Study Aids For Cset Social Science 1-3

[TeacherGroupie]

DanteLover, there's reason to believe that the plus marks parcel the score ranges into quartiles: roughly, up to 25%, up to 50%, up to 75%, 75% and over. In other words, if 74% of available points correct is three plus marks, so is 51% of points - and there's quite a difference between the two.

If you're pretty comfortable with the timeline of English/American/world literature, try looking up various favorite works of literature on Wikipedia or Answers.com: typical entries should mention at least something about the historical, economic, and social milieu out of which a given work arises. (Les Miserables and A Tale of Two Cities both center on the time of the French Revolution, which happens to be the background that's required for the document-based question in the sample set on the CSET Web site. Prussia in that question is the German-speaking chunk of eastern Poland, in the lower left-hand corner of the Baltic Sea, from which Germany historically derived its hardest-posteriored military commanders - if you were hiring mercenaries in the 18th and 19th centuries, you wanted Prussian ones; these facts might shed a little light on that question.) The object here is for you to anchor what you need to know in history to things you already know in literature

I'd also recommend a decent historical atlas, partly because it's also a good teaching tool; a historical atlas will give you the flow of history and help you see the causal chains, thereby helping make a bit more sense of history as story. At this time of year Barnes & Noble is often still selling The Times Complete History of the World and its little brother The Compact History of the World as coffee-table gift books: either would serve you and your future students well.

[DanteLover]

That's a great idea! Thanks Teacher Groupie.

I will look into finding the atlas. Study books tend to change the sequence of events and everything gets jumbled!

[TeacherGroupie]

History is, at bottom, the world's longest, largest unfinished novel; try thinking less in terms of "jumbled" and more in terms of keeping track of at least four continents' worth of simultaneous plot lines.

(I'm not joking, or at least not very much, about history as novel: it's no accident that the same Greek root lies behind both "history" and "story".)

[DanteLover]

I'm working on it. I'm going to try my best and hope this time I'll make it happen.

[TeacherGroupie]

Extra hugs, DanteLover. For you, I truly do recommend thinking of this in terms of tracking multiple sometimes-overlapping plot lines.

[DanteLover]

Thanks TeacherGroupie

[DanteLover]

YAY I PASSED!! Finally!! *sigh of relief*

[TeacherGroupie]

Congratulations, DanteLover!

[DanteLover]

Thanks