Project Proposal

For my project proposal, I will learn how to use Virtual Stock Exchange. I haven't been exposed to this technology before, so it should be interesting, to say the least. It will help me to teach the Great Depression as well as the idea of "stock market bubbles."

Chalk and eraser style

So every once in a while, I like to go au natural with my teaching. Not naked, mind you (though that would add a certain dynamic to the lecture)--rather, I like to go sans technology. Kick up the chalk, tell a few stories, and ask a few questions. Of course, this isn't exactly smiled upon these days, esp. when our kids live at the speed of text.

How to do it? It's something I working up to, even now. But I've formulated these three keys to doing an au natural lecture right:

1) Every story is boring; every story is exciting

I think about the famous historians of our generation (I use the term loosely, if only b/c some of these writers are frowned upon by the academy, and sometimes for good reasons): McCullough, Goodwin, Ellis, and Ulrich--all of them knew something about details, about characters, and about anecdotes. They wrote their stories as though someone might actually care about who these people are. Their characters could be boring under most circumstances--yet they know how to contextualize them in ways that go beyond "he was a man of his times."

2) Show the power
No one likes hearing a story about the pathetically oppressed--even stories of Communism highlight the "people's revolt," riots, and populist action. Showing the character's *agency* under even horrible circumstances moves students more than any analysis ever can (Elizabeth Smart is a good example of this).

3) Be a little quirky
Go out of the box occasionally--it'll jolt the students out of their txtmsg stupr. Get happy, get sad, even get a *little* angry at the topics being discussed. Bottom line: get something.

No one else in America cares about history, except in some sort of abstract way. If we don't do it, then their historical understanding is hosed.

It's been a long time, blog...

Welcome back, friends of history teaching. I had surgery last week, so I've been a bit MIA for the past little while. That said, my thoughts on teaching for the week.

Surgery is a funny thing. The same tools used to kill a person can also be used to help a person heal. There's blood, lowered heart rate, even the risk of death when a person "goes under." Yet we do it--all in the hopes that we can attain some greater good.

Forgive me for waxing metaphorical, but I see the teaching of history in the same way, and I wish that more teachers would share this vision. When I present an issue during my classroom lecture, I find that I generally am not doing it to "uplift" but to pose moral questions. I *want* my students to sweat over the questions I present. If they walk away from class thinking about slavery, workers' rights, or war all with a smile on their face as they think about their date that night, then I have indeed failed. The truth cuts, hopefully to the core.

So maybe I should just teach all history classes with the intent of overturning everything they know, upending worldviews, and shifting paradigms? That's generally what most "activist" history teachers do. Yet in our delight as we see our students sweat, I have to constantly remind myself that I too am wielding a surgeon's scalpel. Am I carefully helping the student to rid themselves of what could be cancerous ignorance or am I just cutting recklessly, doing "surgery" after "surgery" with no regard to the students' capacities to embrace new understanding and truth? Without care, our delight in questioning assumptions can culminate not in enlightened students but in crushed ones who have trust issues towards.

This has been a little stream of consciousness-esque, so let's boil it down to brass tacks. I'm going to teach a class on the Mountain Meadows Massacre at some point in my life (so I anticipate--I do live in Utah, after all). That's a difficult topic for Utahns to comprehend. It brings to bare all kinds of issues about Mormon exceptionalism, zealotry, and Utah-federal relations. It is also loaded with a century's worth of bitterness and activism. In such a context, it's easy to react violently: to see ignorance and wield the "surgeon's scalpel" in the defense of truth. Yet the reality is that such a reaction sheds more heat than light. The best reaction is the reaction of the skilled surgeon: calmness, measured response, and even a little sedation. Then...and only then...can we as teachers hope to remove the tumors of ignorance that burden our students minds.

Multimedia Project

This is a short film on the role of Walter Cronkite in forming American public opinion during the Vietnam War.