Thursday, Oct. 18, 2007

Urbana teacher fosters students’ love of history

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Bill Ryan⁄The Gazette
Ashraqat, a seventh-grader, talks with her teacher, Ellen Georgi, about a History Club project during a club meeting at Urbana Middle School Tuesday. Georgi hopes to share her love of history with students through this club and two others.
Ellen Georgi said she was destined to become a teacher — growing up, she was surrounded by them.

Her mother and grandmother were both teachers, and her uncles were both professors. At family gatherings they would engage in the ‘‘usual shop talk you hear when teachers get together,” she said.

But Georgi, who now teaches social studies at Urbana Middle School, had always wanted to be an archaeologist. She went to college and trained in sciences and in archaeology, but decided that such a career would be detrimental to her family life: ‘‘It’s a tough career when you want to raise children.”

So, she became a history teacher and now teaches others about archaeology and ancient civilizations.

While Georgi enjoys teaching about Mesopotamians, Greeks Romans, Egyptians, Mayans, Incas and Aztecs, she also loves teaching about the rich history of Frederick County. So she started a History Club for her students as a means to help them explore the history of the area and as a primer on historical research.

‘‘There’s so much history here in Frederick County,” she said.

Georgi moved to Frederick County from San Francisco in 2005, when her husband, who works for Bechtel, transferred to the area. She first taught social studies at West Frederick Middle School, but moved to Urbana Middle so she could be closer to home. Georgi grew up in Anaheim, Calif., and said she had always been involved in community volunteerism as a Girl Scout and through her church. When she is not teaching, she is also the vice chair of the Appalachian Trails Boy Scout District, one of two divisions in Frederick County. Her husband is the chairman. Georgi is in charge of membership, helping the scout units with their recruiting efforts.

Georgi, last year’s Frederick County National History Day Teacher of the Year, first started the History Club at West Frederick Middle School, then started a similar club at Urbana Middle.

The clubs evolved into a countywide club, which meets once each month at the C. Burr Artz Library in downtown Frederick. The History Club is open to children from sixth through 12th grade who live in Frederick County, but Georgi said ‘‘if any Montgomery kids want to come north, let ’em.”

The reason the club meets at the Frederick library is because it contains what Georgi said is one of the greatest historical resources in the area — the Maryland Room. Georgi said the Maryland Room not only provides access to historical documents, but also trained historians who can help students learn how to do historical research.

Waneta Gagne, the library’s archivist at the Maryland Room, helps Georgi run the club. One of its most important activities is helping students to brainstorm ideas for the National History Day competition, a ‘‘history fair” that allows students to submit historical research projects for competitive judging, Georgi said.

‘‘It’s an incredible program at the national level ... harnessing the same kind of research skills for history [as science fairs do for science],” she said.

Mary Mannix, who runs the Maryland Room at the C. Burr Artz Library, said that the history club has given the historians there hope for the future.

The History Club allows Mannix and other historians to instill a sense of the importance of history, which could help the Maryland Room in the future. Mannix said each of these students would one day be taxpayers and they would decide how the facility was funded. ‘‘It’s [in] our own self-defense,” she said, to teach the children.

Georgi enjoys the challenge of trying to make history interesting to children. She said other academic disciplines, such as math and science, sometimes overshadow the social sciences. ‘‘I want to make sure that when they walk out of my class ... they think of themselves as historians,” she said.

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