Mr Popkins Classroom

Every history teacher has their own unique way of making history engaging. From a young age students have been taught history and after a few repeating lectures the topics become boring to most. For me American and World history were long boring subjects about the past until my junior and senior year with Mrs. Popkins. Mrs. Popkins taught American history to juniors and World history to seniors at Norwalk High School in Iowa. She came into the classroom everyday with an energetic, happy, and enthused vibe about history. By entering the classroom that way she made the class more enjoyable. Before each class would begin, Mrs. Popkins would introduce the subject with an ice breaker, usually a video or an activity involving movement. This structure quickly attracted the attention of the students and with the attention on her, Mrs. Popkins would smoothly transition the class into the topic for the day. Her nonverbal body language and her enthusiastic attitude altered my feelings about history and teaching …show more content…
This made her class engaging at all times. Each day there was more than one activity planned but the activities were never random. The new activity reinforced the previous and added more information which made learning and comprehending the information effortless. The one I remember the most and hope to use later in my teaching career involved pictures, quotes, and facts spread out across the room, the class divided into groups, and timed on how quickly each group could piece the information together. The tricky part was that not all of the clues were meant to work together, it all depended on what topic you had to start with. This game forced the class to move, interact, communicate, and recall the information taught to them. Her teaching style made me learn to love history and see how each small factor affected the larger population as a whole which is why Mrs. Popkins was the best