Pondering History

At the beginning of the summer I promised myself that I would spend July mentally switching back into teaching thoughts. Well, it's July...

I seem to focus better when I'm in a public place like a coffee shop (maybe I think other people are watching, so I feel compelled to look busy, and thereby trick myself into actually accomplishing something?), so I spent most of this morning with an iced chai and my laptop, cruising the internet for inspiration and wisdom for my coming year of teaching.

It's not that I'm specifically planning any lessons, just attempting to organize some thoughts into a coherent philosophy and overview for the coming school year. What habits do I want to adopt? What pattern will my 90-minute class periods take on? What theories of education do I want to incorporate?

I stumbled across a collection of interviews with accomplished and experienced history teachers, and found so much wisdom there, I felt compelled to start a list of "notes to self" for next school year. Then my list ended up as a collection of quotes, because I couldn't put the ideas any better than these teachers...

"I always tell my students that I don’t care if they remember everything, but they had to know how to locate information, know how to think, and had to be organized. I feel that as long as they know how to get information, it doesn’t really matter whether they memorize a lot of stuff. I want to give students the ability to become informed decision makers and problem solvers." Maurice Butler

"I believe we have more respect for the potential of our students; we understand that each student is a potentially powerful learner." Michele Forman

"The first thing I keep in mind is the Hippocratic oath: Do no harm. It works for teachers too. Most of the history classes I had in school were awful. They were filled with lectures and textbooks and little else. I don’t want to be that kind of teacher. ...History is not a series of dead facts. It’s made up of choices made by real people in real circumstances... It’s about making explanations for the way things are today. It’s also about drawing inspiration from the past, recognizing that anything we appreciate today, anything about this country that is decent, got that way because people worked together to create it." Bill Bigelow

"One of the things I need to say here is that I don’t try to “cover” all of U.S. History...To attempt it is to guarantee that the curriculum will be a mile wide and an inch deep... A teacher has to choose: either I’m going to explore some aspects of history, explore some time periods, in real depth, and in a way that can excite students—or I’m going to make sure that my students get through that entire 1,000 page textbook." Bill Bigelow

"Another important aim of my history teaching is to puncture the myth that a country is like a family. Too often, when textbooks talk about the United States they are filled with “we” did this, and “we” did that. But who really is the “we” that is being talked about? There is a coercive element to the language that is used in a history class—and in the media more generally, for that matter—that demands that students identify with the policies of the U.S. government and of U.S. elites... However, U.S. society has always been stratified based on race, class, nationality, language, gender—and it’s bad history, bad sociology to assume a common past. ... I want students to understand that U.S. society has always been experienced very differently depending on a variety of factors—and it still is." Bill Bigelow

"...He thought my biggest problem was that I was confusing the students by discussing how different historians thought differently about issues. “This is the only history course that most of these students will ever take,” he told me, "and they need to know the facts." I disagreed. If this is the only history course students ever take, it was all the more important that they know that historians disagree over what the facts are as well as over interpretations." Orville Vernon Burton