Charlottesville Teach-Up

Confessions of a History Teacher

I have to make a confession:  over the course of the past three years as the history teacher at Field School, I have taught as much science as history. 

It’s not for lack of material.  I have long been fascinated by history, and having taught it in various forms over the last few decades, with such classes as US History, European History, Government, Economics, the South, Nuclear War, Latin American HIstory, Civil Rights, Constitution Law, and African-American History under my belt, I have an abundance of experience in social studies to draw upon.  I have a Ph.D. in American History that provided me with a solid background for teaching, and my continuing self-education ever since and attention to current events (I read a newspaper or two a day) has given me an enhanced understanding of the study.  Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I have a better appreciation for the events and characters of our past as I grow older, understand the various types of personalities that inhabit the world, and match the stories I read to what I know about people.  For example, I read an insightful biography of George Washington recently, and I think I really know the kind of person Washington was and what accounts for his greatness in our history (a combination of a gifted personality, events then taking place, and sheer luck that he wasn’t killed time and again in battle). 

The problem with history teaching in middle school is the dearth of good textbooks.  I use Joy Hakim’s Story of US to teach U.S. history, and I don’t think there is a better series on American history for students of any age.  It is well-researched, well selected, and well written.  But there’s nothing close to comparable for World or European History.  After reading Hakim’s U.S. history series, teaching anyone else’s text would be a letdown.  Moreover, the students would not be as eager to read.  As it is, I don’t have a problem getting the boys in my classroom to read. 

Fortunately, Hakim has now published 3 of 6 planned texts on the history of science, and I embarked on teaching the first of these two years ago, one that revolved around science history from ancient times, with much focus on the Greeks and Aristotle.  It was so much fun to read, and to contemplate the lack of science understanding and the stories of thinkers slowly developing ideas.  We read about Archimedes probably apocryphal “Eureka!” moment when he figured out how to determine whether the king’s gold was being alloyed, and how Aristotle’s ideas so affected intellectuals that thousands of years passed before some of his thoughts were debunked.  We took up the following text last year, one that stretched from the Dark Ages through the end of 19^th Century and that centered around the brilliant and often nasty Sir Isaac Newton.  This year started with the extraordinary work of Albert Einstein, who in one year, wrote 5 papers that set the stage for the next few generations of scientists. 

Since the history of science stretches all around the world, it serves as a perfect substitute for world history.  But it’s even better for middle school teaching for two reasons.  First, the topics of science are so fascinating and there are still so many unanswered questions.  Hakim spends much of the last of the books noted here discussing the unknown frontiers of science.  This leads to great discussions in class, about subatomic particles, unified field theory, the big bang, entangled particles, black holes, and so on.  If you have just spent several years learning the stories of how scientists slowly and doggedly learned how to, oh, split an atom or guide a rocket to the moon, you know that the next set of frontiers will likely be conquered, and perhaps before we know it.  The questions on the frontier are super exciting… When will we find life in space (I firmly believe it’s just a matter of time)?  Can we extend human life (for better or worse)?  Just how powerful will our computers become and when will they begin to approximate human beings?  Will we learn ways to teleport across the vast distances of the universe?  Will we discover time travel (doubtful)?  Can technological changes help us to solve the persistent problems of poverty, climate change, oppression, and world health? 

The second reason it’s such a fertile subject with middle schoolers is that history’s top scientists often do their best work in the twenties.  The boys in my classes are ten or fifteen years away from potentially doing world-changing work in science.  Newton was 23 when he wrote his seminal Principia and Einstein was 25 when he published the 5 papers.  The biographies of these and many other scientists in Hakim’s work suggest that the best of them come from diverse backgrounds and with varied personalities, but most have been blessed with a solid education in science and a determined curiosity.  Is it realistic of me to think that a Field School boy will one day play a part in the history of science?  Might one of our guys help to answer one of those questions above?   

I think so.  

Inspirations from the Oliver Kuttner Speech at Field School

We have an annual speakers series at Field School.  It 's an event that's meant to create awareness of the school in the community, and we annually arrange to have someone who reflects one of the school's ideals:  boys education, good parenting, leadership and ethics, sportsmanship, or the outdoors.  This year, I wrote Oliver Kuttner, the founder of Edison2 and winner of the recent XPrize $5 million car competition, with an invitation.  He agreed, and on Friday night, we had a crowd of about 150 Field School boys and families and others from Charlottesville to hear what Mr. Kuttner had to say about his car.  

It might have been the best speech in our series, and not just because he told all our boys how critical it was to learn math if they want to do something like this.  Kuttner does not come across as one who makes these presentations regularly.  Instead, he comes across as a guy who knows the engineering and business of building cars really, really well, and as one who provided excellent leadership for his team.  These qualities were great to witness, because he expressed both the triumphs of his work recently as well as its frustrations.   

Among the triumphs, aside from the millions of dollars in prize money, were his pride in having built what seems to be the very best car running.  It gets about 100 miles per gallon.  It is safe, with a design not unlike a race car meant to avoid wrecks and protect passengers in a mishap.  There seems nary a part in the car that was not fully considered and built with the primary goal of making a sleek, commonsense car.  Furthermore, it looks really cool.  It is a simple car, and my impression is that everyone in the room wanted one of their own.

The frustrations lie, however, in trying to get it produced.  He is not interested in taking on that challenge himself, but hopes others will see the virtues of their car and purchase the rights to their work.  He told us that the team had sold several lucrative licenses for parts and had had audiences with a variety of carmakers, mostly from Asia.  But no one has yet bitten on building on their platform.  Intrenched interests within the bureaucracies of automobile companies create cultures there that make change very unlikely.  He thinks time is on their side, however, as the inevitable rise in fuel prices and government fuel efficiency standards will certainly lead the auto industry searching for better performance options in time.  

Along with many others in the room, I was inspired by his speech and by his work.  I was impressed that he and his team had set out to build a better car, and had clearly done so.  Though I might have assumed that the big car companies and their legions of employees were building the best possible cars these days, his presentation made it clear that a small group of dedicated engineers and thinkers could do much better.  The message was that there is ample room for improvement.

I think the same message applies to education and that we are discovering as much at my school.  We can do better in educating kids.  As with Kuttner's team, the keys to improvement are not startling.  After reflecting on his speech, I resolved to share our school's stories about what works in education more fully.  Though we don't have the benefits of math models to predict our outcomes quite so elegantly, I look forward to making the case for creating better schools.  

Oliver Kuttner chats with the crowd after the talk.  

 

"A Nation of Wusses"

After Philadelphia officials called off the Eagles-Vikings game Sunday night due to a coming snowstorm, Pennsylvania's governor, Ed Rendell, famously sounded off on a local sports talk radio show:

"We've become a nation of wusses.  The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down."

I really don't know the mysteries of the Chinese government well enough to assert whether or not they would cancel a contest under similar circumstances (I imagine party officials huddled behind gargantuan doors, smoking cigarettes like mad, and issuing a decision through their farce press).  But my trip to China ten years ago makes me inclined to second Rendell--the people would have gone to the game.  I used to teach at a suburban DC school that brought exchange students from China every year, and I vividly remember those boys doing things that our sheltered boys would never, ever have done.  Sometimes, our boys took classes at a nearby school and our school provided a bus over there.  If they missed it, they missed the class.  The Chinese boys, however, just ran the mile and a half or so over (they might not have even known about the bus).  I saw this time and again, and I couldn't imagine any of our suburban boys doing it in a hundred years. If it had snowed a foot, I'd bet those Chinese boys still would have made the trek.

In my capacity as the Head of Field School, I have to make these decisions about whether to cancel school for snow days.  In general, we have school.  Last year, when we had two two-foot blizzards and Albemarle County cancelled school for 10 days, we called it off twice.  I am proud of that, although I still regret one of those cancellations.  In four years, we have had five snow days.  

I am reluctant to cancel school because I think I send a very powerful message about perseverance, one of our core values, when I make the decision.  We tell our boys, again and again, that they have to overcome obstacles in getting their work done, in addressing their academic weaknesses, or in fighting to win a game.  Mindful of my role in modeling behavior, how can I then tell them that we should not have school because of the weather, unless it is genuinely dangerous?  We tell them that they should not make excuses for failing to do their work, and we feel like the same applies to us.  I tell our parents that they should make the same sort of decision that they do whenever their boys are ill:  if coming to school would be unreasonably unsafe for you, stay home.  

I think Rendell is probably right about calculus too.  If you work at it, and work at it, and work at it, perhaps taking your book along on the subway ride to the game, and you don't fall back on whatever excuses you have nurtured, you can get calculus.  Unless you're a wuss.

The Wild Car Games

The last day of school before a break can be lousy for teaching at my middle school.  There is just too much excitement and focus on what’s next for our boys to easily maintain the routine.  Therefore, a few years ago, we started to play a series of games on the last afternoon before a big break to try to transform the enthusiasm into something educationally productive.  This time around, we called it “The Wild Car Games.”

We had done units this fall on cars and wildlife, and so the games reflected those themes.  We divided our boys up into 8 teams of 7 or 8 and gave them names associated with species taxonomy (Domains, Kingdoms, Phyla, and so forth).  Each of our teachers created a scored challenge that each group would attempt in a 15-minute period.  There were 7 games, and each group started at a game and then rotated, completing all the games and having one break period.  After lunch, we set up, announced the teams and “let the games begin.”

The games included a word game (“Taboo”) with wildlife terms, an archery competition with long-distance wildlife targets, and a speed-memorization challenge with the lyrics to the Beach Boys’ multi-vocaled “I Get Around.”  Our math teacher, Scott Rubinow, put car-oriented word problems on each of the tables in the room and the boys had to go to one of the tables and do the work.  Another game showed the groups photos of 10 cars and asked them to identify the decade in which the car was built, its country of origin, and its list price when it first sold.  In the kitchen, our chef put out four unidentified seafoods and asked the boys to identify each according to class with bonus points for Latin names.  One game featured iconic car and wildlife pictures and asked that the boys recreate and photograph them using props found around school. 

As most of our boys have done this a time or two, they know what they are doing.  We reward two teams at the end of the day, the one with the best overall score and the one that struck us as demonstrating the best teamwork.  On this go-round, the Origins and the Species won the top prizes (Klondike bars). 

Among the memorable moments from the day was an answer in a Taboo game.  When the word was “sponge,” a boy gave the clue, “you use it in the shower.”  One of those answering shouted out, “sexual reproduction,” to big laughs from the crowd.  One group thought that one of the foods in question was scallops until they tasted it and then realized, “oh, it’s octopus.”  Impressive.  I ran the car identification game, and was happy to hear that most of them recognized the one USSR car, the boxy and basic little Era that the communist nation so long produced.  I listened as they debated their group answers and found that someone often knew the right answer, and he would too often be drowned out by the loudest voices.  The take-home message that I shared with all of them at the end of the day was that the loudest guy isn’t always right. 

The games are mostly good fun, for both the teachers and the students.  Our boys love the competition, and racing from site to site and performing some creative group task can be a blast.  The teams tend to get better during the few hours, as a leader asserts himself and as all the participants learn to play a role in helping the team to be successful.  Our boys appreciated the effort and left for the break having had some fun that last afternoon and probably learning a thing or two as well.

 

What I Intend to Take Back Home from a Week of Leadership School Backpacking in the Rockies

Written August, 2004

    This afternoon, on our return from the mountains, I found a bathroom to wash my hands, and looking up, I saw something I hadn't seen in several days.  No, not toilet paper.  But my own face.  

    Most days, that's one of the first things I see, washing my face in the bathroom sink and taking a quick look at myself, at the Buckwheatesque plume of hair atop my head, at the red crease marks left by the pillow.  After several days in the mountains, I reflected that I hadn't seen my face in several days.  I felt my emerging beard and tried to remember what I must have looked like right then.  I could see all the others, but not myself.  I wondered briefly whether humans had much sense of their visage before mirrors, or what it must be like to be blind.

    I had other revelations that don't much occur to me.  I didn't much mind the natural toilets and nature's toilet paper.  I drank only water each day and enjoyed its taste.  I had no qualms about eating just whatever we had.  Perhaps most importantly, I didn't mind (and really hardly noticed) the rain.  I've done a lot of camping, but never with so much rain that my tent and sleeping bag were so saturated.  It's good to know, from time to time, that the things you worry so much about, that when they happen, they're not really all that bad.

    One of the fundamental pieces of an experience like this is getting to know yourself.  I suppose that one of the things I'll be taking home with me, besides rocks resembling the states of Alabama, New Mexico and Louisiana, is the thought that the mirror is hardly the place to look to find out who I am.

Election Day Project

On almost every general election day, I do a project on politics, one I have done effectively with both middle and high school students.  I go to any of a number of websites that cover the elections and get a list of the governors', Senate and House races that the analysts say are very close in the weeks just before the election.  Then I assign each of the students in a given section or two with one of the races.  They have to research the candidates, their positions on issues, the evolution of the campaign, their television ads (many of which can be found online), and the polls that have been conducted on the race.  The students write a paper and predict the outcome with an Election Day due date. (Late papers not accepted this time!)

I teach Grades 5-8 and assigned this project in the Seventh and Eighth Grades.  On Election Tuesday, I took the 5th and 6th Grade classes across the street from my school to a public school which serves as a polling place.  The 7th and 8th Grade classes met together (by maneuvering the schedule a bit), and I had them give me brief synopses of each of their races.  I started with the interesting Governors' races in Massachusetts and California.  Then I moved on to the ten or so House districts I had assigned, including our own in the 5th District, the Louisiana 2nd which was the only one in the country that switched from Republican to Democrat this year (it's quite a story), and the California 11th (which was won by a margin of 121 votes with about 175,000 cast).  While the students gave their predictions, I projected an interactive map of the congressional districts from CNN's Election Center 2010.  The map itself invites analysis ("why are the districts shaped that way?" and "those Western states are sparsely populated, huh?").  Most of the close races made it clear that this was likely to be a day in which the Republicans made big gains in the House.  Most of the races are not competitive, but those that were almost always were looking like Republican wins.

Then, we did the same thing with the Senate.  There, the Democrats have held a 59-41 advantage based largely on their success in the 2008 Election which also brought Barack Obama to the presidency.  However, the pundits knew that it would not be as easy for the Republicans to win the Senate majority because only 1/3 of the seats were up for election.  I then began to project an interactive map from www.270towin.com before the boys while they each, in turn, told me about the tight races in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Nevada and California.  When one predicted that Joe Manchin would win in WV, I entered that information on the website, and the state became blue.  Dan Coats to win in Indiana?  I turned that state red.  In the end, our class prediction was that the Democrats would retain a 51-49 edge.  In fact, the Democrats now have a 52-47 edge with the race in Washington still too close to call.  We were pretty close.

I told them that their only homework Tuesday night was to watch 15 minutes of political coverage just before bed.  Many of them told me the following day that they watched it for more than an hour.  And they all knew who had won the race they covered.

The project can be done in every year that there are races, often every year in November.  It is important that your students understand the distinction between primaries or caucuses and the general election.  This project helps them to understand the national scope and implications of elections, and the similarities and differences between issues and campaigns in other places.  We had a closely contested race in our district, with a plethora of television commercials and yard signs, so our kids knew about the local race.  This project helped them to see how ours was part of a bigger framework.  

"I Am Holding This Sign"

The first time I ever witnessed a political protest up close was in 1990 when I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.  George H.W. Bush was president and Iraq had just invaded Kuwait, so Bush assembled a coalition of allies and pushed back the Iraqis.  The move was very popular in the U.S., but protestors gathered in front of the library there in West Philadelphia, being college students and all, to protest.  I remember signs reading “No War for Oil.”  I had read so much about the protests of the Sixties and somehow understood protesters to be more thoughtful, smart, intellectually agile.  But the scrawled slogans and four-word chants left me very disillusioned.  “That’s it?”  A very complicated issue involving the rights of sovereign states, the ambitions of a dictator, assembling a coalition, and using force to ensure the rule of law was simplified, in the minds of college students, to greedy oil barons manipulating U.S. policy.  

I was similarly disillusioned 8 years later when I took some students to visit the U.S. Senate during the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton.  It just happened to be the day that the country’s various anti-abortion protesters marched to the nearby Supreme Court to protest on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.  They too held those four-word signs and chanted (“Abortion Kills Children”), boiling down complicated issues of human and civil rights and social policy.

So when I saw some of the photos from this weekend’s silly March to Restore Sanity, I smiled.  One sign read, “I am Holding This Sign.”  Another read “A Perfectly Good Sign.”  For me too, that’s about all I could squeeze onto a placard in those giant, easy-to-read letters that I would be prepared to defend.  The issues are just too complicated to be reduced in this way.

But the chants and signs and repitition work to establish ideas, often regardless of the truth.  It’s too bad that politics works that way. 

The issue I care most about is education, and I have watched during the course of the last few years as the genuine reform efforts of Michelle Rhee, former head of the DC public schools, was brought down by such sloganeering.  She confronted a dire situation in the DC schools, a pathetic and indefensible system with unbelievably high dropout rates.  I visited a DC public school while working near there ten years ago and within minutes, the abysmal work ethic of the administration and teachers was obvious.   But when she tried to get rid of the do-nothing, weak teachers in the system, the teachers’ union declared war and misleadingly questioned her every move.  Those of us who went to weak public schools know they are there, and that they shouldn’t be teaching.  One of her big sins was to wield a broom in a photo for Time, implying that the system needed to be cleaned up.  Which it clearly did and does.

After the mayor who hired her failed in his reelection bid, Rhee lost her job.  The incoming mayor had run against her, in part, capitalizing on nonsense ideas popularized by the teacher’s union.  She had helped the system to make real improvement in the quality of instruction and test scores in her brief tenure, and the success would have grown.  Sometimes, a leader that “cleans house” can be followed by another that is even more effective because the latter does not have the ill-feelings generated by the firings (but benefits from the composition of the new house).  But I doubt that is the case in DC.  The kids in the city deserve a quality education, but I would imagine the education there will regress as a new administration that came to power on simple ideas returns to the status quo.

The Simplest Way to Improve Education - Recruit Better Teachers

The Washington Post ran an article by Paul Kihn and Matt Miller today on the qualities that lead to the profoundly better educational systems in Finland, Singapore and South Korea--more selective training, funded teachers' education, higher salaries, and teacher autonomy.  From the article...

"These countries also foster a professional working environment. Finland, for example, grants teachers the kind of autonomy typically enjoyed by doctors in this country: They have wide latitude over how they teach, they share responsibility for their schools' operating budgets, and they belong to a culture that emphasizes the need to continually update one's skills."

The full article can be found at here.

"Space Balloon" by Luke Geissbuhler

I want to do this.  Next summer.

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

 

 

Obama's Speech to the Students

A year ago, in in a nonsensically protested speech, President Obama gave an address to schoolchildren in Arlington, Virginia and the networks picked it up so that anyone could watch.  Many schools did around the country, and I thought his speech was simple and perfectly appropriate for the beginning of a school year.  He talked directly to students and said that they bore the primary responsibility, as he had, for their own education.  That is a piece of advice I give to students all the time, but he took one step that, until then I had never taken.  He said that students should work hard and not let themselves down, their families down, or their country down.  Their country down.  That was a surprise.  

My experience as a teacher, however, has been that students certainly can make a difference in the quality of classrooms and even schools.  When a student does not try his hardest, he is letting himself down, and sometimes his school, and maybe even that entity that is foremost on Obama's mind, his country.  Ever since, I have been telling our students that their efforts matter, and that we want their very best so they don't let themselves down, their families down, or their school down.  I think the students really understand and believe that, and it inspires them to do their best work.  

To read or see Obama's speech, click here:

http://teach-up.typepad.com/charlottesville-teach-up/2010/10/obamas-speech-to-the-students.htm