Tag: US History

Starting Where You End Up in US History

I’m about to head back to the classroom to get ready for my 18th year of teaching high school students. This time of year puts me into a frame of mind to look back at older lessons and see what I want to tweak and revise. I have a notion to give myself some extra work this year and not just look at my civics and economics lessons for the classes I will be teaching students this year, but also to look at what I did in the years right after the worst of the pandemic when I was teaching students US history. I’m thinking I might package some of that material and post it here on my site. Maybe some teachers will find it useful. Maybe it’ll spark an interesting discussion or two. At the very least it will give me an opportunity to reflect on my work and I hope that will help make me a better teacher.

The reason I want to do this with my US history assignments is that I decided to teach the class by going backward chronologically. We started by talking about what is happening in the US right now, and then each unit went back a few years and tried to talk about some of the decisions and actions that led to the things we had already learned. I had been thinking about this approach for years and I figured, if the disruption of a global pandemic isn’t an opportunity to try an outlandish idea, what is? So I figure this is probably the class where the stuff I have done is different enough from other resources that it’s worth talking about.

Here are some of the reasons that I took the plunge and went with a reverse chronological approach.

FOCUS ON SKILLS: I think this is true for all subjects that we teach students in K-12 education, and I’m certain that it’s true in history: there is more to cover than we can ever hope to cover in one year or even four. But if we can help students develop certain historical thinking skills, we can help them develop a toolbox that they can continue to use for the rest of their lives. The specific content is useful and interesting (to me, at least) in its own right, but its most important function is to give us a space to practice using the skills.

What does teaching about more contemporary history topics have to do with this? The further back in time you go, the more abstract things get to students. (Anyone who has tried to explain to a 2020s teenager what it was like to grow up in the 1980s without a cell phone has an inkling of what I mean here.) Language in the primary documents is going to be a little different. The rhythms of daily life are not the same. What was a contentious issue then doesn’t even raise questions today. So by using more familiar materials, and then gradually showing how the past was different, students can put more of their intellectual energy into building the skills rather than translating the past into the present.

The historical thinking skills I tend to emphasize include:

  • establishing and understanding chronology;
  • identifying and explaining cause and effect relationships;
  • placing primary and secondary sources into context;
  • using evidence from sources to support conclusions;
  • considering how a source reflects the specific perspective of the creator(s) of that source.

LEVERAGE STUDENTS’ CURRENT INTERESTS: When I chose themes for the year, I tried to pick things that I saw students engaging with in their art projects and other activities, from technology to immigration to LGBTQ+ issues and so on. I was trying to set up a framework that would help them tell a more robust story about the world they were engaging in. Now, it’s absolutely true that in many cases, historians can tell a story about the way our modern world operates that stretches back centuries, but I feel like the closer-to-the-present stuff is often more accessible and easier for students to build their making-connections skills.

LEVERAGE MY LIFE EXPERIENCE: The thing about growing older as a teacher is that there is an ever-growing range of material that exists as lived experience for me and Stuff for the History Books for my students. And when you start teaching students about US history from 1600 or 1865, the odds you get to cover a lot of the 1990s and 2000s are pretty low. When I was in school in the 1980s and 1990s, it was a common joke that US history classes would start in colonial or pre-colonial times and then race to try to get through World War II by the end of the year.

Now, that wasn’t great even when I was a kid – I learned relatively little about the Black civil rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate, post-1960s feminism, and a host of other topics compared to, say, the US Civil War or the Gilded Age. But back then I could still pick up references to the 1960s and 1970s in popular media and I was able to pick up some things from context to cover some of the gap.

Now that gap is even wider – if a US history course wraps up around the 1960s, there’s no room to talk about the rise of AIDS, the public introduction of the Internet, the post-Sept. 11 war on terror, the 2008 financial crisis, or a bunch of other things that feel enormously relevant to me but are unknown to my students.

Absolutely, some of this is me getting older and metaphorically waving my fist at the clouds and saying “Kids these days!” along with “I’m still relevant!” But I don’t think it’s a bad idea to teach my students about things that, when they have additional questions, I have a lot of tools in the toolbox to help answer those questions.

INCORPORATE NEWS LITERACY: This part is getting a little harder as many news institutions put their archives behind paywalls (often for understandable reasons). But my curating a set of sources that were reporting on events in real time or close to it, I help introduce my students to some of those institutions and help them get practice at gathering information from a text journalism source.

INCLUSIVE TEACHING: I know teachers can and do discuss the 1600s and 1700s without only focusing on white men. But I do appreciate being able to have students learn about Congress by reading about someone like Patsy Mink or about the intersection of culture and commerce by reading about the development of Black musicians like Philadelphia’s own Gamble and Huff in the 1970s.

I taught students US history with this approach for three years, until I was reassigned to teach them about civics and economics. I would definitely enjoy using this approach again if I ever return to the subject, because I think I was reasonably successful at achieving these goals and I believe I would improve the course with further practice. But if that never happens, I enjoy the teaching I do now as well.

Despite all these reasons, there are definitely reasons to reconsider this approach, and some potential stumbling blocks if you take it on. I wasn’t the only one teaching students US History at my school, so if someone transferred between my class and a colleague’s, that person could have a bumpy ride. And if a 12th grade teacher was counting on all of their students having an identical store of background knowledge, well, I kinda wrecked that hope.

I also had to make sure I didn’t assume students already knew things that I didn’t cover. For example: if I’m going to teach students about what Congress did in 2010 before I ever get a chance to teach them about the drafting of the Constitution, I better make sure I explain what Congress does and how it works at the start of the year.

There are also people in the historical studies field who would probably criticize me for the way I’ve talked about using the study of history as a way to understand the present, rather than viewing the people of the past as people with their own lives and their own ways of seeing the world that we should try to understand and respect in their own right. I have a fairly instrumentalist view of knowledge and learning that connects with my philosophical roots in classical US pragmatism, and I know those views are nowhere close to unanimously shared. So some things that I have set out as priorities might not resonate with other educators. (I should also emphasize that even if I study the past as a way of understanding the present, the study is only going to be useful to the extent that I try to understand the people and events of the past as fully as possible, rather than assume that everyone in the past was essentially running a dress rehearsal for whatever thing I might be thinking about today.)

So I would not call this approach to teaching US history a no-brainer can’t-fail approach. But I think some teachers might find it to be a useful structure. So my goal over the next few months will be to post some of my lesson materials here on Not News, and see if it strikes up any useful conversation.

Still Not Throwing Away My Shot, Gaps and All

As I write this, the film version of Hamilton is a few hours away from its premiere on Disney+. I have my Hamilton T shirt ready for viewing the show with my family, and I may watch it a second time tomorrow when at least two different Twitter viewing parties are set to happen. (As I post this, my family and I are a few minutes away from that first viewing.) I’ve been very fortunate to be able to see the show three times, including once with a group of Rush students as part of the Hamilton Education Program organized by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. I have the original cast recording. I have the Mixtape. I have the “Weird Al” Yankovic Hamilton Polka. I am a serious hardcore Hamilton fanboy, is what I am trying to establish here.

I’m also an educator who teaches kids about history and government, and I have always felt an obligation to help my students reach an accurate and honest understanding of our nation’s history and the enduring scourges of racism and violent oppression that are as bound up with our founding as ideals of liberty and self-government. In this moment of 2020, I feel that obligation more strongly than ever.

So I have to ask myself, at a moment where many Americans are finally taking extra steps to confront hard truths about our past: “Is there a place in this moment for a fictionalized celebration of the United States’ founding?” Can I still put on that T shirt and sing along to “My Shot?” Can I feel good about the fact that I brought 50 high school students to see this show? That I’ve shown clips of it, displayed its logo in my classroom, and referred to it in my discussions?

My answer is still Yes, but thinking through the question has helped me see what other lenses I need to bring to bear in my classroom.

Before I explain, let me take a moment to review some of the criticisms that historians and other people have made of the show.

I have some quibbles with some of these criticisms. For example, based on the reading I have done, I think Alexander Hamilton was opposed to slavery – however, he did profit from his marriage into the Schuyler family, whose wealth was at least in part connected to slavery. I think that George Washington answering the line “Black and white soldiers wonder alike if this really means freedom” with “Not. Yet.” is an example of Lin-Manuel Miranda making the specter of slavery haunt our celebration of the founding, and I think that subtle approach is one that helps the audience get to the point of being able to hold positive and negative opinions of the framers at once. Maybe I shouldn’t hail that as major accomplishment in the second decade of the 21st Century, but I think that’s where we are.

But in a show where control of the narrative is a central theme, there is no denying that some people have been left out of the narrative. How can I be OK with that?

My answer is that no one story can tell everything that needs to be told. Every story, every explanation, is a series of choices about what to include and what to exclude, what to emphasize and what to downplay. And every story exists in a context and a relationship to other stories and other perspectives. If Hamilton were the only story told about the nation’s founding, or the only story told about Washington and Jefferson and Hamilton, then its fictionalizations and omissions would be crippling.

But Hamilton exists in a country that has centered and mythologized the framers for centuries. The juxtaposition of these familiar historical figures with contemporary musical styles, performed by a cast of varying ethnic and racial backgrounds, gives an audience enough of a sense of the familiar to feel comfortable and enough of a sense of the unexpected to encourage a re-evaluation of perspectives.

I first learned about Hamilton because I follow the journalist Chris Hayes on Twitter. Hayes is an old classmate and friend of Miranda’s who kept praising the show, and based on his tweets I could not figure out if it was a show about a rapper or a show about Alexander Hamilton. It took me a bit for the light bulb to go on that it was both. The act of the juxtaposition is an act of commentary itself. On one level, yes, Hamilton is a white-European-centric Great Man approach to history. But it also makes an audience that might be comfortable with that style of history think about who else has been part of that story all along.

But what about the mythmaking? The celebration of the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality (“I wrote my way out”) that Miranda sees in Hamilton, in himself, in his family’s story? Again, if that were the only story we tell about America, it’d be super dangerous. But while it is essential that we have stories that acknowledge the pain that European settlement caused, it is just as essential to recognize that many people of color, including Miranda, view the United States, or at least aspects of it, positively. And this country, for all its faults, is the collection of people who have made their lives here. We can regret and condemn the destructive actions that led to some of those people’s existences while also acknowledging and indeed celebrating that those people exist, and this country is theirs too, and that many are happy about the lives they have built in it (even though there is still lots of work to be done). Hamilton provides a window to do that, and at this moment of the 21st Century, I think that is one story – among many – that deserves to be told.