US History question

[Carrie12345]

I'm a bit intimidated by planning US History.  I grew up in NJ, where 2 years of US History were required.  It seems most other areas (and colleges) only require one.  I would prefer to have my kids do it in 1 to make more room for other options, but I can't stop hemming and hawing.

 

I don't remember having an enormous amount of busy work to stretch the content to 2 years.  In fact, I remember US2 as being TOUGH!  (US1, not so much. Probably because we had that drilled every year from elementary on.) And I took a half credit Vietnam class later, so it isn't as if we dug real deep into that in the US class. There were still many things about WWII and other events that I didn't learn until I was an adult.

 

Basically, I have it in my head that US History is BIG, complex, and barely manageable in 2 years, and can't figure out how people are smooshing it into 1.  But it's obviously being done.

 

How badly am I overthinking this?  My own kids have less academic experience with early US History than I did by high school, but we have gone through it before, so they're not clueless at this point.  Is that maybe the key? That the expectation of years of overview makes it easier to get through in less time later?  

 

It just seems like such a LARGE difference.

[shinyhappypeople]

I'm a bit intimidated by planning US History.  I grew up in NJ, where 2 years of US History were required.  It seems most other areas (and colleges) only require one.  I would prefer to have my kids do it in 1 to make more room for other options, but I can't stop hemming and hawing.

 

I don't remember having an enormous amount of busy work to stretch the content to 2 years.  In fact, I remember US2 as being TOUGH!  (US1, not so much. Probably because we had that drilled every year from elementary on.) And I took a half credit Vietnam class later, so it isn't as if we dug real deep into that in the US class. There were still many things about WWII and other events that I didn't learn until I was an adult.

 

Basically, I have it in my head that US History is BIG, complex, and barely manageable in 2 years, and can't figure out how people are smooshing it into 1.  But it's obviously being done.

 

How badly am I overthinking this?  My own kids have less academic experience with early US History than I did by high school, but we have gone through it before, so they're not clueless at this point.  Is that maybe the key? That the expectation of years of overview makes it easier to get through in less time later?  

 

It just seems like such a LARGE difference.

 

In California (and most places, probably) it's compacted into one year and our kids suffer for it.  It's basically impossible to get everything that's important in within 2 semesters.  Speaking from my own experience as a student who learned a "smooshed" version of US history, a lot is skipped or glossed over along the way.  We never really went beyond WW2.  So I had no understanding of how America contributed to the rebuilding of Europe after WW2 (I always thought Europeans just sort of went back to business as usual), no clue about how and why NATO came to be until pretty recently,  nothing at all about the Korean War, McCarthyism, or Vietnam.  I had a vague understanding of those as historical references, but no real understanding of them.  I think it's absolutely worth it to take two years.  

[Janeway]

I went to four different high schools in 11th grade, which was US history year, so I always assumed my gaps were because of that. 

 

BUT, no matter how much time you spent, even if you did history fulltime for four years, there will still be a ton to cover. Remember, there are people out there with doctorates in history who go on and spend their lives studying it even further and doing more and more research.