbook, you have videos. So the purpose of the portfolio is for you to create your own scrapbook or visual record each weekly lesson. In fact, the goal is to make one entry port per lesson. And this entry, which you’re going to do either in a scrapbook or perhaps in a photo album, perhaps in some kind of binder, you want to take nice paper.

You want to put on this nice paper pictures or perhaps photos or perhaps old maps or perhaps poems or perhaps even lyrics or quotes that you have found that relate to whatever we talked about that week.

Take those things, you want to have at least five items of those things, and arrange them in some kind of an orderly, aesthetically pleasing way on the actual portfolio entry.

If you have a picture or a map, include a caption. Tell us what it is. If you have a quote, make sure you include who said it. You may even want to comment on that quote. Another thing you can do, and I have my students do this as well, often my students, instead of gathering together five things that they say print or find online, what they will often do is they will often create their own artwork.

They’ll make a single drawing or perhaps even some kind of collage page to actually illustrate that week’s lesson. You can do that too. That’s another great thing to do. The whole point of this is to give you a visual kind of hands-on way to remember what that week was about, at least in some of the details.

Either way, you want to focus on showing craftsmanship for this thing. You want to focus on actually thinking carefully, “Okay, what would be the appropriate images to put here? What should be emphasized in this visual representation of what was talked about this week?” You may even get great ideas from the images you see during the lectures. Finally, the other great work you’ll be doing will be the project. Now, we’ll have separate project videos throughout. on in this DVD you can watch for each individual project. I’ll go and tell you what the four projects are. For the first quarter of the series you’re going to be doing a project that I call the Reformational Imitation. Because we’re looking at so many great artists and composers and inventors during that time period, I want you all to kind of choose something from that time period, either an artwork or a series of sketches from a great master artist, or perhaps reproduce the work of some master composer, you actually write out the musical notes and lines and so forth, or perhaps illuminate a poem of some great poet from this time period, or make a model, perhaps even a working model, of one of the inventions of the people that we looked at.

It could be to scale or it could be on a small size if you needed to scale it down. The second quarter, you’re going to be giving a speech defending tradition and kind of the value of passing on the past to others. We’ll talk about that in detail later. The third quarter is actually where you’ll be writing a thesis paper, you’ll be taking a look at a specific topic in history and exploring it deeply, coming up with an argument to actually defend, and then gathering as much information as you can to present your argument and show why it is persuasively acceptable.

And of course the last quarter, fourth quarter, one of my favorite projects is the hour project in which you spent a certain number of hours crafting something, some kind of hopefully more permanent thing you’re going to keep for a while to kind of represent the year in history. We’ll talk about that in detail later. But kind of the name of the game with the projects is craftsmanship. Actually taking your time with these things, managing your time well throughout the quarter, but also taking your time to do these things well and take delight in them.

Anyway, we’ll talk more about those in separate videos.