This is, in essence, what I want to teach my seventh and my ninth grade history classes this year: How to visualize a time period or a historical sequence of events, how to organize it into several kinds of graphical maps, how to convert those maps to an outline and then a first draft, how to edit that draft, and then how to present that information to an audience.
This is not an easy sell to the kids. I’m wondering how I’ll do it. It’s become clear to me that neither my seventh graders nor my ninth graders know how to do it, and so I’m more conscious than ever that this is what I have to do.
