In Subject Matters, we reveal the struggles faced by educators who teach subjects such as science, math and English, and the solutions they’ve found.
(CNN) – As history is made every day, history teachers’ subject matter is growing with it – even as the number of classroom hours stays the same.
That ever-expanding content is the crux of the social studies teacher’s dilemma: How to cover every topic with limited class time?
Here are some of the challenges they face in their classrooms.
Cutting back too young
When high school teacher David Plonski mentions the 1860s and 1960s, he expects those dates to trigger different ideas in the minds of his students at Tarboro High School in Tarboro, North Carolina.
In the 1860s, the United States was caught up in the Civil War. The 1960s are remembered for social revolution, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and Beatlemania.
But Plonski notices that some students have a weak sense of time, are unable to picture the different characteristics of those eras and often confuse events a century apart.
At Caprock High School in Amarillo, Texas, teacher Jeff Frazer said he’s surprised by how many of his incoming students know that the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 but don’t know that it was a list of grievances against Great Britain.
“I think they learn information by itself, in isolation,” Frazer said of his students. “But putting the big picture together is not happening.”
And during the comparative religions unit at Rutland Middle School in Rutland, Vermont, Ted Lindgren regularly asks students, “What is Easter about?”
He said they invariably bring up the Easter bunny but don’t know the significance of the holiday to Christianity. It shows a lack of cultural literacy, Lindgren said, that they have to compensate for during class.
“There’s just a lot more to occupy a student’s time today than there was in previous generations,” the eighth-grade teacher said.
High school students’ lack of a historical knowledge base can partially be explained by the decrease in class time spent on social studies at the elementary level. History is not an area that requires testing under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, so it often gets shortchanged, teachers said.
“In a lot of districts, social studies and science have been removed from the curriculum, per se, because of math and language arts testing,” said Gayla Hammer of South Elementary School in Lander, Wyoming.
To help mitigate the problem, Hammer and other teachers said, they use social studies texts within their reading lessons, because reading skills will appear on standardized tests.
Beverly Fanelli, a fifth-grade teacher at Fox Elementary School in Macomb, Michigan, said she approaches social studies as informational reading so she can work it into her language arts curriculum.
“Because we have so much to do and only so much time, wherever we have overlap, I will,” she said.
remember the dates for us was very complicated thing.
I can read about anything but the thing I fear is that I don’t know in history how much is true.But still I love to read history, its like a film or story going in front of my eyes.
aur kia BD Date yad karne ko kahta 
khud ko jo nahi ata hoga na isliyeh 