My junior year of high school at Pinkerton Academy, I had a great US History teacher. He was my favorite teacher and he was one of the reasons why i chose to pursue the education field. His teaching methods were fun and effective at the same time. Instead of just lecturing, he would involve stories and hands-on projects. Many times he would have the class break into groups to have debates. This way we got to do something other than just listen and take notes. The first half of the year, each month we had a research paper due. Although I am not a fan of research papers, it was another technique to get us out of the classroom and doing something on our own. My favorite part of this class was “The Project”. There were rumors throughout the year about this project and how terrible it was. However it was the most fun project I’ve done. It was semester long, and we had to break into groups of three or four. We had to choose three decades and basically just study the events that occured. First part, we had to make a 150 slide powerpoint of just the pictures of events. Second, then we had to make a time line with more details of specific events. Third, we had to create a newspaper and write articles for 30 events. Lastly, we had to give a 45 min presentation. But for the presentation we had the choice to decide what we wanted to do and we could be as creative as we wanted. So our group came up with a carnival setting and each game had something to do with the events and the class got to learn about each event with the games. This project was well worth it because it took us away from normal note taking and had us researching, learning on our own and we got to take the role as the teacher for the day.