Jace Flores Student Teacher Blog

This was the culminating lesson for the Civil War unit where the kids had to write an alternate timeline on the Civil War (or run up to the conflict) based on what they knew, what they had learned and what they researched. Admittedly it was a bit of a gamble because I had never seen this done before and the kids can be variable on their ability to do things. Sometimes they can conquer the world and sometimes they can’t walk two feet forward. I created this worksheet with three questions and, to prime their minds, I started with a warmup asking “Have you ever thought about an event in your life going differently, and what that would have looked like?” A low stakes easy to do what-if that is essentially an alternate timeline.

From there I gave them the worksheet and projected an example I did on John Brown’s Raid, showing them how it could be done. After that I told them not to copy this example (obviously) and to use their Chromebooks to research as they saw fit and use much of the class in order to fill this sheet out. Surprisingly, things went exceedingly well. There were some clarification questions unsurprisingly, but the kids were really engaged with the activity. There were only 3-4 people out of 60 classes in two sections that did a what-if based around the movie Glory, which was a lot lower then I expected (and those who did a Glory what-if put in the work, nothing was phoned in). The example above is a particularly good example of a what-if the kids did.

At the end of the period we had three kids volunteer to share their timelines and they were all good, having different events and themes. You could tell that they were putting their information to use.

Overall the activity was a major success. The kids used their information and creativity to write these interesting and engaging stories, which I think was helped by the freedom they had to write about what they want in the time period given. So some wrote one’s as small scale as what if Frederick Douglass never ran away, to what if the CSA won the Civil War. I think a signal of how successful it was was that Brian and JB (a cooperating teacher for 1st period only) both said they were going to adapt the assignment for their own unit plans, and these are teachers with almost four decades worth of teaching experience. So major success! I think doing these kinds of more freehand one off assignments is a good way to cap off a subunit for the kids to express their creativity and have more fun.