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.