Www.martinsclass.com was created in November 2008 during my first year of teaching as a way to encourage students to stay on top of course material, and to make my teaching more transparent. In the 2009-2010 year, I split my website into separate branches, AP Human Geography and Modern World History. I also built the site using wordpress, which enables students to have an account, giving them the ability to create and publish blog posts and static web pages themselves.
AP HUG students face a daunting amount of content to master; I would rather they spend less time acquiring the information and more time learning and analyzing course content. Hopefully this site facilitates such a process.
AP HUG students face a daunting amount of content to master; I would rather they spend less time acquiring the information and more time learning and analyzing course content. Hopefully this site facilitates such a process.
How to use this site:
This site is organized into a blog and a back-end full of static webpages. These webpages can be seen by searching in the search bar or by clicking on a tag (see the floating ball of words in the right sidebar). There are many webpages that students have created and tagged with relevant terms. When you click on the tag you will see any pages and posts that relate to that concept.
A note to other AP HUG teachers:
In recent months I’ve noticed that this site is getting more and more hits from all over, and has become referenced on several sites. Please keep in mind that my site is very much an agglomeration of everything I have come across over the past year (going on 2). I am a scavenger and pirate by nature, and am known to borrow, adapt, and utilize any ideas and resources to implement in my teaching for the benefit of my students. I am a firm believer in borrowing ideas that work, and am happy to help share these ideas with other teachers. In fact, you might notice that I’m already using ideas/worksheets/elements from other teachers. I try to give credit where I can, but I’m slightly preoccupied with teaching AP HUG. For a list of other teachers’ websites – see teacher links.
About Mr. Martin:
Mr. Martin, a.k.a. Jeff, is a native of Northern Virginia. Growing up just outside the beltway, I developed both a healthy interest in, and intuitive distrust of politics and politicians. In 1998-99, I lived throughout the former Yugoslavia (Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia) in Eastern Europe, learning fluent Serbo-Croatian, teaching English classes, eating various greasy foods, and avoiding NATO bombs. Upon returning home, I was intensely curious to learn as much as possible about Balkan politics, and focused my studies on international relations, specifically on the violent dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, ethnicity and ethnic conflict, as well as democratization in the post-Communist world. Between 2000 and 2006 I earned a B.A. and M.A. in Political Science. My graduate Plan B Thesis was titled “The EU and Democratization in Serbia”. During this time, I married my beautiful wife Lisa, with whom have been blessed to raise two beautiful daughters.
I’ve had (some might consider) a strange variety of jobs before becoming a social studies teacher, including a pizza delivery specialist, interviewing people who just got arrested for a federal drug study, a graduate teaching assistant. In my last year of grad school I started a clothing company, which I operated for about 2 years. After selling my company, I worked briefly as a semi-professional silk-screener and briefly designed again.
In the summer of 2008 I joined the Baltimore City Teaching Residency, which is an alternative certification program that enables non-education majors such as myself Currently, I am very happy to be in my second year of teaching Modern World History at Baltimore’s prestigious all-girls Western High School. In the 2009-2010 school year, I started teaching AP Human Geography, which has been as challenging as it has been rewarding.
