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The Years Are Building Blocks: Part Four

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This is a guest post by Drew, who currently teaches 7th Grade Texas History in the San Antonio area, where he has taught since 2004.

Shout out to my college roommates for always giving me a hard time about being cultured.  Was I full of myself, or what?  Nothing goes together better than Austin and music.

8. Music – I actually played Ted Nugent’s ‘Great White Buffalo’ in class because the song tells the story of buffalo from the Native American perspective.  I didn’t think much of it until our 3-on-3 basketball tournament yesterday at TAKS celebration.  One of the teams, 3 girls from one of my classes, made t-shirts at home and their team name was….White Buffaloes. I wonder if they’ll wear their shirts to the Ted Nugent concert on July 4 at the Sunken Gardens in San Antonio?  Anyway, they lost to the Skittles.  Next year, I’ll figure out how to use ‘Hey Man, Nice Shot’ by Filter or maybe ‘Slam’ by David Sanborn.

9. Speaking of Austin – For the fifth year in a row, I have a student attending a social studies summer camp in Austin.  Before you run off laughing imagining a bunch of students sitting around a campfire with their nose in a book, just listen.  This camp is an interactive five day adventure featuring the sights and sounds of our fair capital city. The students come from around the state and get to meet the people working in their state congressman’s office, if not the representative themselves.  From the archive room of the LBJ Presidential Library where they see formerly top-secret documents being catalogued to McKinney Roughs to the Texas State Cemetery, the students get to breathe in our wonderful state history.  All of my students who go, come back and thank me for recommending them.  Students as young as 4th grade attend a camp in Ft. Worth, 7th graders in Austin, and 8th graders go to Houston for a Science intensive week. Shameless plug: www.educationinaction.org.

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