We had in-person classes for the first week of the semester. On the first day, we didn’t exactly follow the spacing guidelines of the seating chart but we eventually got it. Both days we went around the room to learn about each other and each other names. Professor Whitaker, wanting to learn everyone’s names in the first week, went around testing her knowledge after each row. Many of my classmates were either history majors or secondary ed history majors. Because of the Coronavirus, the college experience and structure has been constantly changing. During the first day of class, we talked about how coronavirus has affected us, either sharing what we did over quarantine, our concerns about what will happen, even placing bets on how long it will take for Temple to shut down. Almost the whole class has had an experience of what “normal” college life is, but there was a freshman who shared she felt that everything just keeps getting pushed back, I remember relating to that feeling.
After our casual discussions about ourselves and coronavirus, we changed course to talk about what this semester of Historian’s Craft will look like by going through the syllabus. Professor Whitaker explained how normally this class would focus on some event in history, or each student would pick one… I’m not really sure, but the important part was that it’s different this year because we are living through a historical event, so the class will focus on Coronavirus.
Then we discussed what history is. Common words were the past, study, and time. We made a big word cloud of words that come to mind when we think of history and made a single sentence to describe what history is. I think it was something like “history is the study of past events and how they impact our present.”
On the second day, I think, we had discussions on what matters to history. We applied it to Confederate statues: when and why were they put up, what message they were meant to send, and what message do they send now? We also discuss how the vandalism that happens to these statues becomes a part of their history. The protests following George Floyd’s death vandalized many of these Confederate statues so we talked about, would removing these states be “erasing history?” We ultimately ruled no, getting rid of these states is not erasing history but getting rid of what the statues meant and promoted, white supremacy.