Going Ape and Having a Cow:

Teenage life in Champaign County and beyond in the 1950s

 

By Karen Klebbe

2006 Summer Fellowship at the Early American Museum

Assessment (Long Version—Option #1)

Oral History:

Another final project option is to have students interview a family member/friend/community member about their experiences in the 1950s regarding the areas evaluated: school, music, leisure, and television.

 

Please reference Alexis Jones’ AHTC lesson plan, Oral Histories in the Classroom (http://www.usd116.org/ProfDev/AHTC/lessons/Alexis/alexis.html)

 

While the above lessons were written with grades 4-8 in mind, the five lessons in What is History? are particularly helpful in teaching students how to conduct successful interviews and can easily be used with high school students with few adaptations.

 

Students should then use the recordings of their interview for the final paper.

 

Final Paper:

Students will write a three-five page paper, comparing and contrasting their interviewee’s 1950s experiences in each of the four evaluated areas to their own.  This paper will have the “skeleton” of a five-paragraph essay, only it will have six main headings:

                                    1. Introduction

                                    2. School

                                    3. Music

                                    4. Leisure

                                    5. Television

                                    6. Conclusion

 

Time should be scheduled in the computer lab once interviews have been completed for writing the paper, as not every student has access to a computer at home.

 

Assessment (Long Version—AP Option #2)

Students will write a three-five page annotated research paper on a topic not mentioned in the kit.  Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Korean War
• Theatre
• Musicals
• Civil Defense/Cold War
• Civil Rights
• Rise of Rock-n-Roll
• Slang
• Women in the workplace: percentage, types of acceptable work, pay
• Women in sports
• TV Commercials--what message were they sending & how?
• History: compare one aspect of history textbooks (gender roles, women, minorities, how Europe is discussed and portrayed, etc...) from the 1950s to current history books: who is discussed and how? who is left out?  what does that tell us about 1950s?
• Sports and television: baseball, boxing, basketball, golf, tennis
• Gender roles as seen in TV and movies
• Tupperware & women in business
• Architecture: the ranch house and domestic architecture
• Levittown & rise of suburbs
• Sci-Fi movies
• Polio & its vaccine in 1955
• African-Americans in Champaign-Urbana in the 1950s

 

Assessment (Short Version)

Students will write an in-class essay answering the following question:

What was the greatest change in teen life between the 1950s and today?
Students are to analyze the artifacts/documents contained in the kit for the purpose of the essay, much like a DBQ.

 

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