476 Introduction and Some Thoughts on Teaching History

Well hello there. As you can see in my bio to the right my name is Josh Ouellette and I am currently a single subject teaching credential and masters student at the University of La Verne.

My plan is to teach History, really the first subject in school that I ever loved, and the subject I am most passionate about. While I see how Government and Economics are important subjects, the courses I would prefer to teach would be World History and U.S. History. Though at the end of the day I realize I'll teach any part of the subject that my future employer hires me to do.

When it comes to History I think it is important to show students examples from what is going on in the world today because there is always a form of how this has happened before in the past. Meaning that if we can contextualize something from the past to a student's present they can draw a link to the past to help shape how they view their present and future. I know the old adage is, "if we don't know our past we are doomed to repeat it," or something along those lines. And while this is definitely true, I think we need to go to the next step of that because we always seem to be repeating our past because I think we as History educators need to do a better job making the past reality, instead of allowing subjects to stay in the past.

Are you sufficiently confused about some of my pedagogical history thoughts yet? I kind of am too. Hopefully in this course I will be able to hammer out my ideas and better shape them into something that is hardened, yet still malleable, in order to better serve my future students.

I am also a football coach, spending the last two years at Buena Park High School, and aspire to one day be a head coach at the high school level. I am an avid sports fan, Dodgers, West Ham, Titans, USC in no particular order, and I'm sorry if you have to be around me if one of my teams lost that day. I love to read, historical fiction is probably my current favorite genre, but I love fantasy, Sci-Fi, classic novels, Harry Potter (it's its own animal), and biographies. I also love TV shows. We live in the golden age of content for TV right now. Some of my favorite shows would be "Vikings" (yes, I wish I was and should be an extra on the show), "Sons of Anarchy," "The Office," "Peaky Blinders," and a long, long list of other shows that varies across genres and subjects just like the list above.

Well, that about does it for this post.

Thanks for stopping by. The Dude Abides.