So What!?!

One of my professors in third year started off our first day of class with the words "So What!?!" written on the board. She told us that this was going to be the phrase for the rest of our course while examining texts and sitting in lectures. She told us that we needed to find meaning and relatiability to everything we were learning; to answer the question "so what?" in order for us to find importance in the information. This was the first class that really engaged me in critical thinking. It is also the class that inspired me to take the phrase "so what!?!" when making my lesson plans and activities.
With that being said, while looking for publishing information for the the Social Studies 8-10 curriculum books, I came across Pearson Education's official Canadian website. The website has all these recent updates to the textbooks: Pathways, Crossroads, and Horizons. These updates include information and activities that relate the "So What" concept that I've been trying to follow. They link past events, such as the Black Plague, with current issues like HIV/AIDS.
If some of you have the most recent copy of the textbooks than you may already know this, but I definitely do not. So for those of you that also have not seen the updates, check out their website: http://www.pearsoncanada.ca/index.html