Wrestling with History & Teaching

[JerryvonKramer]

English.

 

I expect American students to know the basic narrative of American history from the founding fathers through the Civil War etc. They should have a rough feeling of what was going on in each century going as far back as 1776. I teach American students as well as British ones. I also showed them that clip and they did do a little better: naming Carrie as well. I find their history is very patchy though, but give them more of a bye because I assume they are taught American history rather than British history in school.

 

I expect British students to know their country's basic narrative, at least from the time of Henry VIII, if not from 1066. I also expect them -- being literature students -- at least to have a SENSE of the over-arching story of lit from the Greeks to Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Pope / Dryden to the Romantics to the Victorians to the Modernists and beyond. A SENSE of it. When they have absolutely no sense of it, that's a concern. I can't teach all of history to them. And we have to build our modules from somewhere.

 

I try to go "ground up" as much as possible, but it's frustrating when there are NO touchstones at all. As if when you say "Laurence Olivier" it's the first time they've ever heard the name in their lives. That presents significant challenges. Teaching to a completely blank slate isn't what an undergraduate degree is about.

[ohtani's jacket]

It's frustrating because it means I have to explain it. I don't want to have to explain it. I want them to come ready-made, from school, at least having HEARD of, say, Method Acting, or Marlon Brando, or I dunno, an idea that the Romantics were in the 19th century and that the Restoration happened in the 17th century.

 

 

 

I don't recall knowing any of this stuff when I came out of high school.

[JerryvonKramer]

 

It's frustrating because it means I have to explain it. I don't want to have to explain it. I want them to come ready-made, from school, at least having HEARD of, say, Method Acting, or Marlon Brando, or I dunno, an idea that the Romantics were in the 19th century and that the Restoration happened in the 17th century.

 

 

 

I don't recall knowing any of this stuff when I came out of high school.

 

 

I think schools do a bad job of macro overview. They seem wedded to modular "bitty" teaching so all the bits don't join up and any bits left out and simply that: left out.

 

What country did you go to school in OJ? I can never work out where exactly you are from.

 

I wouldn't expect kids from anywhere other than Britain to know the Restoration or kids from outside of Europe to know the Romantics.

[Matt D]

I know my high school (Graduated in 99) did a terrible job of teaching us anything that happened after WWII. I'm not sure if it's better now but I kind of doubt it.

[ohtani's jacket]

 

 

It's frustrating because it means I have to explain it. I don't want to have to explain it. I want them to come ready-made, from school, at least having HEARD of, say, Method Acting, or Marlon Brando, or I dunno, an idea that the Romantics were in the 19th century and that the Restoration happened in the 17th century.

 

 

 

I don't recall knowing any of this stuff when I came out of high school.

 

 

I think schools do a bad job of macro overview. They seem wedded to modular "bitty" teaching so all the bits don't join up and any bits left out and simply that: left out.

 

What country did you go to school in OJ? I can never work out where exactly you are from.

 

I wouldn't expect kids from anywhere other than Britain to know the Restoration or kids from outside of Europe to know the Romantics.

 

 

I went to school in New Zealand. I'm a Kiwi, but I've lived in Japan for the past eight years.

[JerryvonKramer]

My knowledge of Kiwi history or basically anything Kiwi is literally nothing apart from Jonah Lomu and Jango Fett.

[JerryvonKramer]

Oh and their entry into the Pat O'Connor memorial tournament / Sheepherders / Pat O'Connor himself.

[Jimmy Redman]

It has only just occurred to me that as an Australian, I know absolutely zero about Kiwi history.

[ohtani's jacket]

Perhaps you should be lambasted Parv for not knowing that a New Zealander was the first to split the atom or climb Mt. Everest.

[C.S.]

Jerry, I can't tell if you're a film professor, a history professor, or both. As someone who took film classes several years ago, yeah, most of the kids there knew fuck-all about Godfather, Kubrick, etc. (I was a few years older.) The problem is, most people see those classes as "we watch movies the whole time, yeah!!!" and "it's an easy A." Before college, kids generally don't really view film as anything other than instant, disposable entertainment. They also aren't exposed to the classics, generally because they don't have an open mind. "Ewwww, that's old." I'm not painting ALL kids with that brush - some are more knowledgeable and open-minded than others - but most of them only care about the latest and greatest blockbuster.

 

To be fair to today's youth though, at 18, 19, 20 years old, regardless of how much of a movie buff they may be (and I again acknowledge that most are not), they're still just KIDS and there will inevitably be gaps in what they have seen. I didn't see Godfather until around that age, even though I had known for years beforehand that it was regarded as a major classic. There are SO many movies, not enough time in a day, and a million things dividing their time and interests. I consider myself knowledgeable about movies, but I'd be lying if I said I've seen every single acclaimed classic. Even now, I still haven't. I don't think anyone can really say they have. There are just so many.

 

As for history, you're right, it's not taught well. All kids get are the broad strokes, and never in an interesting, informative way that would make those events part of their general knowledge. To them, it's just more boring bullshit data they have to memorize. I blame the school system in that case.

[Guest The Jiz]

History is rarely taught well, even in reputable history departments. It's taught like crap because people either want to frame history in a moral lens (good guy v. bad guy), or (this is especially true in the US) they have no comparative frame of reference. History cannot be taught well without some realist reference point or without a sound historical preface. Few things agitate me more than people who blab on and on about World War II yet couldn't tell you anything more than a few sentences on WW I. WW I cannot be understood without a realist frame of reference. Yet history textbooks do silly things like say an assassination caused that war, when the assassination was more incidental. Or textbooks trying to frame the American Civil War around slavery when the issue was more related to parliamentary balance of power issues unresolved by the US Constitution that is strangely deitified, with slavery being more the basis than the cause.

 

History is complicated. It's a subject that legitimately can't be taught except through showing students how to analyze the events and broader causes, and having them do their own research while marking down students for projecting modern moralistic pretenses onto the past. I find academics are good about the latter - not all but most - but they still project way too much even for my comfort, and it's largely caused by "historians" accepting an awful lot of premises as "fact" without careful research. An awful lot of WW II historiography is flawed just because one guy 50 years ago got a date wrong and therefore did a misinterpretation, and two generations of historians repeat these falsities without caring to check on it.

 

It's often not hard to tell if a historian is worth reading after going through 3 pages and their bibliography. You can infer an awful lot about their construction that way.

[Johnny Sorrow]

I'm picturing Parv as Donald Sutherland in Animal House.

"I'm not joking. This is my JOB!"

[goodhelmet]

I taught U.S. History for ten years. There are a couple of reasons it isn't going to be retained by the student. 1. The students don't give a shit. Unless you can make the topic directly relate to them and their personal experience, it won't register as important. You can create lessons that make a connection the kid but that takes time. You don't always have the appropriate time to teach a subject with the depth and rigor it requires for them to retain the information long term. Instead, you compensate by creating lessons or projects that package a ton of information in an appealing package such as a booklet/pamphlet or a "foldable". 2. The transition of standardized testing acting as tools to improve weaknesses to now becoming high stake tests that determine a person's employment status. I have three kids to feed and a mortgage to pay. I would love to buck the system but you have to make value calls. If making students pass the test is the goal that matters most to your administrator then that is how you design your class.

 

 

I know my high school (Graduated in 99) did a terrible job of teaching us anything that happened after WWII. I'm not sure if it's better now but I kind of doubt it.

 

 

The cutoff point is generally the Vietnam War and Nixon's resignation. After Watergate, teachers go into cruise control / movie mode. The state assessment is over and you want the end of the year to be as painless as possible.

[JerryvonKramer]

Will - the stuff I was saying is not a knock on individual teachers by the way, it's a knock on the way the syllabus is designed. Like I said: "schools do a bad job of macro overview. They seem wedded to modular "bitty" teaching so all the bits don't join up and any bits left out and simply that: left out" -- that is not the fault of teachers, it's the fault of a system that has completely done away with the notion of "grand narrative". I can understand the political reasons for it, but practically it means students literally have no "story of what happened across time" in their heads.

 

The thing is, we don't expect them to come to university already knowing about theory or multiple approaches. To one extent university says:

Hey, you know all that shit you did at school? Chuck it out. Question everything. You learned one approach, there are at least TWENTY. None of them are "right". There is no One True Way. Learn to think for yourself. Those skills that got you the grade you needed to get here, well, you're gonna need more than that.

That's fine. It should be a step up.

The problem is when they come not knowing anything else either, because then we have to provide:

1. The sort of "connect the dots" history from my slides
2. The actual history itself
3. The theory
4. Then the study of the text

This is hard to do all at the same time, and it leads to a certain shallowness when there's no base knowledge there at all. Because if the name on the slide is just a name on a slide in the macro overviews, they'll have forgotten it by the next week.

 

Here are some slides from a week 1 lecture I gave last week, trying to do all of these things at once.

 

The problem for me comes when ALL of this stuff appears new to them. This just shouldn't be the case. How can ALL of this stuff be new? Where have they been? I don't just mean the narrative overview or a few of the names and faces, but ALL of them. That presents a problem for me. I don't want to have to explain all of the incidental things I mention here, there has to be some ground-level of knowledge already. And it's not there.

 

That is what is frustrating for me.

[Guest The Jiz]

I taught U.S. History for ten years. There are a couple of reasons it isn't going to be retained by the student. 1. The students don't give a shit. Unless you can make the topic directly relate to them and their personal experience, it won't register as important. You can create lessons that make a connection the kid but that takes time. You don't always have the appropriate time to teach a subject with the depth and rigor it requires for them to retain the information long term. Instead, you compensate by creating lessons or projects that package a ton of information in an appealing package such as a booklet/pamphlet or a "foldable". 2. The transition of standardized testing acting as tools to improve weaknesses to now becoming high stake tests that determine a person's employment status. I have three kids to feed and a mortgage to pay. I would love to buck the system but you have to make value calls. If making students pass the test is the goal that matters most to your administrator then that is how you design your class.

 

 

I know my high school (Graduated in 99) did a terrible job of teaching us anything that happened after WWII. I'm not sure if it's better now but I kind of doubt it.

 

 

The cutoff point is generally the Vietnam War and Nixon's resignation. After Watergate, teachers go into cruise control / movie mode. The state assessment is over and you want the end of the year to be as painless as possible.

 

I don't disagree with your sentiments necessarily - because you're right - but I find subjects aren't appreciated simply because subjects are predominantly taught in a vacuum without a meta-subject appreciation for its inherent aesthetic value. As such, the pedagogical approach for history becomes a bunch of dates and events that have no real emotion behind it. Times today are very boring. Death (warfare) is a very profound topic to impressionable minds. Frankly, parliamentary politics is boring.

 

Often too, history is taught in a ridiculously reductionist manner, and it's frankly insulting. I mean, how many times have I heard the tards say something like "WW I started because of an assassination, the French held on until the Americans saved the day because of the Zimmermann telegram." It's infantile and beyond silly on so many levels. To that extent, I have this nihilistic view that history shouldn't be taught at all, or at least taught in reverse. Further, history can't be understood without a true conceptualization of balance of power and realism, since actors, even "bad guys," don't do things out of a vacuum.

 

History can be a remarkably interesting study. Assassinations, battles with hundreds of thousands dead, revolutions, genocide, etc. But schools don't want to talk about such things... they want to politicize history in some feel-good nonsense that simply isn't reflective of reality. It's not interesting on its face, involves little thought, and I can't blame students for largely not being interested. I wasn't when I was in school, because it sucked, and I'm still not interested in boring history unless it's relevant in building to something interesting (like war doctrines and debates within a general staff).

 

I'll present one example:

 

"During World War I, France's military age population (18-34) had 13,350,000 people. Of those, 8,410,000 would be mobilized. 1,122,400 would be killed and 260,000 would be missing, i.e. never seen again, disappearing in artillery firepower. Another 3,594,889 would be wounded, i.e. maimed. Of those mobilized, 60% would be casualties before V-Day, 17% would never come back home, 43% would be maimed. Of the 100,000 officers of that war, 30% are killed. Of the 17,000 Saint-Cyr graduates, 6,000 would be killed. Since most of those killed were junior officers leading from the front, more than 50% of the recent graduates would die."

 

That's an atroscious, scarring casualty count. But since people find reductionist approaches to history, the presentation isn't interesting. No one can tell me with a straight face that there aren't plenty of stories in that, of soldiers crawling over dozens of burnt bodies that lay there for months, just to find ammunition to kill an enemy and how, in a sense, it meant nothing in the end but despair.

 

Maybe it's not worth it. I probably would have been better off not knowing these things, just as some exposed to pornography or violence on television can screw with people's heads. All that has certainly screwed with mine where you realize the extent of what humans are capable of, how meaningless life is treated, and I'll someday die with such things buried in my mind. But hey, that's history, and real history has such things etched in the soul.

 

I don't deal with kids, so I don't know what that's like. I can't even deal with the vast majority of undergrads. So in a sense, real history becomes an esoteric pursuit, hence why mass history is bad.

 

But today was interesting in talking with a few Americans online about Vietnam and their realization that most of what they were taught about the war in school were a bunch of lies. It has made them interested in French history and its relation to Indochina. Hopefully some future translations will come where their needs are served.

 

Sorry if this is way too long... it's a topic I don't like discussing on non-history boards due to the psychological components.

[goodhelmet]

Split the topic because this was so far removed from the original topic and I want to respond to Jiz and Jerry at length.

[goodhelmet]

Parv.... from your slides, what do you expect your students to know coming in? I have gone over them about 3 times now and have come to the conclusion that I am familiar with about 10% of the topics/images. For a minute, I thought I was familiar with "Look Back In Anger" then I realized I just knew the David Bowie song. I could probably spend a couple of hours looking up the subject matter on your slides and get an idea of how they are connected but at this point, I have no idea.

[alexoblivion]

Just out of curiosity, assuming this is a theater course, what textbook are you using?

[Cross Face Chicken Wing]

No offense, Parv, but if you showed those slides on the first day of a class I was in, I wouldn't come back.

[alexoblivion]

Granted I go to school in Wyoming, having just had a theater history course that covered what is on your slides, I will say that a large portion of the class wasn't familiar with alot of the stuff covered on your slides. I'm guessing this is because of lack of exposure and interest. But pulling from a smaller sample size, my friends mainly being hipsters, I think they would be familiar with the individuals on the slides, but not so much the broad history of it. Regarding kitchen sink dramas, I started reading uncut and mojo in high-school, and through those magazines, became aware of that movement. I wonder how familiar the average American is with that particular period?

[Childs]

The average American would have no idea what a kitchen sink drama is. The average teenager probably would not recognize even a lot of the more mainstream images on the slides, such as Gorbachev, Ayatollah Khomeini, maybe even Lennon/Yoko.

[Matt D]

By having my kid watch Topper last night, I am proving myself to be king of all parents, apparently.

[alexoblivion]

On a secondary and higher education level, I think, or hope that the students wouldnt have a hard time identifying some of the major mainstream 20^th century figures. Teenagers not recognizing Lennon would surprise me, as I assumed he was pretty ingrained and commercialized into American culure by this point. But reaching back to the 19^th century and before, yeah I agree, it would be a struggle for most high school students, and for some of the more specific content, a struggle on both levels. The 90s Spice girls and Noel Gallagher/Tony Blair picture made me smile as I think that one in particular would get a nice blank reaction with students in America. On a higher education level, I could see some of the names coming down to things such as interest, background, and major. From talking with some of the people in the theater history course, I dont think they were familiar with Sartre, Pinter, Camus, Artuad or some of those general figures before the class, nor were they really receptive to the stuff during the class. But for the english or theater majors, it was a different story. On a side note, I just asked my sister if she was familiar with kitchen sink dramas. After giving her a high, rambling, explanation of the genre, she proceeded to read what she found on google. With that being said, its nice how easy it is to take a name or subject and go down the google wormhole in seconds.

[goodhelmet]

I agree with the google thing BUT I also think it is easier to dispose of that knowledge after it serves its purpose.

[JerryvonKramer]

No offense, Parv, but if you showed those slides on the first day of a class I was in, I wouldn't come back.

Oh yeah? Oh come?