Andy Matuschak famously pointed out that [people who write extensively about notetaking rarely have a serious context for use](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zUMFE66dxeweppDvgbNAb5hukXzXQu8ErVNv). A popular Reddit thread awhile back [complained about all the people talking about how to use Obsidian for content creation](https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/x2d7p1/psa_were_not_all_productivity_content_creators/) instead of all the other things people like to take notes about. And people periodically ask me whether I'll teach my students how to use Obsidian. Given all that, I thought I'd talk about I use Obsidian for my day job. As a disclaimer, I do have to admit that IT blocked Obsidian about a week into work, which was _super annoying_, but since I still managed to download all the files from my vault and use them anyway, and I still have access thru my mobile devices, I still feel justified in talking about it for the Obsidian Roundup. If anything, it's proof of concept for how future-proof my notes are, haha. ## Lesson Planning Unlike most teachers around the world, my district provides me with a generally decent curriculum, so planning is _relatively_ straightforward. I always know what topics I'm supposed to be teaching in a given week and what the point of the lessons are supposed to be. I'm always provided with resources for learning the content and sample lessons to use as a base for my students. The curriculum is provided as a Word document, so I can add comments to it and edit it as needed, which is nice even though Office products get a bad reputation in our circles. Since the alternative is for it to be on a static website, or a PDF, or have it tucked away in a content management system that I can't edit or comment on or make copies of, or only get a paper copy, I'm fine with it. I don't dislike Word at all – it's very good at what it does, which is be a high-fidelity way of rendering what something will look like when printed, and since I print out paper copies of most assignments for my students, this is better than markdown for that purpose. I don't need LaTeX to teach high school social studies. That would be like driving a formula 1 race car to buy groceries. In a similar vein, I don't need a zettelkasten to plan out 2-3 hours worth of lessons a week. I don't do a lot of lecturing; mostly, I'm putting together assignments geared at teaching my students how to understand a particular thing. Although there are formal lesson planning worksheets that float around the internet, and student teachers are often forced to fill them out, most professional teachers in public schools near me only do that sort of thing once or twice a year when they're being formally observed by their bosses – and it has to be handed in using their template. Most people get by with a powerpoint presentation, or a couple of quick notes on a calendar, or just a collection of worksheets with a sticky note on top. What I found myself doing was writing out a plan of what I wanted to do, and linking to the files I wanted to use at each stage. It helped to have all of my files and notes in the same place, where I could easily attach them and file them next to each other. The primary advantage Obsidian has when using this method is that it is _fast,_ and that when you change the name of another file, Obsidian notices and your links don't break. [ ![## 0.1 World Religions - Vocabulary: prophet, scripture - [[0.1 Religious Roundtable Activity.docx]] is ready to go as the activity worksheet. I shouldn't need to collect this; they can use this as an "outside source" for the graded SAQ in 1.1 - [[0.1 Religious Roundtable.pptx]] is the directions and prompts. ## 1.1 Developments in East Asia - Vocabulary: Sinification, bureaucracy - Content: [[1.1a Diffusion of Chinese Culture.docx]] - Assessment: [[1.1b Gunpowder SAQ (GR).docx]] - Here's a good [guide on SAQs](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1C2CUZOByPWrmiH_DdfLD95P0ZkKFLfWTrB8G22QmtWc/edit#slide=id.gf2bdfeef0d_3_0) - Extension: Students create an infographic (by hand or on the computer) creatively illustrating the process of Sinification in E. Asia during the late post-classical period: [[02 ext-hw one-pager.docx]] for Sinification. ## 1.2 Developments in Dar al-Islam - Vocabulary: syncretism, caliphate - This is a great opportunity to reference Black Panther and get the Islamic elements and the cultural diffusion into West Africa and such. See if I can dig those references up but it really can be just a slide. - Students should [skim-read (not annotate!) this entire entire reading about the Mamluk sultanate](https://ancienthistory.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1312390?webSiteCode=SLN_HANC&token=7339EE77E508FA904B3B6238313CE9A8&casError=False) (it's got some great compare/contrast with European and Japanese feudalism that will be useful later) and then each student should be assigned a character to write a journal entry from the perspective of (each person should get assigned to 2 students who should work together to ensure they are _not_ writing about the same thing): - al-Nair Muammad ibn Qalawun - a 17 year old _awlad al-nas_ - Qalawun - Baybars I - Shajar al Durr - ann Armenian baron/ess - al-Ashraf Khalil - Hulagu Khan - Abu'l-Qasim Ahmad al-Mustansir - Berke Khan - a Frankish Captain - a Hospitaler knight - A _barid_ courier - Assessment: Students use question stems from Bloom’s Taxonomy list, and design five of their own multiple choice questions **assessing** understanding of motivations behind the spread of Islam, which ensure that students can explain how belief and their practices affected society in the period from c. 1200 to c.1450, as well as the causes and effects of the rise of Islamic states over time and effects of intellectual innovation in Dar al-Islam. **Question: do we have software that will let them turn these into a functional question bank?** ](Substack/Attachments/17db9062-ce4d-49b7-ba1b-0639d842623c_778x1001.png "## 0.1 World Religions - Vocabulary: prophet, scripture - [[0.1 Religious Roundtable Activity.docx]] is ready to go as the activity worksheet. I shouldn't need to collect this; they can use this as an "outside source" for the graded SAQ in 1.1 - [[0.1 Religious Roundtable.pptx]] is the directions and prompts. ## 1.1 Developments in East Asia - Vocabulary: Sinification, bureaucracy - Content: [[1.1a Diffusion of Chinese Culture.docx]] - Assessment: [[1.1b Gunpowder SAQ (GR).docx]] - Here's a good [guide on SAQs](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1C2CUZOByPWrmiH_DdfLD95P0ZkKFLfWTrB8G22QmtWc/edit#slide=id.gf2bdfeef0d_3_0) - Extension: Students create an infographic (by hand or on the computer) creatively illustrating the process of Sinification in E. Asia during the late post-classical period: [[02 ext-hw one-pager.docx]] for Sinification. ## 1.2 Developments in Dar al-Islam - Vocabulary: syncretism, caliphate - This is a great opportunity to reference Black Panther and get the Islamic elements and the cultural diffusion into West Africa and such. See if I can dig those references up but it really can be just a slide. - Students should [skim-read (not annotate!) this entire entire reading about the Mamluk sultanate](https://ancienthistory.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1312390?webSiteCode=SLN_HANC&token=7339EE77E508FA904B3B6238313CE9A8&casError=False) (it's got some great compare/contrast with European and Japanese feudalism that will be useful later) and then each student should be assigned a character to write a journal entry from the perspective of (each person should get assigned to 2 students who should work together to ensure they are _not_ writing about the same thing): - al-Nair Muammad ibn Qalawun - a 17 year old _awlad al-nas_ - Qalawun - Baybars I - Shajar al Durr - ann Armenian baron/ess - al-Ashraf Khalil - Hulagu Khan - Abu'l-Qasim Ahmad al-Mustansir - Berke Khan - a Frankish Captain - a Hospitaler knight - A _barid_ courier - Assessment: Students use question stems from Bloom’s Taxonomy list, and design five of their own multiple choice questions **assessing** understanding of motivations behind the spread of Islam, which ensure that students can explain how belief and their practices affected society in the period from c. 1200 to c.1450, as well as the causes and effects of the rise of Islamic states over time and effects of intellectual innovation in Dar al-Islam. **Question: do we have software that will let them turn these into a functional question bank?** ") When I lost the ability to launch Obsidian on my work computer, all the files were still there. I still had all the `.docx` worksheets I'd put together, all the `.ppt` presentations I'd prepared, and all the paragraphs explaining to myself what to use them for. I couldn't automatically launch the files from notepad the way I could with Obsidian, but that's an inconvenience, not a crisis, and in the grand scheme of "inconvenienced by education-related software" it's barely even noticeable compared to not being able to input attendance from days I was absent, having to manually enter grades from a google form because none of the 3 databases hosting critical student data talk to each other, or the inability to combine different halves of classes I teach so I can make a coherent seating chart with all the students on it at once 🙃 ## Intermingled Notes The second advantage of Obsidian is dataview. Although I could only access it using my phone, at the end of my lesson planning sheet where I kept all my ideas for how to teach different topics, I had a dataview query that listed every file I had tagged `#teaching` – most of which were highlights imported from things I read in Readwise Reader. This meant I didn't have to keep careful track of which things I read were for different things and neatly file articles away. I can just annotate something with a note like "oh I could use this for `#teaching` the unit on the Mamluk Sultanate; what if I had students write a journal entry from this guy's point of view?" or "this is a nice point about classroom management techniques, I should remember it when I go back to `#teaching`" – and I'd have it all neatly tucked in with the rest of my plans and notes... even though that same article might have also had an annotation like "this bit about young slave soldiers reminds me of how `[[Chinese criminals were sometimes tattooed and conscripted]]` didn't I write something like that the `[[tattoos newsletter]]`"? or "The Mamluks taking out the Krak de Chevaliers is really interesting, but I should `#research` whether the Knights Hospitallers held the castle with only male knights or if there were women there too." A lot of the things I read serve multiple purposes, and teaching notes are only a tiny subset of my knowledge vault, at least for now. If I ever wind up teaching another subject that I need to research, like psychology or cybersecurity, I'll probably add in subtags like `#teaching/cybersecurity` or `#teaching/classMgmt` but for now I don't have an overwhelming number of notes that are directly relevant to teaching. Something like a zettelkasten is useful for researchers, but most teachers don't have time to _research_ how to be a better teacher. It's something you mostly learn by doing, and watching other people, at least in my experience. And no amount of writing down advice like "it's very important to give students timely feedback" is going to actually make it _easier_ to give students timely feedback. ### Background Knowledge Still, although my district does provide me with a wealth of materials and references to help make it easier for me to jump right into teaching content I'm not intimately familiar with, it's never my _goal_ to be mediocre. Having more knowledge about the subject than my students is always beneficial, because if they ask a question about something they couldn't find in the provided materials, I prefer to be able to answer it. Plus, I hate looking ignorant when colleagues expect me to know things that are "common knowledge" among people interested in the topics I've been assigned to teach. Most of my personal knowledge about history is the stuff I write about online; Neolithic cultures, rural and nomadic cultures, non-western cultures, cultures so old we don't know much about them. Unlike a lot of the older generation of men who make up my mental image of history enthusiasts, I don't enjoy learning about of war, much less the minutiae of how battles were fought. Left to my own devices – as I was while out on childrearing leave – I tend to care about the role of women, of marriage, of friendship, of toys... etc. None of that is ever tested on national standardized tests. Professionally, I'm now expected to know about stuff that happened after 1200, stuff mostly centered around large-scale cultural diffusion, invasions, major technological innovations, etc. My curriculum doesn't leave a lot of time for [deep dives into scurvy](https://newsletter.eleanorkonik.com/scurvy/) %% ( [[2021-06-08 Scurvy]] ) %%, so I basically had to go back to basics in terms of learning things relevant to my job. I don't really mind — the Mamluk Sultanate is cool, and it's fun to have opportunities to slide in myths about [the domestication of the potato](https://newsletter.eleanorkonik.com/potatoes/) %% ( [[2022-02-28 Potatoes]] ) %% even if it's not technically a tested subject — but it required a very different kind of studying and learning than I've done in awhile, because the AP World History curriculum selects for an understanding of broad trends and major events over the course of many years, rather than following my usual habit of diving deep on obscure things like, say, [the role of princesses in Mesopotamia](https://newsletter.eleanorkonik.com/ancient-princesses-ambassador/). The thing is, though, that since I don't need to extensively source background knowledge I'm acquiring in case students ask me a hard question, and it's more important that I have _exposure_ than _mastery_ to these concepts, I mostly haven't been taking notes on the stuff I read for this purpose... because notes aren't going to help me _remember_. That's not why I take notes; that's not what my Obsidian is for. I'm not the one who has to sit for the AP exam, after all. My Obsidian files are _working_ documents. And for teaching, most of my job isn't planning or creating... it's managing, grading, explaining, providing, organizing, and, honestly, walking. But for the things that Obsidian is useful for, I vastly prefer it to OneNote, if only because OneNote, like Logseq and other outliners, seems to care very deeply about dating my notes... which I find immensely distracting, for reasons I explained in my article about [when themed logs are more useful than daily notes](https://eleanorkonik.com/themed-logs-not-daily-notes/) %% ( [[2022-06-16 When Themed Logs are More Useful than Daily Notes]] ) %%. I also really hate being able to write anywhere on the page, and most of the other "features" it provides. Headings and paragraphs in a Markdown file are about as simple and straightforward as a big desk calendar, which is frankly what I use for the rest of my planning. I collect assignments in manila folders, I write homework assignments on a whiteboard. I don't need a lot of technology to do my job, but sometimes, it does help.