LC History

Edja

Hi All

Just wondering, what LC history books would you recommend? I'm just out of the dip, know Sweet FA about the LC syllabus, and am wondering what I should be looking at?

Cheers
Edja

alabandical

Obviously depends on the school and topics but Modern Ireland and Modern Europe from Gill and Macmillan are fairly solid (though they need a good bit of backing up with your own questions and activities and that). For the new doc question, Edco's book looks pretty good.

shtopthelights

If you haven't already, I'd suggest you get a copy of the syllabus itself and a copy of the 'L.C. Guidelines for History teachers' -the latter has suggested time allocations for the different aspects of the course and good general advice. You can order these from the government publications sales office for a small fee -they may also be available in book shops.

scoil.net.ie/hist has some useful stuff too.

I may, if I'm successful in my forthcoming interview, be teaching L.C. history too, little worried that I'll be overwhelmed as I'm not a history specialist so my subject knowledge needs quite a bit of development.... any tips (in general) from History teachers would be very welcome!

Dionysus

Edja wrote: »

Hi All

Just wondering, what LC history books would you recommend? I'm just out of the dip, know Sweet FA about the LC syllabus, and am wondering what I should be looking at?

Cheers
Edja

alabandical wrote: »

Obviously depends on the school and topics but Modern Ireland and Modern Europe from Gill and Macmillan are fairly solid (though they need a good bit of backing up with your own questions and activities and that). For the new doc question, Edco's book looks pretty good.

The class I'm teaching had Modern Ireland by Gerard Brockie and Raymond Walsh. It's awful. Every single time they refer to the modern Irish state as the "Irish Republic" I cringe. This is meant to be a history book, not a BBC report. Let me be clear about this: they are not referring to the aims of the Easter Rising or the first Dáil but are referring to the post-1949 state thus. And then this undereducated nonsense of referring to Northern Ireland as "the province" is more of the same historical illiteracy.

If anybody can recommend an alternative, I'm open to it. I'm at the stage of thinking I'll just ditch the book and give my own notes to students.

Dionysus

Anyway, the reason I'm resurrecting this thread is this:

Has the Northern Ireland Topic on the LC been changed to a solely document question since 2010? In other words, my students will not have to write an essay on it as they had to before?

Thanks.

starre

The Document question for 2010 and 2011 is on Northern Ireland.

For 2012 and 2013 it will be on European retreat from empire.

It changes every two years. If you want to keep teaching the Northern Ireland topic for an essay question you can.

Dionysus

starre wrote: »

If you want to keep teaching the Northern Ireland topic for an essay question you can.

Thanks very much. If the North is going to come up as a documents question in June, what do you mean by this?

Do most teachers just avoid teaching the topic that the documents question is on? I've just finished covering NI so now they could well answer an essay on it in the exam, having written a few essays so far. I'm not too sure about just how much work we could do to revise the documents question. Any ideas?

starre

My apologies for not being clear, I meant from next year on, if you like teaching the Northern Ireland topic, you can teach it as it will be back on the essay section of the paper.

It won't be on the paper as an essay question this year. It will be next year.

All teachers will have taught the topic this year, for the document section. Not all will teach it for next year.

No offense, this is a genuine question, have you read the syllabus and looked at the exam papers?