Blogs > Cliopatria > Enthusiastic Educators; Educating Enthusiasm

Sep 27, 2004

Enthusiastic Educators; Educating Enthusiasm




One of Rebunk’s faithful but quiet readers, Sam Martin, an eighth grade history teacher working in the real trenches of the profession in my old stomping grounds of Charlotte, North Carolina submitted Rebunk’s first request. He asked the following (and by the way, I do know Sam, as we were fellow counselors at Camp Pemigewassett in New Hampshire way back in 1991. Apparently he tracked me down through Rebunk. If I were Andrew Sullivan I’d talk about how blogs are thus the best source ever created for helping to maintain human relationships, and that traditional sources, such as the phone company, are threatened by us.) :

I just scanned through an HNN update on research/thoughts connected to the decline of voter turnout. While identifying the reasons for falling election participation is important, it seems like the reasons have been known for awhile and we need to move onto the solution phase. The solutions offered in the HNN series seem structural, and while helpful, don’t strike me as more than band-aids to the problem. . . . As an 8th grade US History teacher I approach the upcoming election with mixed feelings. An election is a real “teachable moment”, but it is also just a “moment” since we do not revisit it for four more years. Pedagogically it does not make sense to teach something out of the blue once in four years, no matter how noble it may be. Since you and your fellow Rebunkers are educators, I wondered what you all thought about the state of civic education and what is needed to better educate future voters.

Not surprisingly, as Mr. Martin is much closer to this area of teaching than am I, he does a pretty good job of identifying the dilemma: That elections happen every four years, and that thus they are ephemeral opportunity to engage students as citizens. One problem he identifies later in an email he sent to a parent in Charlotte is that many teachers themselves are not especially interested in what used to be called civics, and that when teachers are not enthusiastic about a topic, it is hard for them to convey a sense of excitement to their students.

This latter issue seems to be the identifiable, and we should hope rectifiable, problem, and it extends at least to high school and junior high. Teachers should be something of specialists in their topics. A physics teacher should know physics, should have been a physics major or at least have a really solid grounding in the sciences. An English teacher ought to have been a literature major who took a few education classes. And those who teach history and government in our public schools ought to have spent a whole lot more time during their undergraduate years learning historiography than they did learning how to design lesson plans. The former is specialization. The latter is vocational training, and not the most challenging vocational training at that.

You see, Sam Martin is absolutely right when he says that elections come every four years and are thus “just a moment” in the student’s education span. But elections themselves are only part of the larger process of being engaged as a citizen. If our schools have committed teachers who are enthusiastic about history and politics and geography and current events and for that matter literature and biology and trigonometry (ugh!), then the education they provide will be part of a continuum. When elections roll around, their students will already have some ideas about elections as turning points, about contested elections, about how the midterm elections can be as important to the failure or success of a presidency as the events we think about every four years. If we go to war, it will not happen in some vacuum in the student’s mind, because their teacher will already have begun to have explored wars and their links with foreign policy and human rights and both the good and evil that men and women do. When an issue such as affirmative action comes up, students will know about the Civil Rights Movement; When genocide in Africa arises, maybe they will even have heard about Rwanda, or at least apartheid; When a president (or local judge) is impeached, they’ll already know about Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. In this way, elections will no longer seem to be these strange quadrennial outliers, but rather they will be part of a larger American and global process in which the teacher, and thus the students, are not only engaged, but immersed, and indeed interested. The students will care because their teachers, from 6th, 7th, 8th grade have cared. The students will care because these things are inherently interesting in the right hands and minds.

The problem, of course, is one Mr. Martin has identified. Currently far too few teachers possess that interest or passion for history or current events (or geometry or physical education for that matter) and certainly far too few possess the subject expertise. Solving this will take far more than I am capable of providing here, but reform at the university levels would help, and this could start among the disciplines themselves and in education departments especially. Alas, I am not especially optimistic that we will convince most schools of education that their courses in methods are not the end all and be all of the process of making teachers and that at the end of the day, to teach one has to know. But it seems that knowing that teachers have a role to play in instilling a sense of interest and passion, identifying it as a problem to be solved, is a huge part of the battle. From the political vantage point it would be useful if our leaders realized that our teachers ought to be trained in what they teach, and not just in some broad, ephemeral field called “education.” Perhaps with a confluence of self-reform at the university level and gentle (or strong) prodding from state houses, and a willingness to think beyond the increasingly absurd box of testing, change can happen that will get more enthusiastic, qualified and passionate teachers such as Sam Martin into the classroom.

By the way – this adds a whole new dimension to Rebunk: Apparently, we take requests! (No guarantees as to satisfaction, however . . .)



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Tom Bruscino - 9/28/2004

From a purely teaching standpoint, I'm not sure I agree that it is all that big a deal that presidential elections are only teachable moments. We all should strive to be consistent and make sure that most or all of our students come out of our classes with certain lessons learned, but consistency can go too far. We should talk about civic duty when it is not a presidential election year, but we all seem to be missing the point about presidential elections. Presidential elections are teachable moments because they are high profile, because nearly everyone has some idea of what is going on.

When it is not a presidential election year, there is something else going on that nearly everyone knows about, whether it be sports or popular culture or war or politics. Those are all teachable moments that we should use to get the interest of our classes. Should we have not used the recall of the governor of California to teach because it does not happen very often? Of course not. We play with the cards we are dealt, and no amount of wishing is going to get high school or even college students to take an interest in the Senate race in South Dakota (as important as we all know it is this year). Be happy your students know the candidates in this year's election, and see if you can use that to illustrate some points. Next year, talk about American Idol or the Apprentice or aspects of the war or Tom Brady's sex change or whatever it is that can help you teach.


Greg Robinson - 9/28/2004

See my comments to Steve's post about civic education above. I agree with both of you on many points. I think our primary problem in high school history education (and probably K-8, but I can only speak from the vantage point of high school) is exactly what both you Derek and Steve have touched on and that is the lack of history majors teaching history. I would almost go as far as to advocate an advanced degree in history. I personally did not feel ready to teach history after I finished my B.A. A firm grap on historiography and an intense passion and enthusiasm are essential.


Stephen Tootle - 9/28/2004

Presidential elections happen every four years. We have elections and vote on issues all the time. You can teach those too.


Steven Heise - 9/27/2004

I think the larger problem is that, if my memory of junior high serves, there is no continuous ciriculum in the social studies. And this is not just on the junior high level, as I know for a fact that most high school social studies departments offer such a mismatched smorgasbord of classes that there really is no logical way to enforce, or impose a ciriculum which would allow for continuous study in history or any other field that is lumped into the ill-defined 'social studies'.

If we are to compare the structure of a secondary level school's math or science department with a social studies one, we would find that while the social studies does, in some instances, have a series of prequisites, it is nowhere nearly as logically structured as their hard sciences counterparts, because the simple fact is one cannot do calculus without at least a decent grounding in algebra or geometry. Whereas with history or civics (I prefer Political Science, but that's just because I want my minor to sound cool) it is much easier to mix and match as the specialized knowledge required for each different class is exceedingly diverse. History is not Econ, but Physics is pretty much Calculus, which means that the understanding of history does not require an intrinsic understanding of economics, but to understand the higher levels of physics, you do need to be able to do all sorts of wonderful calculus.

In my junior high, in sixth grade we had geography, seventh was state history, and eighth was U.S. history. In that order. In high school, you would take either U.S. or State history, a geography or global studies class, a career planning class (which is a terrible class to start with, but for it to be required, and taught by the same teacher every year because she had tenure was torture), and finally either Civics or Great American Personalities, would round out your social studies education, and the electives at the high school level were something along the lines of anthropology, economics, world religions, and an advanced US history sequence. Through seven years of school, there was no real concise or coherent social studies regimin, or even a real advanced set of history courses (notice no mention of World or European history, just US).

The point of this meandering is that before we can go and try to make the election more than just an event in the minds of the students we first need to create a system that allows for continuous education within that sphere of learning. If we give our teachers a more of a stake in the education of their pupils rather than the mass produced psuedo-modular ciriculum it is quite possible that the happier and more effective teachers will come along naturally enough.

Steve