Teaching What Really Happened and American history textbooks can differ across the country, in ways that are shaded by partisan politics

One of the growing concerns for me, as a future educator, is this situation where the younger generations have easy access to an immense amount of information; accurate or not. While in this day and age, the internet has given them access, it has also created this situation where students see these social media posts about historical events and just believe that information. Some don’t bother to do their own research and create their own opinion based on the different perspectives and resources they could find. It’s also very hard to even find the trustworthy sources that give them the information accurately. I think that a new role has fallen on teachers to teach students from a very young age, to not believe everything they see on the internet and do their own research to find accurate information. This ties in with both readings this week because it happens within our own textbooks; it is all about perspectives. It’s important to instill in our students the idea that any information they read about has different perspectives. Teaching critical thinking in an age where crazy amounts of inaccurate information is out there posing as the “right” answer is incredibly important. The picture I found is a meme that was created in order to shed some light on that; teaching our students how to think and form their own opinions based on accurate depictions of historical events. It is our responsibility to teach our students to not be satisfied with one source and to broaden their sources so they can come to their own conclusions using accurate information.