What+could+have+been

Rome: Rome, the Eternal City, which unfortunately had to be taught with a very finite amount of time. I had a lot of big ideas for my Roman unit that I wasn’t able to squeeze in any of my other units. As the semester went on and I kept thinking of new projects that I wanted to try and do, and usually I kept saying “Well I can probably do that for my Rome project.” I thought about doing a talk show where the students again had to address the different themes we looked at and work them into a dialogue that could resemble anything from Jerry Springer, to The Late Show, to Larry King. With all the practice they had during the course of the semester, I thought my students could probably create some very good and creative shows. I also thought about doing a promotional poster or commercial for key emperors. These could take the form of a campaign style, a sales pitch, or my personal favorite a sports agent/boxing promoter format. I had thought about doing another opened project similar to the Mesopotamia project to see if I would get fewer posters and reports now that they had been exposed to a variety of other forms of assessment. In the long run however, all these ideas had to stay just that, ideas. I had just enough time to cover the big ideas and topics and then my semester was over. For me to take the week to week and a half that these projects would have taken, would have meant that I didn’t teach a number of things. This could have left the projects looking very similar to those of the Near East unit, meaning little depth and learning. I decided that, at least for one semester, I would bypass the project for this unit in favor of more instruction on my part. While this was not ideal, I think it did provide the students with a better understanding of ancient Rome.