There’s nothing more terrifying than finding out your district administrators have just returned from a conference somewhere, and they’re excited about something. You know because they suddenly smile too much, and now they want to come talk to your department or hold a special faculty meeting. It’s enough to ruin your entire 17-minute lunch period.
It’s not because their conferences are always in Vegas or Honolulu or Mount Olympus or some such thing, while teacher workshops are in Moore, or at the Pawhuska Technology and Training Center. No, what’s scary is that they come back all excited about some revolutionary new paradigm-shattering approach to teaching – usually a combination of common sense stuff you’ve been doing for years and a few colorful twists slathered in cutesy rhetoric. They’re sure you’ve never heard of it, and that you’ll be so excited for them to share it with you!
They’d never send you to these sorts of conferences, of course – they’re so far away and expensive, after all. But they think they’ve come upon the Pedagogical Holy Grail – the one which will replace last year’s Silver Classroom Bullet, which superseded the rather durable Brass Teaching Ring, that of course overthrew the Era of Learning Unobtanium (ELU).
So you wait.
The details vary from revolution to revolution, but the need to unendingly build on the ruins of whatever was going to save us all last year remains sadly the same. It drives the world of educational trainery like dilithium crystals power the Enterprise, or infantile narcissism fuels the President. The same few themes do come back around eventually, however, like the Merry-Go-Round of the Damned, and you learn to look for them. Dread them. Fight them. And yet, the very predictability in the process forms a dysfunctional sort of affection for them after a while.
My personal favorite is the Periodic Awakening of Fact-Free History.
It’s a Revelation built on a simple truth – one recently discovered by your building principal or curriculum manager or whoever sits before you, eating your bagels this particular Friday morning. “When we were in school,” they always begin, “History was all about memorizing facts – names, dates, places. So many facts.”
Their distress is evident. Damn those facts! And the memorizing of them? Barbaric! Cruel, even. We all pause and reflect on this travesty of our dark past.
“But history isn’t just names, dates, and places! It’s about… ideas! Causes and effects! Opinions and documents and different ways to interpret them! We shouldn’t be spending so much time on stuff kids could just look up on their phones!”
This point always requires the sharer to hold up their own phone momentarily, as if perhaps the rest of us were unfamiliar with this radical new device. The visual distraction helps blur their subconscious leap from “I hated my history teacher in high school” to “you all teach boring, stupid stuff and you’re ruining the future!”
You know where it’s going from there. It’s time to do more PBL (Project Based Learning). More STEALHAM (Science Technology Engineering Arts Literacy History Athletics Math). More opinions and less reality – because if we teach the way we were taught in the past we’ll create the future we dreaded in our former present! We’re preparing kids for jobs that don’t exist yet, so we need to light more fires and fill fewer buckets if we’re going to fail forward…
It’s a frightening proposition, this fact-free history – if for no other reason than how difficult it would be to insist that such a thing doesn’t actually prepare students to function in modern society. It might, actually – but that’s not a good thing.
It has traction because – like most powerful deceptions – it’s mixed with valuable truths, even if they’ve been shaken to the bottom during delivery… Cracker Jack prizes smudged by poison peanuts. We don’t need to memorize names and dates and stats in the manner of centuries gone by in order to be considered fairly enlightened; Google or some variation thereof seems to be here to stay. If Sherlock Holmes is correct and our minds hold a finite amount of information, like that flash drive stamped “Pawhuska TTC” you got for free at your last workshop, it’s probably not a good use of mental space to drill ourselves on who led Confederate forces at Chancellorsville, or chronologically list every Vice President and their state of origin.
On the other hand, it’s a shame to think any civilized young person would be set loose on the world without a pretty good idea of what the Civil War was, roughly when it occurred, and some of the major changes it brought about. It’s unforgiveable if we don’t at least try to ensure that same youth understands the three branches of government and has a general grasp of how each is supposed to work.
You know – facts.
As to the sacred teachings of whoever keynoted the Honolulu Retreat, it’s nearly impossible to make a passionate case for something social studies-ish without drawing on those anathematic details – names, dates, etc. “To what extent was slavery the cause of the Civil War?” is certainly a valid debate to have, and opens itself to a wide variety of approaches and responses. An effective argument in any direction, however, inevitably requires substantial background knowledge at one’s proverbial fingertips – a comfortable familiarity with the issue of slavery over the three centuries prior, the dozen or so precursors to the war occurring in the 1850s, the extant documents from various players indicating their values and viewpoints, etc.
Yes, those things can be “looked up.” No, one needn’t have memorized the details of the Kansas-Nebraska Act or know the precise origins of the “lost cause” mythology in the postbellum South. But neither can you start from scratch and throw something together after a few internet searches – at least not anything viable. Those names, dates, and stats so reviled in our collective memory are the grammar of history, the multiplication tables (or maybe even the numerals) of critiquing culture. They’re not the goal – they never have been. But they’re essential for reaching most worthy goals. They’re often precursors to even defining them.
And it’s even more essential that we emphasize data and details when addressing contemporary issues. I’m a believer in everyone being entitled to their own opinion, but I’d rather not cement my students’ ignorance by encouraging them to wax emphatic on topics about which they know little.
“How can the size and expense of the federal government be reduced without compromising our national security?”
“Should parents have more choice in where their children go to school?”
“Did the Russians interfere in our elections on behalf of the Trump campaign? Did Obama ‘tapp’ Trump’s tower?”
“Should businesses be allowed to refuse service to someone if they don’t approve of their lifestyle, their religion, their race, or their politics?”
If you’re sitting around having beer and burgers with friends, you can spout any opinion on any topic you wish – especially if you bought the beer. Anyone who knows me primarily through social media would never believe how receptive and balanced I can be when confronted with the most bizarre opinions or interpretations of current events from my students.
But if you’re in an academic setting, on academic time, pursuing academic goals, we should INSIST on statistics, data, experts, and records. We should at least TRY to be precise about names, dates, and other onerous “facts” before spewing our precious individuality about pretty much anything.
It won’t be perfect. My students are 15, and we’re rather limited as to time and resources. We’re not working on our doctoral theses this semester and none of them are writing books on trends in jurisprudence at the moment.
But we can at least model the process – we can acknowledge the ideal pursuit of better-expanded versions of our efforts and discuss how they might differ.
I’m not against “individual learning journeys,” and I’m certainly not suggesting we go back to the Trivial Pursuit version of American History, Drill-and-Kill Edition. My little darlings are all individuals with their own experiences, opinions, emotions, and ideals. Kumbaya!
It’s just that most of the stuff worth exploring in history happened to people with names, on dates, in places. It often happened in order. If we’re going to understand it – heck, if we’re going to learn from it, or improve it – we’ll need those pesky facts.
NEXT TIME: Facts-Only History
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Statistics say, in fact, that you’re probably pretty good. Once you control for poverty and upbringing and factors well-beyond your control, the reality is that most American public school teachers are at least adequate, and many are quite impressive much of the time. If this is your first year, you’re probably not as good as you will be in two more; if this is your twentieth, it’s possible you’ve lost some of the passion of your first fifteen. But overall, I suspect you’re a miracle worker every day and simply don’t see it.
18% failed their common assessment; what can YOU do differently? Absenteeism is up; what can YOU do better? Some demographics are being disciplined out of proportion to others; what are YOU doing wrong? How can YOU reach more kids? How can YOU solve more problems? How can YOU meet more needs? What are YOU doing to modernize or personalize or gamify your curriculum? Why did YOU give little Bobo that ‘F’? How can YOU get more parents involved? What are YOU doing about global warming? Nuclear disarmament? World hunger? Transgender issues? That one computer mouse that keeps getting stuck? WHY HAVEN’T YOU FIXED IT ALL YET?!?!
You keep finding ways to make it work. You keep finding ways to reach as many as you can. When you can’t, it’s not because you suck – it’s because the system simply isn’t set up in a way that benefits most kids individually – it’s set up in the cheapest way possible that still kinda teaches kids in bulk. 
But you don’t have to suck – not going forward. You’ve had the training, you have (or had) the ideals, you know kinda how it’s supposed to work. So fix it. Try something different. Consult trustworthy peers in your building and ask what’s working for them. Find that administrator who’s not a jerk and let them know you’re looking for ways to improve – they LOVE that stuff. 
My ELA comrades are fond of discussing ‘universal themes’ and ‘common plots’ in literature and in life. I can’t speak to every book ever written, but I will confess I have a much better idea of who’s going to die and who’s going to betray the hero in any decent sci-fi or superhero movie now that I’ve sat in on a few literature classes.
Opening your eyes and looking around is harder than it sounds – that’s why there are so many songs and books about it. You’ve probably noticed how often major characters experiencing personal revelation are blinded or in pain from the sun or other sources of light, even when they don’t kill Arabs on the beach. Jackson Browne even had to go to the doctor after trying to keep his eyes open for so long. We’re all fighting the darkness, sure – but we’re equally blinded by the light.
Step Five: Initiate Conversations.
Oklahoma is trying hard to outbid all of its neighbors in the matter of granting easy and quick divorce. An attorney at Kingfisher, in that Territory, has issued a circular which points out that the statutes of Oklahoma specify no fewer than “ten separate and distinct causes, for any one or more of which a divorce may be obtained,” including that all-embracing term, “gross neglect of duty”…
It’s difficult to question things we don’t realize we assume. For example, few of us ponder why we easily trust our family doctor to diagnose pretty much ANY part of our body, internal or external, except our mouth. Our mouth, it seems, is so darned complicated and unique compared to, say, our aortic valve or epidermal sheath, that only SPECIAL DIFFERENT OTHER TYPES OF DOCTORS can even LOOK at this oral outlier.
School is rife with these sorts of assumptions. We simply MUST shuffle students from boxed area to boxed area in slightly-under-an-hour increments. We have roughly the same number of kids in each class, one subject per teacher, and at some point papers of various kinds must be placed in baskets to “grade.” Eventually, all experiences must reduce to a number between 1 – 100 and one of five letters, none of which can be ‘E’ because that’s stupid and wouldn’t tell us anything – unlike, say, ‘C’. 
And if students behave, and keep the right letters on their weekly personal-reduction-to-a-point-value report, they may be allowed to play sports, or participate in drama, or band, or debate, or cheer, or dance, or some other ‘extra-curricular’. 
Most of these kids are never going to be professional athletes. But neither are they likely to become professional mathematicians, or chemists, or historians, or novelists. The skills and knowledge gained in each of those realms nevertheless serve a larger good. They help to form a fuller, better, hopefully somewhat happier person.
I sat in yet another #STEM breakfast recently and heard extolled the glories of project-based learning with clear assessments whose rubrics were known in advance and a process built on collaboration – what the rest of us might call ‘band rehearsal’, ‘theater’, ‘competitive debate’, or ‘football practice’.