Holy Pedagogical Days (A Lesson In Progress)

November 2, 2017June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal ~ 2 Comments

I’m teaching AP World History for the first time this year, and it’s been… a fascinating challenge.

Fortunately, I’ve been in and around the world of AP and Pre-AP for nearly two decades, and I’m blessed to know several amazing APWH teachers and consultants – all of whom share generously and encourage unceasingly. There’s more of a learning curve than I care to admit, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it immensely.

Most days.

I have 93 students spread out over four sections. (I know, right? Fewer than a hundred kids on my roster – I didn’t think such things were possible.) I’m surrounded by experienced teachers who are supportive but see little reason to tiptoe when it comes to asking questions or making observations – my kinda people. My district has been struggling, at least according to those widely publicized test scores the state keeps pushing, but I see its heart and the talent gathered here, and I am at home.

Takin’ It To Dilemma

It’s in that context that I periodically find myself in something of a philosophical dilemma. See, AP is by design a more-or-less college level course. It certainly moves at a ridiculous pace, and students are responsible for an insane amount of information – most of which they’re expected to read, view, or otherwise digest on their own so we can focus on critical thinking, document analysis, and other essential skills in class. That’s without a doubt been the number one challenge for both them and me – keeping up with the content. It feels some weeks like I’ve left them to learn the material all on their own while I torture them in class with things like making good inferences or identifying points of view.

For most of them, this is their first AP class of any kind. I have a handful of juniors and seniors, but the bulk of my darlings are freshmen and sophomores. Many are strong enough students coming in, but plenty of others signed up primarily to qualify for one of the eleventeen different flavors of high school diploma the state delineates; several require advanced coursework to get the shiny sticker at the bottom. There’s no Pre-AP program here to speak of – yet – so this is in many ways a whole new world for them.

That gives us something in common, at least.

Thus my philosophical dilemma. Yes, – it’s a college-level course. Yes, there’s a big ol’ scary AP Exam coming up sooner than it seems. I absolutely want to do everything in my power to push them to their lil’ limits, prepare them for the exam, and lay the groundwork for them to do well in subsequent AP or other advanced classes, and in college, and in life. It is without a doubt time to don their big kid panties and suck it up – we’re in HIGH. SCHOOL. NOW.

But see, that’s just it – they’re in high school now. Not college, not a career, not the post-secondary something or other for which we’re trying to prepare them. High school. Getting ready for those things, but not yet doing those things.

Therein lies the dilemma. Every teacher faces it in some form or another – sometimes daily. How much do I push, and how much do I bend? When do I draw hard lines, figuring that’s what’s best for my little cherubs in the long run, and when do I adjust based on the situation, the need, the individual, hesitating to put the rules ahead of the relationships?

It’s tricky even if we set aside the touchy-feely stuff. Sure, I love them dearly most days, and that’s part of the gig, but the answers don’t suddenly become clear when we prioritize the purely academic aspects of the equation. I know they need to practice independent reading and note-taking skills; they beg for questions, outlines, or something I can give them on paper so they’ll know what content matters most. I organize interactive small-group discussions and activities, which work well enough; they want me to lecture more and insist it helps them understand stuff when they’re later reading on their own.

We’re starting formal written arguments in a few weeks, but we’ve also colored. We’re still digging through primary source texts, but today we watched a musical parody video about the Black Death as a self-check on content (if you understand all of the references, you’re probably good to go on the Plague; if not, you might need to brush up). I have no idea if I’m doing it all “right,” but I’m genuinely trying to balance the demands and guiding purpose of the course with the dynamics and practical limitations of my kids – and sometimes myself.

And that’s OK. It has to be. (Whatever you’re doing is too, by the way. Those folks on the tweeter-blogs making sweeping pronouncements about what should or shouldn’t be done in every classroom for every kid in every situation can kiss my curriculum. Lay off the pompous teacher-shaming and go flip your classroom or something. Sorry, do I sound bitter?)

The Mayans and Groundhog Day

It’s in that spirit that I’m trying something stupid this week. Or brilliant. Maybe both. I finally snagged a classroom set of laptops for classroom use, and we’re going to break up the routine for a few days.

I’m giving my students a list of major and semi-major holidays from which to choose, and an organizational table to complete as they research each. While a few are uniquely American, most have roots much further back in history and have evolved over the centuries. Students will explore those roots and that evolution, zoom in on some of the rituals or customs associated with each, and – here’s the World History Part – try to make sense of it all in relation to the cultures from whence they sprang,

If the AP gods smile upon us, they’ll also be able to trace how some of these rituals and customs have evolved from century to century and place to place. Presumably those changes reflect aspects of the times and places in which they occur. A secondary goal is to determine the reliability of various online sources for this sort of thing – holiday legends tend to be ripe with after-the-fact sentimentality and artificial OMG.

I know, I know – it sounds a little elementary on the surface. I’m hoping I’ve structured it enough so that it’s not. It has the potential to be ultra-productive – both in terms of engagement and in making connections between customs and cultures, between history and traditions. Not to go all crazy or anything, but what if they’re able to identify change and continuity over time, similarities and differences between cultures, or other baby steps towards legit historical skills and AP-level thinking?! LET THE LEARNING BEGIN!!!

Or, this might very well waste two hours of their lives they’ll never get back. That’s also a very real possibility.

On Day Two, they’ll be given the option to compare and contrast two of the holidays in terms of the information they’ve gathered in some yet-to-be-determined format, OR to compose for publication an article / blog post about one of their chosen holidays. I may offer a third option of simply adding a few more holidays for students who may not have more than that to give at this point; just between you and me, I’m waiting to see how Day One goes before finalizing that part.

I’m hoping many of them try the blog post / article. Like with the initial tables, there are guidelines and requirements and hoops through which to jump, but I’ve tried to leave them some creative freedom on exactly how to do it. I realize that edu-bloggers far more popular than I would insist in stuffy tones that I shouldn’t crush students’ personal learning journeys with things like word counts or formatting expectations, but I’ve met them and with all due respect, sometimes fences often set us free.

Assuming it actually happens, my plan is to then post the results for you and anyone else I can virtually round up to read and offer comments – good stuff, bad stuff, thoughts and suggestions, etc. I’m pretty sure that’s a trendy edu-thing to do these days – “authentic audiences” and all that – but mostly I just think it would be nifty keen and get them a better variety of feedback than I could provide alone.

Thanks in advance for helping with that, by the way. I’ll let you know when they’re posted.

Reflections

I have no idea what to expect. As I type this, I should already be showering and on my way. With my writing time so limited these days, I’m often trading pithy commentary for pedagogical transparency and personal reflection. Hopefully some of you will find my periodic bewilderment and perpetual self-doubt either comforting or amusing in some way.

I certainly do.

I’ll post the actual instructions soon and let you know how it goes. In the meantime, Comments are always welcome below – except for you bots at the essay-writing service or selling the Russian sex dolls. Seriously, people – I don’t have time to monitor that stuff right now!

On that note, go change the world. Thanks for staying with me on this ride. You are needed, now more than ever.

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Chasing Justinian & Theodora

October 26, 2017June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

I spend most of my “work” hours outside the classroom reading World History textbooks these days – not to evaluate them, but to absorb enough content to effectively run my classroom.

I don’t actually mind; I like the whole “learning” thing. I know some general history and I’ve picked up enough random knowledge over the years that I don’t feel completely ignorant – at least not constantly. Still, it’s a legit challenge – every day, every chapter, every thoughtful student question to which I have only the vaguest idea how to respond.

The textbook I inherited is not my favorite, but it sometimes catches my attention with rhetoric like this:

“Then, in 533 C.E… with the empire’s borders reasonably secure, a new emperor, Justinian, tried to reconquer western territory in a last futile effort to restore an empire of Rome. He was somber, autocratic, and prone to grandiose ideas.”

Well that’s rather poetic. And it gets better:

“A contemporary historian… described him as ‘at once villainous and amenable; as people say colloquially, a moron. He was never truthful with anyone, but always guileful in what he said and did, yet easily hoodwinked by any wanted to deceive him.’”

OK, full disclosure: when I first read that bit, I immediately thought of a certain current political leader and wondered if there were enough similarities to justify a snarky blog post – writing about one while actually talking about the other. The kind of highbrow stuff for which I’m damn near famous.

Then came the clincher:

“The emperor was also heavily influenced by his power-hungry wife Theodora, a courtesan connected with Constantinople’s horse-racing world. Theodora stiffened Justinian’s resolve… and pushed the plans for expansion.”

You may find these summaries a bit loaded, and you’d be right. But such broad, judgmental strokes are not fatal flaws so much as necessary compromises. We’re covering 10,000ish years in roughly 160 class periods; there’s simply not time to debate or analyze every individual or circumstance. Yes, we examine contrasting points of view and practice all the usual social studies skills – but we save that stuff for debating whether the Mongols were “barbarians” or inferring motives for the Crusades. Justinian and his bride are minor figures in the grand narrative, and for them to have any meaning at all, someone has to frame them memorably and then move on.

Still, they caught my attention. I looked them up in the textbook I actually like and discovered that Justinian merited only a passing mention. Theodora was omitted completely. A third text doesn’t name either of them.

Huh.

The next step, of course, was Wikipedia. (I’ll pause and give some of you a moment to regain your composure.)

Say what you like about the world’s largest online encyclopedia, but eight times out of ten, Wikipedia has just enough information, front-loaded with the most important bits, to scratch that academic itch. I wouldn’t cite them for my doctoral thesis, but if you’re trying to understand the Green Corn Rebellion or figure out how many different Mesopotamian rulers called themselves “Sargon” at some point, it’s a helluva place to start.

And no, I’m not on their payroll. I wish.

In this case, though, the site did its job too well. The more I learned about Justinian and Theodora, the further I drifted from my safe, general overview of the Byzantine Empire. Two days and a 70+ page color-coded, cut’n’pasted Word docx later and I’m still on this dysfunctional rabbit trail near their woods, uncertain how to leave but unable to get closer.

Two separate histories of Justinian and Theodora were written during their rule. That’s great, except that they disagree repeatedly, and parts of each are difficult to swallow even without contradictory evidence. Oh – and they were written by the same guy. Other than that, we have only official reports and third-party accounts and the usual never-quite-enough-ness of history. Of such bizarre threads is history sometimes woven.

Justinian was often called “the emperor who never sleeps.” He was passionately committed to doing God’s will, but comfortable utilizing great brutality in the process. He came closer than any other ruler to restoring the Roman Empire which had fallen centuries before (leaving only the eastern half – the Byzantines – although they thought of themselves simply as Romans). He devoted untold hours attempting to personally resolve theological disputes fracturing the church. He compiled and clarified centuries of contradictory and jumbled Roman statutes and legal precedents, editing the whole mess down to a single manageable volume to bring stability to the courts and consistency to the universities. He’s remembered as the Byzantine Empire’s greatest ruler, one of its biggest heroes, and one of its worst oppressors.

How can you not love him already?

Theodora is even better. The woman who would become his queen began life as the daughter of – wait for it – a bear-keeper. How does one make a living keeping bears, you may well ask? Well, he worked for the Greens at the Hippodrome. Where they held the chariot races. Against the Blues. And seemingly orchestrated other entertainment as well, some portion of which presumably involved bears. These events could also be a form of political protest, or an expression of violent rivalry between social classes. Unless maybe they couldn’t.

No one’s sure what happened to the Reds or Whites, but they were probably absorbed by the Blues and the Greens, or simply fell out of popularity over time. They definitely weren’t there for the riots where the crowds chanted “Nike! Nike! Nike!” until Justinian had his soldiers block the exits and slaughter them all with swords. Or maybe he bribed the Blues to leave first and only 30,000 Greens died. He’d always favored the Blues. Unless he killed them all, I mean.

I’m not making any of this up.

As a young woman, Theodora had become an actress and a… naughty mime of some sort? – seducing and having sex-for-money with men of means well-before her 16th birthday. Other than being particularly good at it, none of this was considered unusual or shocking, although it didn’t do much for her social status in the eyes of respectable people. Then again, what does one expect from the daughter of a bear-keeper?

That’s a real question. I have no idea what would have been expected.

Theodora converted to Christianity in her late teens and became a humble cloth-maker, eventually somehow meeting Justinian. The ruler-to-be had to wait for his first wife to die, and then change some laws so he could legally marry Theodora, although that didn’t prevent some pre-marital scoodlypoopin’. Theodora was brilliant and creative and stubborn and beautiful. She served as unofficial co-ruler with Justinian, promoting legal protections for women, strengthening punishments for those who abused the weak, and opening a home for former prostitutes who wanted to clean up their lives.

At the same time, she demanded absurdly self-debasing rituals from any who wished to enter her presence. She involved herself in religious disputes, even when it meant opposing her husband. Theodora also had a lot to do with that “kill all the protestors” thing above.

She was not what you might call ‘demure.’

So what started as fleeting curiosity over a comment in Chapter 10 has taken over my life temporarily, with little to show for it. At some point I’m going to need to let this go and get back to the essentials. I have classes to teach, after all.

But not yet.

My goal here isn’t to make sense of Justinian or Theodora – I’m not sure I can, although I’ll probably write something about them eventually. Right now, though, I share this tangent as a reminder of how complicated basic narratives can become once you shift perspective or gain new information. It’s sobering that for all of our compiled knowledge, research, and analysis, we can’t even say with any certainty what it was like for Theodora to grow up in a world of gladiatorial combat – unless it was actually more of a vaudeville/variety show – which might actually have been a circus – or a strip club – or NASCAR.

Or some combination of these. As long as bears were involved.

And let’s not forget that different times and places and people and events took place in different times and places and involved different people and events. Sure, there are human universals – people fall in love, kill one another for power, favor those most like themselves, etc. But other fundamental realities are radically different from era to era, and from place to place. The relation of parent to child, the role of faith in economic interactions, assumptions about diseases, food, or sex – these sorts of things are unpredictable when you jump contexts. They’re often hard to understand even once you’re aware of them.

Going deeper at this point would mean reading a few actual books, then patient research on my own. I might need to travel a bit, consult with experts, and immerse myself in learning the times, the cultures, the language, the –

You get the idea.

That won’t be happening any time soon. I’m trying to finish off the Byzantines so we can wrap up the Islamic Empire, give some context to the Crusades, and start the Renaissance only a week later than I’d hoped. And in that context, Justinian and Theodora simply aren’t that important. I just don’t have the time to spend on them – not if I’m going to keep up with the rest of my priorities. They’ll simply have to wait.

Still…

A bear-keeper?

Maybe just a few more days.

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Am I Teaching To The Test?

September 13, 2017June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal ~ 3 Comments

I’m teaching AP World History this year. It’s a first for me, and at times has proved a bit of a challenge. Do you have any idea how many cultures and nations and movements and causes and changes there are in the entire history of mankind? All interacting and comparing and evolving and being complicated?! With maps and graphs and primary sources and EVERYTHING?!?!

It’s daunting sometimes. Freakin’ Babylonians and their… cuneiform.

Today we spent about half of a 72-minute period looking at AP-style multiple choice questions. Eight of them, in total, one at a time. Students had about a minute to read and respond to the question privately – A, B, C, or D – then another minute to discuss it with a partner to justify or change their response. Finally, I’d either reveal the correct answer and we’d discuss, or we’d discuss… leading to the correct answer.

I’m pretty sure it looked a lot like test practice, for a test that’s not even coming until May 2018.

So… have I lost my mind? Sacrificed all that is holy to me? OH MY GOD AM I RUINING THE FUTURE?! Grab your vouchers, kids – Blue is teaching to the test.

Then again… maybe we should back up a bit.

For those of you unfamiliar with Advanced Placement, the basic idea is that students experience college-level work while still in high school. In the histories, at least, that means a LOT of informational text (usually in the form of a ginormous textbook), primary sources, charts-maps-graphs, note-taking, discussions, and writing writing writing writing oh-god-the-writing.

There’s also some writing involved.

Their grades are figured like any other class – however the teacher wants, pretty much – but come spring, students are encouraged to take the big ol’ AP Exam(s) for whatever course(s) they’ve had that year. In AP World that means three hours and fifteen minutes of multiple choice, short answers (paragraphs) and two essays – one built around provided documents and one not.

It’s good times, to be sure.

Possible scores range from 0 – 5, with 5 being the highest and 3 generally considered “passing.” The official rhetoric, though, is that it’s beneficial for students to take the course and the exam even if they score a 1 or 2, because of the experience it provides for them prior to college. (If I were sharing this with you as a parent or a teacher at one of my workshops, I’d now bust out a graph showing how much more likely kids are to stay in college and succeed while they’re there if they’ve taken a few AP classes in high school – whatever their scores on the exams. We could then quibble over those statistics and whether that correlation actually means what it looks like it means. I think it mostly does. Other smart people don’t. The resulting kerfuffle keeps Twitter interesting and makes drinking with other AP teachers far more entertaining than it might otherwise be.)

Now, not everyone is a fan of the College Board. That’s OK – they sometimes make me a bit crazy as well. Their reasoning and decision-making often leave me wanting to drink my own spit. And some of the people up that bureaucratic chain… Seriously?

But overall I’m quite a fan of AP – even those crazy tests. In fact…

*looks around furtively*

In fact… they’re-far-from-perfect-but-overall-I’d-argue-that-AP-Exams-at-least-those-in-the-social-sciences-with-which-I’m-familiar-serve-a-defensible-purpose-and-are-pretty-decent-tests-as-big-ol’-tests-go.

(I’ll give you a moment to recover, perhaps grab some rope and Google “how to dispose of blogger’s body”…)

But these exams do a decent job measuring a practical balance of content knowledge, attentive reading and document analysis skills, and the ability to put together a reasonable historical argument and back it up with facts and reason. There are few if any “gotcha” questions relying on trivia or excessive specifics, but neither are there many to which one might successfully respond without a decent understanding of actual world history.

Sure, there are things which are helpful to know about the way the test is set up and scored before you take it, and those “test-taking strategies” might conceivably nudge your score by a fraction or two, but overall…

AP Exams are – in my opinion – a pretty good measure of what they say they measure. Those things in turn correlate strongly with the sorts of skills and knowledge most history teachers say they want their kids to have, whatever their ability level.
Which brings me back to today and my eight multiple choice questions.

They were from someone else’s materials, so I won’t reproduce them here even by way of example, but it’s perfectly valid to ask whether or not what we were doing for 40 minutes of government-mandated class time was, in fact, learning meaningful history and associated skills, or practicing for a standardized test like any other – just dressed up a bit nicer and more likely to be picky about its weird mixed drink order.

I’m not a hundred percent certain, if I’m being entirely honest.

I think it was the right call with this class, for this course, as we march towards this exam. I feel good about how it went, actually. I’m particularly relieved about that because it took me forever to put the thing together just the way I wanted. But I did ask myself throughout the day if I might be selling my pedagogical soul for 40 pieces of College Board silver, payable in the form of student exam results and months of bragging-to-all-the-best-people for all-the-wrong-reasons.

So was it the right call? Is this a valid use of valuable class time?

The easy answer is that AP Exams are a known feature of the course going in; they are the stated “goal” and preparing for them is like coaching towards a big game or practicing the type of music you’re most likely to play in your next concert. Nothing wrong with that argument, but personally I need more.

We were revisiting content they should have mostly known, but in a different format and using someone else’s phrasing (rather than mine or theirs). That’s a good use of time… sometimes.

We were paying close attention to a map showing the spread of agriculture and pastoralism, and then to some excerpts from two Confucian writers, 500 years apart, who agreed on most things but disagreed on one rather significant issue. Neither may sound particularly exciting to you, but I assure you both are central social studies skills no matter what level of class or type of history you’re in.

Oh! And we were “close reading.” We talked about close reading, and debated details from our close reading, and went back and reread our close reading more closely. I’m a fan of close reading, even in what is in some ways a survey course. And my district is at the moment uber-focused on improving overall close reading skills. Let me assure you, as bright as most of them are, and as much as I love their weirdness and wit, many of my students – even in AP – are not naturally strong in close reading.

I don’t mean simply the sort of “close reading” you need to beat a test; I mean the sort you need to accurately register what people are actually saying. To bring your hard-won content knowledge to bear on specific circumstances or dilemmas. To infer causes or correlations, results or reactions – to be a well-rounded, useful, informed and thinking person.

I don’t think I feel bad about any of those things – particularly not that last one. But it was while pondering the “close reading” aspect of the exercise that I realized why I think I feel pretty good about the time we spent discussing these eight questions – multiple choice though they may be.

There was thinking.

Not brilliance, always. Not deep insights or personal expression. But thinking – the sort that utilizes content knowledge, attempts to apply relatively new skills, and takes risks in constructing responses. I know, I know… it sounds like I’m squeezing a whole lotta’ cognition out of a few educated guesses about the significance of Mesoamerican llamas and whatnot. But I don’t think so.

We live in a time and culture in which facts and reality not only don’t rule the day, they’re marginalized as active evils to be avoided. We create fictional histories and twisted versions of current events to justify glorifying the worst parts of ourselves; we’ve largely sacrificed our ideals for the illusion of increased security and the shaky promise of a few more dollars in our pocket.

Stopping to consciously think – to apply supportable facts to complicated questions, and to look closely at related information, to be intentional in the application of proclaimed priorities and values – that seems like a very good use of time, period – whatever the time period. Kinda makes me want to do it more often.

Don’t worry, though. I haven’t gone full Legit Grit-Master or anything. Friday we colored – sort of. Tomorrow we’re paraphrasing historical documents then recapping them in short bursts out loud via some system I haven’t quite sorted out yet. We won’t even be talking about AP-style anything again until the last week of this month.

At which point we’ll probably revisit the Multiple Choice and talk about what makes a good Short Answer response on the exam. I mean, come on – I don’t want to have to explain why more of my kids didn’t get that ‘3’ next time I’m at dinner with those AP teachers, do I?

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