Two Sundays

It's that time of year again-- everything is busy! And working with Chicago History Fair is no exception. For some reason, my post about last Sunday was never published, so I'll include both weeks in this post, as I had similar experiences both weeks.

The students who are working with CHF have end of February deadlines for the first round of submissions, so as you can imagine, I have been busy helping these students work on structuring their papers and projects instead of helping with the research projects. One of the general problems I've encountered is that students are not sure how to write a thesis statement. Many of them have rubrics for how a thesis should work that looks like a flow chart. Beginning with their "main idea" they have to fill in three boxes for their "supporting ideas." While this formula is fine, many students can fill in the boxes but have trouble with writing the actual thesis statement. When I first started helping one student, a high school junior, she many "supporting ideas" about her topic (the Chicago Fire), but she could not think of the "main idea." I then realized that these students have just spent several weeks steeped in the details of research but they rarely think about the "big picture idea." So while this particular student had all the dates and concrete details about the Chicago Fire, she had no concept of what it meant for Chicago or the consequences for the future. For me, the most exciting part about studying history has always been the over-arching themes about the past that connect to today. I found, once again, that I took for granted the ability to study something in detail and then make general conclusions. This skill, something that now comes easily to me, is a critical thinking ability that unfortunately many of the students I've worked with have not developed. In order to help my student working on the Chicago Fire, I had her write down the consequences of the Fire from details she had already studied. Together we then researched the possible ways to connect this idea with the general theme of CHF, which is revolution, reaction, and reform. After spending some time thinking, she at once thought about how much of the city had to be rebuilt, telling me that the Fire must have had an impact on the architecture for late nineteenth century Chicago, meaning although the Fire was a negative thing, it actually was a moment of reform. I was so proud that she made this conclusion after much effort!

Yesterday, I mainly helped students who were doing visual presentations. One of the students that I had helped in a previous week (her topic is Bozo the Clown and Chicago children's television broadcasting) showed up again with lots of work already done. She had come such a long way from having to change her topic several times. We worked on formatting her PowerPoint and choosing YouTube clips for the presentation. In little over a month, many of the students have gone from no previous research experience in history to full projects- how exciting!

Next week begins the first round of judging and my first time as a CHF judge. We will begin with the high school division research papers.