Teaching
I was a classroom teacher for twenty-eight years. If you read these essays on “Our America”, it won’t surprise you to know I taught social studies: American and World History, Government and Current Issues, Economics and even Sociology. And I taught every grade level from sixth through seniors, at a time when our community was transitioning from farm town to “the suburbs”; 1978 until I finally left the classroom for the front office in 2006.
Teachers today are carefully scripted by the state and local administration. Each learning “objective” is outlined in detail, so that everyone teaching the same subject has near identical plans, lessons, and outcomes. In some states, that literally means every eighth grade American History teacher is teaching the same lesson, on the same day. While Ohio isn’t quite that strict, the whole goal is to have near daily control over what goes on in every classroom.
State Control
There are lots of reasons for “controls”. We are a highly mobile society, with kids moving in and out of classrooms and schools all the time. To have a student stay in one school system kindergarten through twelve is the exception rather than the norm. So those kids deserve some continuity in their education.
And there is the obvious reason: making sure teachers actually teach. By standardizing classrooms, then there is an “objective” scale of success and failure. As I saw it, ‘D’ and ‘C’ teachers did improve, forced to teach at a higher level. But the price was that the ‘A’ teachers were forced to change a lot of what made them exceptional, pulling them “down”. So the end result was ‘B’ and ‘C’ teachers and fewer failures, but fewer exceptional teachers as well.
In the Day
When I started teaching, “back in the day” there was a general understanding of what the subject matter was, but no specific controls. There was the “textbook”, and there was a set of maybe twelve “objectives” for a course, but after that what, how and when you taught the subject was solely left to the classroom teacher.
That put the burden of planning on me. I’d sit down at the beginning of each school year and plot out a time-line for my courses, figuring out how long I could spend on each topic and still make my way through the entire curriculum. That was a lot of work, but it gave me the freedom to pace my class to take advantage of the “real world”. In Government, in even-years I taught politics and elections early in the class, to take advantage of the “real world” elections that happened in November. In odd-years, I taught that part of the class in the spring, leading up to the primaries.
It also gave me control to respond to world events. In January of 1999, we learned a lot about impeaching a President (and Presidential sex). In November of 2000, we extended our examination of elections as the ballots were counted in Florida. And in September of 2001, I altered my time-line to learn about Islam, and radicals, and American policy in Southwest Asia.
Teaching the Present through the Past
When I was teaching History in the 1980’s, I built in extra-time to spend on World War II. It wasn’t just to tell stories about my WW II spy Mom (one year, I actually got her to come speak to my classes). But in the 1980’s in Pataskala, I felt it was important to give “my kids” an understanding of racial bigotry. We spent time talking about the Nazi persecution of Jewish people, leading up to the Holocaust. And we contrasted that with the US persecution of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
I was careful to avoid “equivalency”. While the “re-location camps” now seem very un-American, they were not “the same” as the Holocaust. But what I really wanted my kids to understand is that even “the good guys” could fall into doing “bad things”. I wanted them to be on guard, as US citizens, for that kind of racial prejudice. Those historic examples lead us to discussions about current issues of race and religion in America.
Talking to History
In those days, we could meet folks who survived the experience. One year we had a Holocaust survivor, a sweet lady, come in and talk. Her life before the Holocaust was a simple childhood that all the children could relate to. She didn’t tell too many “horror stories”, but it was enough to see the tattooed numbers on her wrist and the tears in her eyes when she mentioned her lost family.
And we had a survivor of the re-location camps, a high school second-baseman for East Los Angeles high school who ended up under lock and key in Arizona. His only way out was to volunteer to fight in World War II. He was in the mountains of Italy with one of most decorated US Units of the War.
I know that the survivors of the War are almost all gone, but I’m not sure you’d “expose” eighth graders to that today anyway. Not only would it disrupt the “planning”, but in our current educational climate, why would any teacher take the chance of “upsetting” someone in the community? Any deviation from the “set” plan, the state approved curriculum; especially one that would emotionally impact a child, is just an unacceptable job risk for a teacher to take.
Unacceptable Risk
In Virginia, there’s now a state “tip line” to let them know if a child is “uncomfortable” in class by discussions of racial bias. In Tennessee, they are banning a graphic novel that explains the Holocaust, Maus. The book shares the experiences of a mouse, gently telling that horrible story. I had a copy of Maus in my classroom since the mid-1980’s. It’s still on my bookshelf today.
In our era of “sensitivity”, how could a teacher possibly talk about the Holocaust, or the Trail of Tears, or the reason for the Bill Clinton impeachment? In our polarized society, what lesson can teacher’s give about the Nisei internment without being “unpatriotic”, much less John Lewis on the Edmund Pettis Bridge? And how foolhardy would it be to even bring up the two impeachments of Donald Trump, the Insurrection or Covid; the biggest “teachable moments” of the recent past?
There is a lesson for teachers here. Stick to the script, or risk losing your job. It’s happening all over the country. And it’s failing the future.
