Social Studies Lesson Plan Template: Fill & Download for Free

Look, let's be honest here.I, an American high school Junior, would love to have a geography class. I'd love to have a “life” class, or a “how-to-learn” class, or a “Native American history” class, or really any of the suggestions by any of these other answers.But, that's the problem. A stupid little problem, reality is; these answers (my own included) are all ideas, ideas envisioned by hopeful (or are we hopeless?) idealists.To explain what I mean, I'm going to start with a dream come true.A fair number of the suggestions on this board have been for some sort of Personal Finance course. Well, walah! Look at me! Here I am, former student of exactly such a course—required for graduation—the utopian paradise known as “Consumer Education”.I wish.I understand I may be a tad bit biased against it, but please do try to hear me when I say: Consumer Ed sucks.It was supposed to teach us, (and I quote) “savings, banking, interest, credit, taxes, insurance, investing, consumer fraud, renting vs owning, and financing higher education.”In reality, it looked like this:Img 1: A real screenshot of a real assignment (the template of it, no answers filled out) from my Consumer Ed class.And this:Img 2: Another real assignment, though this is the answer key.The first assignment was a series of multiple choice questions with four answer choices. Questions included some prime examples of critical thinking and alaysis such as: “Sales promotions in the form of games [are also known as]…”The second assignment was to fill in the blank boxes with generic dictionary definitions, explaining the concept of interest as “The price of money.”Both of which are fascinating and totally intellectually stimulating, right?Right??There was nothing in Consumer Ed the slightest bit fascinating to incentivize hard work, nothing the slightest bit helpful in learning how to plan our futures, nothing the slightest bit useful for when we enter the workforce.Any content based class I propose in response to this question would end up the same way.Geography? Memorize a few world capitals for a day, then forget. Native American history? Multiple choice Scantrons on names of tribes and chiefs, maybe with the occasional short answer question on tribal wars.Any idea of mine, if implemented, would be standardized and streamlined and codified and narrowed down into oblivion.But still, a kid can dream, right?There is one class, not as content based as most high school classes, that would be beyond fascinating for me: teaching.I don't mean “learning” how to teach. You're in a school, for Christ’s sake! Do it yourself!Imagine if you forced a group of high schoolers to give up their study hall. They have no choice in the matter and are stuffed into a room, told they are required to take another class in place of their now-defunct free period. They have no clue what they're going to learn, how they're going to learn it, how they'll be tested—they know absolutely nothing.Believe me when I tell you said group of high schoolers would be pissed.I'm talking smoke out-of-the-ears, hootin’ and hollerin’, somebody-tell-me-what-the-F*CK-is-going-on-or-I'm-walking-out-the-door angry. One more elegant than I might say that these kids are the definition of indignant.In walks a fellow student—a frickin kid, by the love of God!—who says that he/she is now the teacher. This “teacher” has spent the past month or two planning all of the lessons, designing all of the note sheets, and writing all of the tests for his/her “class”.What content would be taught? Whatever the teacher-student wants! It's his class, he can teach about the history of towel whipping in locker rooms if that really interests him (and he's able to design lessons and tests around it)!A bit of a Baptism-by-fire? Yes! But would it be freaking fun to try to control that class? Hell yes! Maintaining the discipline of, gaining the respect of, and piquing the interest of the class would be extremely difficult, near impossible, especially considering the teacher-student’s social status as an “equal” to those being taught.Despite this difficulties, teaching a class in such a manner wouldn't just be fun, it would serve to teach the teacher.For starters, it would give the student-teacher a newfound understanding of and (hopefully) respect for the difficulties of the jobs (real) teachers do. Such a class would, in addition, help students grow their human management capabilities in a manner beyond mere scholastic testing—a skill important in any job in today's workforce.Put quite simply, I would love to have a teaching class. No ideas, no help, no nothing from any real teachers on my tests and lesson plans. No backup when the kids get rowdy, no authority to delegate responsibility to, nobody but myself to blame for my problems.That would be something different—a good kind of different, though.

There are countless things mothers do for their kids but I think these things by my "Amma" (read Mom in English) really stand out. My mom strongly believes that education is the most important thing and that is the one and only thing which can help take you to the next level.Arranging my bag for schoolJust like everyone we also had a timetable of the classes from Monday to Saturday 9 - 4. We used to have a class work and home work notebook for every subject, and a diary to note down the home work and also at the end of which we have a template to fill in the class schedule. So every single day of my school from kindergarten to class 9 my Mom used to check my class schedule for the day and arrange the books in my bag in that order. I never had to check whether I forgot something because I know my Mom took care of it, in fact I never checked my bag until I reached school. Only in class 10 that I used to arrange my bag.Accompanying me to next street for 4-5 yearsWe Indians go to private tuition after school where there will be a teacher, often someone from your own school who will make you study. Being the only kid and pampered too much they sent me to one because of the fear I wouldn't study at home. This teacher's house is located in the adjacent street to ours and the distance would be something like 150meters at max. I just had to walk 20meters from my house to reach the end of the street and another 30 meters on the main road and another 50-60meters in the next street to reach my tuition teacher's home. She could have easily asked me to go alone and come back but she never did that. She accompanied me every single day for 4 to 5 years. The only reason being I had to walk 30 meters on that main road where there would be buses and lorries. There is more than enough space adjacent to the road where I could have easily avoided them but she never took a chance. Its only in class 5 once I am 10 years old and I had company she allowed me to go alone.Going nuts when she couldn't find meI am a sports maniac and I used to play a lot of cricket as a kid. There used to be a ground at the end of our street and we used to play Cricket there. I went to ground on Saturday and by end of play we made plans for Sunday morning that we would assemble by 9AM and start playing. On Sunday morning I woke up and lazily looked at the wall clock. It was 1030AM and I was very disappointed that I was late to the match. I couldn't find my Mom around so I assumed she was busy and went straight to the ground without informing anyone. My mom comes back only to find out that I was not there. Then she searches all over the place and asks everyone of our neighbors if they saw me. Everyone said "NO" and as a last ditch effort asked our neighbors kid who is one year elder to me to go find me if I was at the ground. This great guy comes back with the info that I was not there at the ground. This is where the whole story went wrong. I was right there in the ground playing cricket and as far as I know this guy never turned up at the ground to check if I was there. So she panicked and sent someone to give an advertisement in the local city cable channel and also a police complaint. After 15-20 mins of this drama I was returning from the ground very casually. I could see from far that something was wrong as there were couple of my neighbors standing outside. All of a sudden someone looks at me and told my mom that I was returning.Mom: "Where did you go ? "Me: "I went to ground."Mom: "But <XYZ> told you were not at ground"Me: "Well, its not my fault"Mom: "I almost gave a police complaint and an advertisement in city cable local channel. Never go anywhere without informing me."I was like "What the hell ? I was right there in ground happily playing cricket and this guy could find me at the ground and all the hell broke loose."At that age, I never thought about what was going through her mind when she couldn't find me. I was all the time thinking about how could that guy not find me at ground. Is he blind ? Did he come to the ground at all ?Class 3(1995-96) English notebookIn school our notebook used to have answers to every single question at the end of every lesson taught by our teacher. There is no other source for the answers other than what is taught by the teacher, which means if I lose it there is no way I could prepare for my exams. Mr. Prakash who taught us social studies during my class 1, also happened to be the English teacher for Class 3 section B. I was in section A and we had a different English teacher. Both the classrooms were adjacent to each other. Deep into the academic year (around Feb) may be he wanted to see what my English teacher taught us, so one fine day he comes in the middle of class and asks me for my English notebook. I handed it to him and totally forgot about it. My mom used to arrange my bag for school according to timetable for the day and she found out that my English notebook is missing. She asked me about the notebook and I was stumped and couldn't remember whether I gave it to someone or misplaced it. Then I went to school and asked everyone in the class whether I gave it to them by any chance. Obviously the answer is no from everyone. I resigned to the fact that I lost it and was in search of a solution to prepare my notes. Remember there were no copy machines during those days. So my private tuition teacher gave us the idea that I take one of the other guys notebook from my class and rewrite all the answers by leaving space for questions because they are anyway there in the textbook. Boom!! I got the notebook from my friend the following day and my mom started writing it during the daytime while I was attending classes. My mom can read and write English but she cannot understand complex sentences. She did it for me because she thought that it would be too much of overhead for me to do it after a long tiring day at school. Apparently I did not realize the importanceDrawing diagrams till class 9In school we have to draw all sorts of diagrams (heart, kidneys, lungs etc). I was never interested in drawing and was adamant that I will not draw diagrams even if it meant losing marks. My mother drew all the diagrams from whenever it started till class 9, not that she intend to spoil me but she was afraid that I might get punished if I don't do the assigned work. I did the work in class 10 because of the board exams. No wonder I drew terribly in class 10 (reflex arc diagram)Final Exam in Class 3 (Match section A with section B)We used to have match the following in the objective section of the exam where we were asked to match section A with section B. In the class 3 final exam, I think it is in Science where I matched B with A instead of A with B. My tuition teacher gave us the news that I lost 6 marks because of that. She also told that the teachers will leave to Kerala the following day (I studied in catholic school where we were taught by teachers from Kerala). It was 530PM and my school is easily 3-4kms from my home located in the adjacent village. The only mode of transport we had in the mid 90's to reach our school was a rickshaw which costed at least 10 Rupees which is a little high given the standards back then. My mom took me to the place where all the teachers stay and requested them to reevaluate given that the existing answers were correct. Now if I look back those 6 marks counts for nothing, but my mom don't know that. All she wants is her kid to do well in studies.If I remember all these things done by my mother, I myself wouldn't have done most of the things. Hats off to all the moms out there.

Which is better, common law or civil law?I’ve just studied the common law and I think it creates more uncertainty in the system. What do you think?Thanks for the A2A. But I think it’s a rather useless exercise in “what-if” to argue which system is better, unless you’re planning to start a country with no prior legal tradition and want to look for a template for your legal system, like shopping for a new car.I’m mostly familiar with the common law system, but have read quite a bit about, and have some experience with, the civil law.I find that the civil law idea of having all the law completely codified, a’la Napoleion’s Code or even farther back, Justinian’s Code of Roman law, provides a false sense of certainty when it comes to making actual decisions.Civil law lawyers and judges may think that the law is all in the books. But it’s not. They are in fact interpreting and applying the law to particular, unique facts every time they make a decision, which is exactly what common-law judges do, too.So in the end, it doesn’t make a lot of difference, dependent as it all is on (A) the shared fundamental social values and current government policies on which the legal system of a given country is based, regardless of whether it is framed as a civil law or common law system; and (B) the particular judge’s understanding of those values and policies.It’s just that I’m more comfortable practicing in a system where we all agree that we are all just muddling along and making it up as we go along (within the framework of existing law, of course — otherwise we have just whim and arbitrary caprice, not law), rather than a system that imagines it is the “summa jurisprudentia” containing EVERYTHING one ever needs to know about the law. BOTH systems, in other words, have to PUT ON THEIR PANTS ONE LEG AT A TIME.An interesting aside, which may even be relevant to the thinking of common-law jurists and commentators versus civil-law ones, would bring in these fascinating discussions of the VERY DIFFERENT development of Enlightenment ideas in the Anglo-Scots legal and philosophical tradition of pragmatism and gradualism, as compared to the grandiose universality of Continental philosophers and in the wake of the French Revolution:Opinion | Two Theories of ChangeA Different Kind of EnlightenmentWhy we must remember the lessons of the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment | Coffee House