Lowell High School Fall 2022
History of the United States with your host J.Monty Worth
Welcome to this course on the history of our country. I hope that it will help you to make sense of the strange times that we are living in. Below are links that you will be using to get to the most useful information, but below is a general introduction to the course and an outline of what we will be studying this year. BTW is the sun rising or setting behind the Statue of Liberty?
RESOURCES
Online books:
The American Yawp: a free and brief online US history textbook
Another US History Book available online (1865 on)
Essay Writing:
more to come
Citations:
Some students find my homework assignments challenging or even annoying. Notice that there are often several parts to questions. While some questions can be answered pretty easily from the textbook reading, others ask for your own opinion or for you to look stuff up on the internet. Other questions are really confusing. This is not by mistake. I do want to give you some questions that require you to think about things in different ways. Sometimes that is hard for me to explain or hard for you to understand. I think it is valuable for you to struggle with difficult questions sometimes. This is the idea behind zen koans. My hope is to make your mind grow and that is not easy. It requires mental exercise and mental stretching. I don't expect you to get everything right on the homework, but I expect you to give a good effort on every question. It is much better to write something that is wrong than to not write anything.
On a practical level, please take a look at the homework early. Make sure that you understand what the questions are asking. If you don't, please ask me in class. That counts as participation (see below) and helps your classmates. You are of course welcome to do outside research, but do remember to avoid plagiarizing by putting in quotations and providing a source for any sentence that did not start in your head.
WORTH STYLE
• If turning in work on paper, be sure that there is a heading at the top of the page with your name, my name and which assignment it is. If handwriting, be sure that you write neatly and legibly, neither too large, nor too small. Use blue or black ink. It is not a problem to cross out words. Single space to conserve paper. It is even better to print on both sides of the paper or to print on paper with text on the other side. If not using paper double space.
• You are young, so you can learn quickly. Learn to take full advantage of your word processing software.
• Use one inch margins so that there is room for our comments.
• Do not underline your title. Reserve that for the title of books.
GRAMMAR NAZI BOOT CAMP
If using a computer, there is no excuse for not using the spell and grammar check function. Turn it on to work in the background, and it will point out your errors. It will not catch all of them, but many. Below are some of the common student errors that really annoy me and thus can hurt your grade.
Before conjunctions such as “but” “therefore” “thus” or “because,” you nearly always need a comma.
Write out all numbers up to twenty or that you can write with only one word (forty, a thousand).
Start sentences with a capital letter. That means you can never start a sentence with an Arabic number (1918).
Always capitalize proper nouns, such as the names of countries, continents or ethnic groups. The one exception, which annoys me is the convention of writing “white” to denote European-Americans.
Do not write 1400’s. Write 1400s. Even better write, the fifteenth century.
It’s = it is its = of it Do not confuse them.
Do not confuse “there”, “their” & “they’re” or for that matter “where” and “were” or “to”, “too” & “two.”
The past tense of lead is led. I wish I had a penny for each time a student writes that.
In history classes, you should nearly always use the past tense.
Ruthlessly cut out unnecessary words. In the year 1492.
Do not use verbalisms or colloquialisms such as “well.” They have no meaning.
Do not use the first person (I, me) unless you really need to.
Changing subjects from grammar to diction (word choice), I find that students often use certain popular terms incorrectly. Try to get in the habit of looking up words that you are not quite sure of so that you don't make that mistake. Recently I see students incorrectly using: - downfall - among -
If you are one of the many Lowell students who suffers from the terrible affliction of classroom shyness, do not give up hope. With consistent effort, you can get yourself to participate more. That will help you to overcome shyness as well as improve your grade in this class and increase your learning (studies show that the more students participate, the more they remember). Like many other things, participation is a habit. If you don't participate, you have acquired a bad habit. If you do participate you have a good habit. It is difficult to change habits. The key to doing so is to set clear goals and force yourself to achieve them until you have established a new habit. So write down questions that you have on the reading for class. Then push yourself to ask those. You might ask a friend who sits near you to nudge you to encourage you to ask your questions. You can also practice asking the questions at home alone in your room or to your family members or stuffed animals. Once you have rehearsed, it will be much easier to ask in class. Then reward yourself for good behavior. Pick a snack or activity that you really like. You can have that if you accomplish your participation goal. That will make you more eager to meet the goal for next time.
Write me an email: worthj@sfusd.edu. You are also welcome to stop by the history office in room 240 when I am not teaching, blocks 4, 5 & 7 and after school M,W,F.