Mr. Evans

The goal of our classes is to teach you how to think, rather than teach you what to think.

Instead of simply giving you information and telling you what you should know about a certain person, event or piece of literature, my job is to guide you through literature and historical documents and help you build the skills to analyze text yourself. It may sound odd, but I hope that I'll make myself obsolete by the end of the school year. I want you to gain the skills necessary to comprehend, analyze, and appreciate texts on your own.

To accomplish this, both our Social Studies and Language Arts classes will be text-based; to put it bluntly, we'll be reading a lot. We'll have lots of small-group and whole-class discussions, paideias, debates, and role-playing activities. Our class will seldom be silent; our success will largely depend on your willingness to interact with peers in academic discussion and debate. At all times, the beautiful buzz of conversation that you'll hear in our class will focus on text.

In an age when information is so easily accessible on the internet and social media, it is crucial for you to be able to ground your thinking and arguments in evidence. Every collaboration and conversation we have will ask you to present textual evidence to support your thinking. Former students have often said, "Your Social Studies class is a lot like Language Arts," to which I say, "That's great!" Literature and history naturally intersect: we learn history from reading literature, and we analyze literature within its historical context. Rather than simply hearing about people and events from the past, you'll get your hands on actual primary-source journals, letters and articles ranging from Elizabethan England to the cotton fields of the American South to the home-front and foreign theaters of the World Wars. So get excited! I know I am.