Kristy+Thurrell+(History+and+Social+Studies)

This is my second year teaching at Solebury, and my second year teaching in general. I graduated from Hamilton College in Clinton, NY in the spring of 2008, and was lucky enough to find a job at Solebury right away teaching US History to juniors, Current Events to 7th graders, and a series of electives (one per trimester) for (mostly) seniors. This year my elective courses are The Vietnam War: The Importance of Learning from the Past, World War II: The Moral Dilemas of the Good War, and 20th Century African American History: Civil Rights. At Solebury, I also am one of the faculty advisors to both the Diversity Club and Spectrum (our GSA). I also do duty in the girls dorm on campus one night a week. I also have the perk of living on campus with my lovely dog Hailey.

My educational loves are many. I obviously love history, and I especially love "modern" history which I define as anything during and/or after the presidency of FDR (my favorite US president). I also am interested in Middle Eastern history, Indian history, and my latest independent study project is to become more familiar with post-colonial Africa (to be honest I haven't made much progress on this with teaching taking up most of my time.) I also love communication and the written and oral presentation of information. (See my posts in the language discussion on the ning if you're interested in more). I love to read and wish that I had more time to do more pleasure reading (I define pleasure reading as anything that's not a homework assignment for one of my classes). I also love women's studies and sexuality studies. I have an unofficial minor in these to accompany my history concentration, and each trimester in college I made a point to take at least one course that had to do with feminism and/or queer theory. One of my favorite things about Solebury is that I have the ability to engage with all of my different academic loves.

Being 25 I feel like a "sorta" member of the web 2.0 club. I've had Facebook since it began, and have watched it change from something very similar to a yearbook into the social networking phenomenon that it is now- a lot of which I still don't know how to use. I only got Twitter when I started doing PLP, I've never heard of things like delicious or diggo, so while in some ways I'm more familiar in general with these types of technology because of my age, I'm not exactly sure that I'm anywhere near literate.

I am really excited about the things that I'm learning in PLP, and the ability to integrate these technologies, and education about them, into my classroom.