This
is the story of how I started my classes in seventh and eighth grade history
every year, starting my fourth year. First of all, I dispensed with
reading over the rules, which I considered boring, and dived right in on material I considered useful.
I
retired from teaching in 2008.
I wasn't motivated as a student, myself. So I stressed motivation.
10.
Nothing Human
is Alien
“Though the
outside of human life changes much, the inside changes little,
and the lesson
we cannot graduate from is human experience.”
Edith Hamilton
Sometimes, in the middle of one of my
brilliant lessons, students would grumble, “Why do we need to know this stuff?”
Or shout encouragement: “This is so boring!”
I remembered what it was like to be
bored in school, to wonder why we had to know this “stuff.”
The question I faced as a young
teacher and the question we face across the spectrum of education today is the
same. What basics and much, much more
should we be covering?
*
A textbook our social studies
department once reviewed came with ready made tests. All teachers had to do was
run off copies and hand them out at the end of every unit. One question
included on the Civil War test required students to identify the losing
generals at the battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. I used to cite
that example at Open House Night and ask parents if anyone could supply the
answer. No one in twenty years ever could.
“It is not enough to be busy…The question
is: What are we busy about?”
It seemed to me that students would
be fine if we focused on more useful material. History—education, really—must
have true purpose. Or we need to ask ourselves a question Henry David Thoreau
once posed. “It is not enough to be busy…The question is: What are we busy
about?”
A
typical junior high or middle school class meets for 8,000 minutes per year.
Time in school is finite. You have ten times as much valuable material to cover
as you can. So a teacher should never throw minutes away.
Not one.
I always believed attitude was the
driving force for every man, woman and child in every classroom in the land.
For that reason, starting my fourth year, with a reputation for discipline
established, that was where I put emphasis the first week. I skipped the
traditional “first day reading of the rules” and went to work, trying to shape
attitudes in a positive way. I had a fresh crop of students and 8,000 minutes
to employ. It hardly seemed necessary to spend the first forty-five trying to
scare everyone. So I handed out rules but told students to read them at home.
“If you have good manners, and I’m
sure most of you do, you pretty much know the rules,” I explained.
Really, 80% of these kids were going
to be no trouble. Why start by
scaring them? For the other 20%, many of whom would cause only minor
disturbance, I added subtle warning: “Besides, I was in the Marine Corps. I
don’t have much trouble with discipline.”
Most teachers assign seats the first
day. I felt kids should have an opportunity to sit where they wished. “You pick
your spot and stay there as long as you behave,” I said. (See seating chart:
end of chapter.) “Or until you start pummeling your neighbor.”
Curious
looks. That’s good. Make kids think.
“Pummeling. It means ‘hitting
repeatedly,’” I added helpfully.
“Why do we need to
know this stuff?”
This
“rules” process took five minutes. Now, on our first day, we had time to
address the question students want answered and teachers must consider: “Why do we need to know this stuff?”
For thirty years I started my opening
day lesson the same way, asking: “How many of you think social studies are
boring?” Most kids sniffed a trap. With gentle urging nearly all raised their
hands. The problem, I explained, was that they had no idea why they were
studying history.
“History is the study of blank?” I continued.
“The past,” was always the first
answer.
“Dates and events” was second.
“Dead people” was third.
When I replied in the negative to
each, someone always tried: “Dead people in the past?”
No one ever got it right, till we
suffered a series of false starts. At last, some teen would venture: “History
is the study of…people?”
Good. Get that down in notes.
“This
year, we will be studying people,” I explained. “Today I’m going to show you
people never change. If you want to make a lot of money when you grow up you
should pay attention in science and math. If you want to understand people you
should study history.
I drew a simple diagram, putting up
the date, 1513, adding that we would not be focusing on useless names and dates
in my class. This was merely a reference point.
I told the story of how Balboa led an
army across Panama, cutting a path through the jungle, until Indian guides told
him the “great sea” was over the next mountain. I added an “x” to show where
Balboa stopped his army before going to the top alone. Now I asked why he would
do so. I always waited for a girl to raise a hand and then called on her.
“He probably wanted to be famous,” Lindsay
responded correctly.
“How can you know?” I wondered. “You
don’t speak Spanish do you?” Lindsay shook her head. “You aren’t the same sex.
Balboa has been dead 500 years. How could you know what he was thinking?”
I asked if anyone played soccer or
basketball and if they’d ever been on a team with a ball hog. A flurry of
response. “Balboa was no different than any ball hog. He wanted to hog the
glory,” I explained.
Lindsay turned out to be a basketball
player and instantly grasped the point. That’s what I wanted, for students to
relate to the people we studied, to understand history was the story of
humanity and for that reason had import.
I shifted to a second example and
called for volunteers to come forward and give a short speech. This was the
first day of school and for kids new to junior high or middle school looked
like a suicide mission. No one volunteered. I told them they could pick their
topic.
No takers.
I chose two sacrificial lambs and
they trudged to the front of the room, like Marie Antoinette approaching the
guillotine. I kept them standing long enough to make their discomfit clear,
then let them go, blending back in the crowd.
I didn’t really want anyone to give a
speech. I simply wanted to show that people never change.
I asked if anyone had heard of Harry
Truman. Usually only one or two kids had. I said historians rated Truman as one
of our best presidents but, like my nervous pupils, when he first ran for
office he dreaded public speaking. The first time he tried he froze. To
illustrate, I gripped the sides of my lectern, looked at the class, looked down
and made loud gulping sounds. I looked up again, gulped once more, shifted from
one foot to the other and shuffled my notes. Finally, I mouthed a silent phrase
and bolted for the door.
Moments later I returned, said sorry,
had to come back, need the money.
One bold soul interjected,
“Awwwwwwwww, too bad.”
“Truman never got a word out,” I
added, “and fled the scene.”
Next, I asked: “How many of you could
draw a Pilgrim if you had to?” Almost everyone agreed they could.
“Yeah, remember drawing around your
hand to make a turkey in first grade?” Brandi said.
“Well here’s a story your first grade
teacher never mentioned,” I continued. “The Pilgrims and natives didn’t always
get along. There was a fight the first week they landed. Another time, the
Pilgrims saw natives standing on a nearby hill. According to eyewitnesses, they
were touching the points of their arrows and making ‘gestures plainly
obscene.’”
Now we needed someone who knew what
“obscene” meant. Then: could anyone guess what the Indians were doing? Several
kids looked like they knew. It was the first day of class. They weren’t sure
they should say.
“It’s okay. Just be careful how you
put it.”
“They…mooned…the Pilgrims?” Tyler
finally offered.
“Yes, they did. Yes they did! History,”
I continued, “is the study of people. The people in the past are like us. They
hog the glory, freeze trying to speak and moon people they don’t like.”
I put the word “empathy” on the
board. Could anyone provide a definition? The kids had plenty of ideas, all
related to “sympathy.”
I told them “empathy” was better. I
added a definition to the board: “You can feel what another person feels.”
A young lady in the front left corner
of the room responded, “So sympathy is like you feel sorry for someone when
their mom dies and empathy, you know how they feel, because your mom died?”
“Exactly,” I smiled.
I used several more examples to make
the point—that through history we can feel what others feel. This included a
quote from Virgil, twenty centuries ago: “Love conquers all.”
“What
did he mean?” I asked.
No
one was sure.
“Look, most of you have been in love.
Jake, I know you’ve been in love!” I singled out a young man who had already shown
hints of a sense of humor. “Don’t deny it. What does ‘conquers’ mean?”
“Defeats,”
he offered.
“Right,
love defeats all. All what?”
Here
Jake and his peers were stuck. “How many of you have heard the song that goes,
‘Ain’t no mountain high enough?’” I asked. “What comes next?”
One
student gave the answer straight. Several sang: “Ain’t no valley low enough,
ain’t no river wide enough, to keep me away from you….”
“So,
Jake, what did Virgil mean?”
“It
means love overcomes all obstacles!” a girl in the back shouted before Jake
could respond.
I
told everyone to get that down in notes. “The people Virgil knew—and the people
we know—are the same.”
Time
was growing short and we were rushing now, rushing to cram in every scrap of
learning we could. We had 7,960 minutes left. So we finished with another
quote, from Terrence, a Roman playwright: “Nothing human is alien.” This was
the touchstone of what we would do the rest of the year.
“What did Terrence mean?” I asked, as
we brought the lesson to a close. Again, we followed several false leads.
Finally, I hinted: “How can we tell Jake is human and not alien?”
“I’m not sure we can,” his friend
Brad said. Even Jake had to laugh.
Natalie replied, more seriously:
“Aliens look different.”
“Nothing human is different? That’s
not right,” I told her. “You’re young and I’m old. You’re a girl. I’m a guy.
I’m pretty. Brad isn’t. We need at least one more word.”
Now Brad had to laugh.
“Nothing human is…totally…different,”
Natalie tried. I wrote it on the board: “Nothing human is totally
different.”
Now students had some idea why they
were marooned in history class and we had used our first forty-five minutes to good
purpose.
*
That first week we dived into
material and didn’t stop swimming until June. That’s how any dedicated teacher
addresses basics and how every dedicated teacher now and for all eternity will.
In 1976 I saw a brief newspaper
article about Bruce Jennings, a long-distance bicycle rider, and used it till I
retired. Jennings lost a leg in a motorcycle accident but that couldn’t stop
him. Using a bicycle with stirrups and sporting a prosthesis he set out to
pedal across the United States. He was in Indiana, heading east, when
Cincinnati papers filed a report.
Now
I started my second day’s lesson by asking students how many thought they could
bike across the country.
Few did.
“Then how could Jennings do it?”
I poked at kids until someone
admitted, “Well, I guess I could if I wanted,” and others nodded.
We read the article, took time for
comment, and I planted a seed I would nurture in months (and years) to come.
How do people like Jennings do it?
I’ve been intrigued by that question most of my life and wanted students to
consider the matter.
I assured them almost everyone could
ride across the country if motivated. The secret to success in my classroom
would be the same. Which of them would be willing to “pedal” hard enough to
earn it? I wanted teens to understand: Two legs suffice. One leg will do if
you’re determined.
We moved to a second example to
bolster the first: the 1948 presidential election, Truman vs. Thomas Dewey. We
covered details briefly. How unpopular Truman then was, only one president ever
sinking lower in opinion polls. (Kids guessed who, until finally someone said:
“Nixon.”) We talked about how fifty reporters rode with Truman on his campaign
train. One night they took a vote to see how many believed Harry could win.
The kids guessed again: “Half.”
“Ten.” “Five.” “Two.”
Finally, someone got it right:
“None.”
I
talked about why I admired Truman. Even though he knew he was going to lose he
refused to quit. He decided to crisscross the country by rail, his famous
“Whistle Stop Campaign.” He gave speeches anywhere a crowd would gather, 275
times in six weeks. I reminded my audience this was the same man who couldn’t
get a word out the first time he tried to speak in public.
Truman lit into Dewey at every stop.
Finally, someone in the crowd shouted, “Give ‘em hell, Harry!”
Truman replied, “That’s what I’m
doing! I’m giving Dewey hell.”
Students
had funny looks. “It’s okay. I’m quoting. Go ahead and put that in your notes.
“The polls showed Truman hopelessly
behind but he never gave up. The night of the election it was obvious who was
going to win. The people who conduct opinion polls hadn’t bothered to check for
weeks.” I used a tone of resignation to show my hero was doomed.
Now, I held up the famous picture of
the man holding the Chicago Tribune:
“Does anyone know why this picture is
famous?”
If any student raised a hand and
appeared to know, I ignored them and called on someone else. I wanted students
to get this wrong.
“Because, that’s President Dewey and
he’s happy,” Ashley said.
“I didn’t even know we had a
President Dewey,” Kia admitted.
“Well, you never heard of President
Fillmore, either,” I replied, deflecting her from the truth.
“Dewey is smiling because he didn’t
like Truman,” someone else offered. It made sense, I agreed.
I took a few more answers, none
correct, then asked again, “Does anyone know
who this is in the picture?”
I called on Geoff who seemed to
understand from the start. “I think that’s Truman. I don’t think Dewey won.”
“Very good, sir. After all the
reporters gave up and the polls stopped asking, Truman kept fighting. He kept
giving Dewey hell. Over the last few weeks of the campaign Truman made a huge
comeback. Dewey didn’t win. The Tribune
was so sure he’d be president they printed the story in advance to get the
paper out early and sell more copies.
“Truman defeated Dewey when everyone
said it couldn’t be done. He won because he wouldn’t give up.”
I asked everyone to take down the
word “perseverance” in their notes and added a definition: “continued effort in
the face of difficulty.”
For decades I did my best to help
young men and women see the point. We can always
do more than we think—if we refuse to quit—if we have perseverance.
 |
| I took my own advice and pedaled a bicycle across the USA in 2007 and again in 2011. My students helped raise $13,500 for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund before the first ride. This is Tioga Pass, which I took, coming into Yosemite NP in 2011. There's a large RV (white dot) just above my handle bars on the road in the distance. |
Seating Chart for My Class
My third or fourth year I happened to read about a teacher who did away
with traditional rows. She arranged desks in horseshoe formation. There were
two rows on each wing, seats facing inward, two more at the base of the shoe. Her
position was at the open end. From there she was free to roam the center of the
room.
This arrangement
proved a huge improvement over ordinary rows. First, it was popular with
students, almost
always a virtue. It allowed them to see
each other, instead of backs of heads, and fostered a friendly atmosphere,
especially during discussion.
The
setup also allowed for improved discipline. Suppose, with old-fashioned rows, a
child in back was thinking about poking his neighbor. Or he was penning a love
note. Under the old arrangement you found yourself far away, at the front of
the room, while the young man studied the distance. To him it looked safe. He knew you wouldn’t
see him poke the cute girl in the back. Or he knew by the time you came down
the row he’d have his note tucked away.
The horseshoe altered the calculation. If you roamed the
center randomly, it was hard for anyone in “back” to zone out. If you thought
the young man in Seat A was doodling, you strolled in his direction, since no
rows impeded, and stood next to his seat. You just “happened” to stop nearby
and ask Sara, to his right, to answer a question. If a girl in Seat C was
talking too much you walked over and without a word gave her your “teacher
look” or tapped her desk.
Seat B (or its twin across the room) was a good place to park
any loquacious youth. Then you surrounded them with quiet or studious types. It
was easy to stand close by during discussions or lectures and tamp down
disruptive impulses. Proximity sufficed. Cutting down minor problems helped
avoid festering sores that lead to serious discipline trouble.
- Megan
Swimming
“You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
Eleanor Roosevelt
Standing
in front of a roomful of teens you never know how they’ll respond to what
you’re offering. They may not respond at all or only with grumbling. Megan
contacted me via Facebook in the summer of 2013 and spilled out a powerful
tale.
“Don’t know if you remember me,
Megan…the writer kid,” she began with trepidation.
I did. Nice young lady.
Still, I had no idea when she was
seated in my class, fifteen years earlier, that she had so much trouble at
home. She needed glasses for starters but her family was too poor to afford
them.
She remembers squinting as I chalked
P-E-R-S-E-V-E-R-A-N-C-E on the board. She said she remembers me telling the
class: “In your own lifetime you will have moments you are stuck, or faced with
conflict. You cannot walk away from it. You have to overcome it. Each and every
one of you can overcome anything through perseverance. You have the power to do
anything.”
At
the time, she had already tried to end her life. Now my words had a “great
healing power.”
“I knew what the word meant,” she
explained in another Facebook message. “I just didn’t know there was a word for
what I was doing…I had perseverance and I never knew it. A teacher broke the
mold on giving me hope in such a tattered world.”
How tattered? Megan’s mother spent
hours on the computer, focused on internet chat sites.
“She quit her job,” Megan wrote,
“stayed up all hours of the night online. I can recall nights, hearing her
fingers tap the keys of the keyboard, hearing, ‘You’ve Got Mail,’ over and over
again.
“The
house we lived in began to fall apart, no food, no laundry being done, nothing
to clean with. The bills stopped getting paid…All my mother did was smoke, eat,
sleep and play on the internet.”
Problems snowballed. Megan’s parents
had long since separated. Dad suffered a heart attack, his second. He could no
longer work or help Megan and her younger sister much. The bank took mom’s car.
By the time Megan was in high school:
I was…living
in a house with no heat, no water and no electricity, and forget about food.
Let me tell you, Best Senior Year ever! Nothing like taking a cold shower and
going to bed freezing! Or once the water was shut off, riding your bike to
shower at your grandparents.
By
then…the roof was falling in on our house and I had a constant leak in the
kitchen, a skylight, I kid you not.
Finally, mom ran away with a man she
met through a chat site. Megan was close to giving up. And who would have
blamed her?
One day her science teacher called
her “a loser” in front of the entire class. He said Megan would “never amount
to anything.” That might have been the final insult that tipped a young lady toward
disaster; but Megan’s English teacher overheard from across the hall, walked
into the science room, “wrapped her arms around me, and took me out of that
class.”
The
damage one teacher might have done was canceled out by the good done by
another.
“But with hope from my wonderful
English teacher and the power of one word,” Megan explained, “it occurred to me
I was going to make it through…I was SO CLOSE to getting out of high school, so
close to having my diploma. PERSEVERANCE. Why give up when I had already come
so far?”
Megan
continued:
I
think perseverance is a good word…Never give up. Fight. I have been fighting my
entire life to stay afloat. I am tired of swimming, but even if I give up, my
mind is trained to swim, so I keep going. That is exactly what perseverance is.
In
a message I sent next, I told Megan I couldn’t have explained it better myself.
If I was still teaching, I’d steal her story. I’d share it with a new
generation of teens.
I’m glad her English teacher gave her
reason to hope. I’m glad I did my little part to help.
I’m really glad Megan kept swimming
and she has good reason to be proud of herself.
