Schema?(Week 1)

• Write about your experience with U.S. History. What schema do you have to help you learn this semester?

My experience in U.S. History has only been about one year, my junior year of high school with my teacher Ms. Bolthouse. Modernization was creating urban cities and a better living condition for most people. My classroom experience was very interesting because my teacher taught in a visual way. She would always show video clips and also work in groups. Many of the times we would also do presentations in class so that everyone would be able to remember what we had been studying that week. What I can recall the most were the images of what we were studying and the big cartoons that we would have to analyze to describe what the meaning is. I noticed how even though its the same context of reading from high school and college now that there are major differences in how they are taught to students. This is because many teachers in college not only give you the good side of U.S. History but also let you know the negative sides of the government. What I can remember from learning in my high school history class was that, Industrialization was a more economic change and had to do with technology innovation and increase of manufacturing. The U.S started to form factories and that was when a lot of the people started to move from rural areas to an urban environment. the working conditions were not great and there was lot of child labor at the time as young as eleven years old and poor working conditions and the misuse of the mechanics and many people will get injuries and even at times death. A lot of the hygiene would cause health problems for  the workers. We talked about the Great Depression and how the U.S. economy had fallen down because the stock market crashed. During that time social security wasn't established and that was when they formed the Social Security Act to establish a economic security. People were doing "buy now pay later". I also learned about Rockefeller one of the most powerful and wealthy man of the time, he controlled the railroads which the transportation method and he taxed very high so the producers and sellers had barely enough profit from it. I also learned about the Jim Crow laws that were explained to me as segregation of blacks and whites. I can recall the court case of Plessy v. Ferguson were it was okay to be "separate but equal" meaning that the U.S decided segregation was going to be taken into action. The classroom settings for whites was that there was one teacher and nor more than twenty students with new materials, and they had many more resources in contrast to African Americans who had one teacher teach more than a hundred students in a crowded house. Many times grades were combined because they did not have enough money to separate the children by age group.


 My schema to help me learn this semester will be to keep up with my readings in history class. This will be beneficial for myself because I will be up to date with the lectures in class and will be able to write more descriptively in my blogs and also have more evidence supporting my claims. I will also take legible organized notes so that later on when I have tests or quizzes about any topic I can go back to them and not be confused about phrases that i had written but instead write complete thoughts so I'll be able to understand it fairly easy. On my blogs I will write a lot of evidence of what I need to know for the class so when I need to study or refresh my memory of a concept I can look back at previous blogs. I will make sure that I annotate as much as I can on the readings, this way I can check important dates in history and remember to use them for a prompt if it is useful. Overall, if I am consistent with all of these ideas I will be set for this semester.