When I graduated from high school, history was probably the very last subject I thought I would ever be interested in pursuing. All of my social studies teachers had also been coaches, and, with the exception of one, they were primarily coaches. Being a bad teacher would never have gotten them fired. Being a bad coach…? Well, let’s put it this way. Residents of the small mill town I grew up in didn’t wait at the local newspaper offices on Wednesday afternoon, for our weekly to go on sale, so that they could read about their children’s performance on a history test.
It all changed when I went to college and attended history classes that utterly mesmerized me. I wanted to become a history teacher. Now my relationship with history was not without its ups and downs. I probably changed interests while I was in college more times than a flee hops hairs on a hound dog. But I always came back to teaching, and never considered anything else but history.
Much of it was because I wanted to tell stories, like my college history teachers. Telling great stories about great feats in time — well it sorta makes you part of those great deeds and almost insurmountable odds. But I wanted to be a teacher because…. Well, let me put it this way.
My daughter is in her last year of education school. She’ll student teach next semester, and she, too, wants to teach history. But she doesn’t get it yet — at least the way that I did when I was teaching. I watched, almost exclusively, the PBS channel, any show I could identify as having anything to do with history, or even science if it could be applied to our social world. I subscribed to far more magazines than I could afford (asking for subscriptions from family members for Christmas). But she’s not doing that, and it worried me until…. Well it’s the teacher thing.
Aside from the master story tellers, I saw in those history teachers at Gaston College, and later experienced as a teacher, an entirely different relationship between me and what I learned. It seems that there is an altogether different relationship between topic and teacher than between topic and student. For students the relationship is probably more akin to that between me and my food. I need it. I consume it. I think about it, probably more than I should. But it is not, in much way, an integral part of me, other than sustenance and my almost regularly fluctuating girth.
However, as a teacher, my relationship with topic is much more a part of how I express myself. It is much more like my relationship with my cloths. Perhaps even more so, as a teacher, its like the relationship between a musician and a violin, which becomes an extension of the players mind, expressed as music.
Any teacher will say that they learned what they teach better, after they started teaching it, than when they were a student in university. Is it this new relationship between teacher and topic that is the cause? Would it be possible to create a similar relationship between topic and student? Would it require completely redefining student, learner, classroom, curriculum….
I think that these issues are probably going to be explored, if not explicitly, then at least in the air around the many floating presentations of the 2007 K12 Online Conference — which starts tomorrow!
Image Citation:
Sarah. “Violin Lesson with Sim.” Usedcarspecialist. 26 Jul 2005. 7 Oct 2007 <http://flickr.com/photos/usedcarspecialist/28752586/>.
For their final exam, the juniors and seniors in my Multicultural Studies class are required to research some element of a culture, develop lesson objectives & methodologies (and we spend a lot of time teaching how to do this, as well), and teach a 45-60 minute lesson to middle or elementary school students (their choice).
For 8 years, I’ve been getting the same comments in their end of the year feedback: it was the hardest and most time-consuming project they’ve ever done in high school, and they learned more doing that project than almost any other in 4 years of high school. For many of them, it was also their favorite challenge of high school – the toughest job you’ll ever love, etc.
Would implementing this type of learning on a large scale require a redefinition of structure and roles? Sure. Just implementing this project on as small a scale as I do can be a logistical nightmare, and I only do it twice a school year. However, I don’t think this should be the only mode of learning, either.
Would I like to see it implemented at some level, to some degree, each year of high school? Without a doubt. I think it’s a highly valuable learning experience (and it’s even inspired a few former students to become teachers themselves!).
I loved history lessons at school (mind you, I was at an all girls’ school and my history teachers tended not to be coaches). What spoiled the subject for me was the need to remember so much. To know who did what on which date.
What I realised in my final year was that other girls were able to draw correlations between what was happening in the different countries at any given point in history, even though they hadn’t been expressly taught it that way. I couldn’t do that. At the time I put it down to an age/maturity thing, since I was a lot younger than everyone else in my year.
However, I’m still pretty poor at being able to see such and such a trend in learning as being tied to such and such a focus in the corporate world. I have had to come to terms with this limitation in my mental capacity. To accept that I will never be among the greats. And that that’s okay, too.
[…]What we feed them or they feed themselves… does it meet the requirements for healthy living. Have we taught them to appreciate better food, or will they have to learn that lesson on their own or not at all? Wonderbread or 9 grain? Fresh veggies or big macs?Two objectives: survival and delight.[…]
David,
I’m confused. Are you now less anxious about your daughter wishing to be a history teacher? If so, what eased your fears?
-=Gary
I am confident that when my daughter actually becomes a teacher, that her relationship with her topic will change, that she will start to live history in a way that makes her want and need to keep building up her knowledge.
My question is how do we affect our students’ relationship with topic.
What makes you so confident? Is such a shift possible so suddenly?