Jennifer+Eldridge-+1963

A Year in Review Narrative: 1963
Dear diary, I overheard mom and dad arguing tonight, again. Sometimes it feels as though all they do is argue. They used to tell me to go to my room before they would start up their heated conversations, but now they don’t seem to care about it anymore. I mean, geeze, I’m 13, so what does it really matter if I hear them arguing about “adult things”, as they like to call them. The last time that I heard them arguing, they were talking about the Civil Rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. had just given his I have a Dream speech. Mom thinks that this is a huge step for our country, and dad just wants her to stop talking about it. He says that all she ever does is talk about politics. This seems to be true. Usually I hear her talking about the Cold war (though, I am not really sure what that is, or why it is referred to as the “cold” war). Tonight’s argument wasn’t as bad. They were just arguing about which movie we were going to watch as a family. Dad wants to watch The Sword in the Stone, but mom says that she doesn’t want to watch a cartoon. She wants to watch To Kill a Mockingbird. I don’t really care what we watch as long as it gets them to be quiet.

Dear diary, Oh. My. Goodness. Dad just bought a 1963 Stingray. Mom is going to be so pissed! The last time dad just bought something without talking to her first she didn’t talk to him for an entire week. Could you imagine? And that was only because he bought us the newest telephone without discussing it first. Although, she eventually got over it when she realized that she could just push buttons on the phone instead of using the dial.

Dear diary, Mom pulled me and Daniel out of school early today. At first she was too upset to tell us what happened, and why we were leaving school early. When we got home she quietly made me and Daniel a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a glass of milk. While we were eating the lunch that she had fixed us, she finally told us why she was so upset. Someone killed our president. She wouldn’t tell us exactly what happened, just that he was in Dallas Texas when it happened and that Vice President Lyndon Johnson would be our new president now.

Dear diary, The weirdest song played on the radio today, it was Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash. Honestly, I didn’t like it at all, the Beatles are WAY better. Dad disagrees, he prefers Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley over the Beatles. Dad has horrible taste in most things, well, except for the corvette. Mom didn’t get as mad about the car as I thought she would. I think that she’s been too occupied by reading to get even care about the car. She just bought this new book, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. I’m not really sure what it's about, but she said that I can read it one day.

Pedagogical Implications:
One of the implications that I am worried that I might run into when assigning this project to middle school students is that they may not be able to choose a year on their own. I am worried that choosing any year except the year that they were born might be a bit too vague. In order to fix this, I would help my students choose a year that they would want to research. I also think that it would be important to show middle school students the finished project that they have a better understanding of what they are actually doing and what their finished product should look like.

When implementing this assignment with middle school students I would either assign this project during the middle of the school year or towards the end of the school year. Since I would implement this project in the middle or at the end of the school year this assignment should be serving as a type of review for the content that we covered so far.
 * When scaffolding this assignment the first thing that I would do is have a several years listed on the board that students should be thinking about.
 * As a class we would discuss what makes the years on the board standout. I would then ask my students if they can think of any other years that stand out to them.
 * As we are discussing the importance of the years on the board, I will be passing out a detailed rubric for the assignment. The rubric will have a checklist, and dates when the rough and final drafts of the project are due.
 * We will then go over the rubric as a class.
 * Once we have finished going through the rubric I would provide my students with an example of the finished project so that they have an idea of what the finished assignment might look like.
 * After students have looked through the finished example, they will have the option to ask questions to clarify anything that they do not understand about the project.