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On October 24, Pauncho Hufstetler shared insights on “Humanities: A Class You Didn’t Know You Wanted to Teach” at the annual Georgia Council for the Social Studies (GCSS) Conference  in Athens.

The GCSS Conference is where teachers and administrators from all over the state, and some other states present various topics related to social studies from K-12. There are also a lot of vendors and textbook companies in attendance.

Hufstetler, Social Studies Teacher at Bainbridge High School, and Board of Trustee member on the GCSS, has taught Social Studies for 27 years. In those years, he has also taught Humanities. Hufstetler’s presentation discussed how he started teaching humanities, how his class is organized, and how he is trying to recruit students to sign up for humanities. Hufstelter teaches a variety of subjects based on Humanities, he describes it as being free to teach what he wants. “I have a little more freedom in the humanities class, as opposed to US History and AP US History. There are state standards you have to follow closely because the state assessment that they take is based on those standards. He continued. “The AP curriculum is governed by the college board, so it’s not a class where there’s a lot of freedom for me to sort of pick and choose what I want to teach. In Humanities, I have more latitude, and I can pick those topics that I find more compelling and  spend more time on those than others.”

In addition, Hufstetler stated that the conference was a success, but this was his first conference that he attended as a Board of Trustee member. He explained it was different for him this year, “It was very different for me this year as opposed to other years. Other years, I was able to go to a lot more presentations that people were doing, but because of my role with the board, I was much busier than I had been in other years. Just trying to do various assignments and making sure the conference went smoothly, as a result of that, I was only able to go to one of the presentations because I was working the rest of the time, but the presentation did offer some resources that I think I will be able to use.”

Even though Hufstetler didn’t see many presentations as he liked, it wasn’t all bad as he met and spoke with Carl Azuz, previous anchorman of CNN Student News, and keynote speaker at the conference. Azuz recorded a shout out to some students at Bainbridge High School that watches news programs.

Furthermore, Hufstetler would like to remark about the conference for teachers and administrators who are involved in Social Studies. “It’s a terrific conference to go to. As you can see, so many presenters from all over the state covering a whole host of different topics. Again, there are vendors there selling textbooks and other educational products and services related to social studies. So there’s an awful lot there that can be learned and gathered.”