Tuesday, May 18, 2004
A Shared Sense of History
The two greatest difficulties of being a social studies teacher in our society today, at least in my humble estimation, are the following:
1. Trying to balance the amount and flow of information. The cliché is "a mile wide and an inch deep or an inch long and a mile deep." There is a plethora of ideas, interdisciplinary connections and important events (famous, infamous or otherwise) that is the history of humanity. Trying to relate all of the major events (dates, names, battles, etc…) of a particular period because it is part of the curriculum is hard enough, but add into that all of the minor events, interesting stories, and connections to various other disciplines and understanding, let alone enjoying, the social sciences is suddenly tedious.
2. Getting students who are in no way, shape or form interested in any of the social studies to understand that all too often it is the social studies that affect them most directly and if nothing else, they are something that they will have to deal with for their whole lives. That lofty goal aside, the really hard part is getting them to see that there is some really cool – and unbelievably relevant – stuff for them to experience in the social studies.
I am reminded of these two difficulties now especially because May is well underway and with a mere three weeks before summer vacation, the natives are getting restless. And the kids are pretty antsy too. We have a decade to go and the Vietnam War to make sense of before our students are released onto the streets of Northern Michigan for thirteen sun-filled weeks.
I can't help but think about what kind of real impact I had on these students. I wonder if they are going to remember any of the details that we learned this time next year. Of course, like any teacher, I know that I reached some, but certainly not all, of my students. I am encouraged by my students who recently went to Washington D.C. and knew who Thurgood Marshall was, knew what they were talking about on the Senate floor and excitedly spoke to me about exhibits they saw while at the Smithsonian. Yet, I am dismayed when I ask the students who FDR is, or what the basic function of the legislative branch is and I look out at a sea of blank stares. More important than test scores and the ability to conjure up an answer from months ago through the veritable primordial ooze of "who's going out with who" and "he wrote her a note that said…" that dominates much of a 15 year-old's brain, is the sense that history is both interesting and important to cling to. Some students get it. Some don't. I do my best to make sure that the former is disproportionately higher in number than the latter.
What triggered this sentimentality was discovered in my floorboards. My wife and I are renovating our 106-year-old house and in the process discovered two letters written in 1904 and a child's shoe from the early 20th century. The letters are fairly mundane – at least what I can decipher from them – but the implications of finding them have sparked my imagination. Who are the people that wrote them? The penmanship looks much too sophisticated to be a child's and so elegant that there are large sections that I can't make out. Maybe I have been reading too many papers with exceptionally bad penmanship from my students, but I can't make heads or tails of parts of it. Even so, it is amazing to me that these little pieces of paper and a shoe that now looks like a mangled scrap of leather have found their way into my life. The items represent people who helped develop the community I live in – whose day-to-day goings on shaped the culture of a people and the attitudes, values and concerns that are woven through our society. They catalogue the journey this community took from a small town to a small city. The roots of who we are as a city come from these people and their ancestors. It would be a shame for those of us who walk the streets today to not recognize this. This is true in cities and towns all over the country. Who we are, what we value and how we proceed through life comes from where we've been, for better or for worse. We should know it, face it and grow from it. It would behoove the people who are in charge of these cities, towns and this nation to remember this and that maybe, just maybe, there is some really cool – and unbelievably relevant – stuff for them to discover in our collective history.
The two greatest difficulties of being a social studies teacher in our society today, at least in my humble estimation, are the following:
1. Trying to balance the amount and flow of information. The cliché is "a mile wide and an inch deep or an inch long and a mile deep." There is a plethora of ideas, interdisciplinary connections and important events (famous, infamous or otherwise) that is the history of humanity. Trying to relate all of the major events (dates, names, battles, etc…) of a particular period because it is part of the curriculum is hard enough, but add into that all of the minor events, interesting stories, and connections to various other disciplines and understanding, let alone enjoying, the social sciences is suddenly tedious.
2. Getting students who are in no way, shape or form interested in any of the social studies to understand that all too often it is the social studies that affect them most directly and if nothing else, they are something that they will have to deal with for their whole lives. That lofty goal aside, the really hard part is getting them to see that there is some really cool – and unbelievably relevant – stuff for them to experience in the social studies.
I am reminded of these two difficulties now especially because May is well underway and with a mere three weeks before summer vacation, the natives are getting restless. And the kids are pretty antsy too. We have a decade to go and the Vietnam War to make sense of before our students are released onto the streets of Northern Michigan for thirteen sun-filled weeks.
I can't help but think about what kind of real impact I had on these students. I wonder if they are going to remember any of the details that we learned this time next year. Of course, like any teacher, I know that I reached some, but certainly not all, of my students. I am encouraged by my students who recently went to Washington D.C. and knew who Thurgood Marshall was, knew what they were talking about on the Senate floor and excitedly spoke to me about exhibits they saw while at the Smithsonian. Yet, I am dismayed when I ask the students who FDR is, or what the basic function of the legislative branch is and I look out at a sea of blank stares. More important than test scores and the ability to conjure up an answer from months ago through the veritable primordial ooze of "who's going out with who" and "he wrote her a note that said…" that dominates much of a 15 year-old's brain, is the sense that history is both interesting and important to cling to. Some students get it. Some don't. I do my best to make sure that the former is disproportionately higher in number than the latter.
What triggered this sentimentality was discovered in my floorboards. My wife and I are renovating our 106-year-old house and in the process discovered two letters written in 1904 and a child's shoe from the early 20th century. The letters are fairly mundane – at least what I can decipher from them – but the implications of finding them have sparked my imagination. Who are the people that wrote them? The penmanship looks much too sophisticated to be a child's and so elegant that there are large sections that I can't make out. Maybe I have been reading too many papers with exceptionally bad penmanship from my students, but I can't make heads or tails of parts of it. Even so, it is amazing to me that these little pieces of paper and a shoe that now looks like a mangled scrap of leather have found their way into my life. The items represent people who helped develop the community I live in – whose day-to-day goings on shaped the culture of a people and the attitudes, values and concerns that are woven through our society. They catalogue the journey this community took from a small town to a small city. The roots of who we are as a city come from these people and their ancestors. It would be a shame for those of us who walk the streets today to not recognize this. This is true in cities and towns all over the country. Who we are, what we value and how we proceed through life comes from where we've been, for better or for worse. We should know it, face it and grow from it. It would behoove the people who are in charge of these cities, towns and this nation to remember this and that maybe, just maybe, there is some really cool – and unbelievably relevant – stuff for them to discover in our collective history.
