Books and Goals
Well I’m already screwing up my “weekly update” so we’re off to a roaring start with this project!
This week I will be discussing the thought process that led to the book I purchased and what some of my goals are for the beginning of this project/journey/training/wordtodescribeprogress.
First the book. The book I chose is called The Unfinished Nation: A concise history of the American People, Seventh Edition by Alan Brinkley. Here is the general breakdown of how I arrived at this book. First thing I did was do a general search on what the most popular and highly regarded text books are for AP US History. Usually these sites would list roughly the same 10-20 text books but the one that always stood out is a book called The American Pageant. So of course I thought to myself, “alright let’s get the latest and greatest history textbook I can find” The American Pageant on Amazon for last years edition costs $135. This then gave me flashbacks to college and how much text books were. So I brewed on this choice for a bit of time, did some more research, and came to the conclusion that I probably shouldn’t start with the latest and greatest. Given I am just starting and it has been quite a while since I’ve studied US history, I figured what I should actually aim for is more of a refresher book and then work my way up to something like The American Pageant. Also I figure that I can save money by not getting the most recent edition of the book, since by the time I’m in a position to teach other, those books will be one to several editions behind.
I found a great site (https://blog.prepscholar.com/what-are-the-best-ap-us-history-textbooks) that gave 4 book recommendations and what the books are good for. Aside from naming The American Pageant as the most popular book, the site also listed the best book for self studying, which is called Making America, and the best budget book which is called The Unfinished Nation. At first I thought, “well I’m self studying so Making America it is!!!!” and then I saw the $160 price tag and reconsidered. The Unfinished Nation has really good reviews, and only costs $35. At this point you may be thinking I’m being a bit too harsh on the costs of these books when considering what I’m going to choose to study. I figure at this stage of the game I just need something to get ye olde history muscles going and that I should work my way up to the bigger and more grandiose books. So once I am done studying The Unfinished Nation then I will move on to Making America and then leapfrogging to The American Pageant. This gives me a pretty clear path on what books I will be reading and also give me the opportunity to more directly compare the contents and angle each book takes against each other. There is a 4th book on the site that is recommended for AP Test prep called America’s History. Directly looking at test prep is something I will not be looking into until I feel I have a solid base on the subject material. So as of right now I have The Unfinished Nation sitting in front of me waiting to be read. It comes in at a buttery 800 pages so this will be quite the undertaking for my ADHD and slightly dyslexic brain. Hopefully in reading it I will be able to rediscover the feeling I had reading history textbooks on my own will back in middle school and college. It’s kinda the big wall I need to break down at the moment.
So now for goals. I’ve always had trouble making goals through out my entire life. I think the issue is I always think way too far ahead when creating my goals. I was talking about this with a friend of mine. He asked me what my goals are for the project and immediately I thought, “become a history tutor.” But I already know that that’s the penultimate goal. So I dialed it back and said, “finish reading the text book.” My friend told me the goal was already way out of scope and that I should make something more granular and obtainable in the near future. He suggested something like writing summary of the the Civil War. While that is a bit far out as far as a goal, I think I can work with the idea. Instead of summarizing the civil war, I could say summarize the chapter that I read, or even just a section of a chapter that I particularly enjoyed. Aside from that, I think I want to utilize my youtube channel, which currently is dormant (but does have 55 subs!!) in terms of uploaded content beside the occasional Drummania video, to maybe give short 5-10 minute stream of consciousness lessons. This way I can become better at orating the material and process the material in my mind. It can also lead into helping me learn a little bit about video production and editing. So let’s list out a few goals right now:
Get through a chapter in The Unfinished Nation
Summarize a section of a chapter in The Unfinished Nation. Post summary in a blog post.
Give weekly updates on my progress on the blog.
That seems like a good list of goals for the time being. Once I can get this process down then I can start looking into more long term and slightly more complex goals. Which I will add in a future blog post. I am taking this week off of work in the form of a “staycation” so I plan on using some of the free time to work on studying.
Well that about does it for this update. Please stay safe out there and be kind to people.
