DZ 3/4: The Weight of the World (History Textbook) On Your Shoulders

"...if you drop one, it weighs enough to break your foot". (45). Are Smokey and Zemelman talking about bricks? No. They're talking about textbooks, and as I read through Chapters 3 and 4 my right shoulder began to ache, phantom pains from high school days lugging textbooks from class to class coming back to haunt me. I had experienced all-too-well the phenomenon Smokey and Zemelman spoke of, and to this day my right shoulder burns if I carry too heavy a load for too long a time. (And they say high school won't be the death of you, ha!).

The troubles with textbooks--superficial, overcrammed, out-dated, and hard to read--are precisely the reason why I distrust school textbooks. Perhaps I should clarify that statement: I don't mind textbooks themselves as encyclopedias, pillars from which a teacher can support their lesson. Textbooks, especially history textbooks, work wonderfully as quick references from which you can glean certain amounts of information. I have very fond memories of "Bailey", my APUSH textbook, because my APUSH teacher never allowed it to teach for her--it was a resource, as much as the Powerpoint slides or the primary documents. It was something to be checked regularly, but it never dictated the classroom environment. It's when textbooks (and especially history textbooks) become the focus of a class that I begin to deeply distrust them. Too many times I've seen perfectly good history classes gone to waste because the professor would rather let the text teach us. It's a lazy cop-out to say "read this chapter and answer the questions at the end" and then go over the text the next day.

It also deprives students of being involved in their learning. During my FNED volunteering, I was assigned to a sixth grade classroom. They were studying the classic world--Ancient Egypt, India, Greece, Rome, all the fun stuff. Great! I thought. This is really interesting stuff! They're gonna learn a lot, and I'm here to help them!

The teacher himself was great, and the lessons he designed distanced the students from depending on the textbook to learn (it was also a matter of necessity, as this class had to share about thirty textbooks between four classes). He tried to go as hands-on with them as he could, getting them involved in their learning--i.e., dividing the classroom into different groups and given certain groups privileges to show how the Indian caste system worked. The kids loved stuff like this, and one of my favorite memories from FNED was the day teacher was absent. He'd assigned reading from the textbook, and once the kids were finished they started getting rowdy. While the substitute teacher handled one group, I took aside the rest and asked them about what they read. Collectively they shrugged.

"Whaaaat?" I spluttered. "It's the Roman Empire! It's so interesting!"

"It's boring." One kid moaned. He was twelve seconds away from shoving the textbook off his desk and mentally clocking out. We still had ten minutes of class, and I knew I had to salvage the reputation of Ancient Rome somehow.

"Oh yeah?" I scoffed. "What about the emperor who made his horse a senator? He waged a war on the sea and declared himself a god, y'know!"

Bingo. I had their attention, and spent the rest of the remaining time (about ten minutes or so), eagerly outlining the crazy exploits of the first five Roman Emperors. The students were enthralled. They were eager to learn. They asked questions. They wanted to know more. It was one of the best moments in my fledgling teacher career thus far, because I got the history away from the textbook and made it come to life. (Gaius Caligula: the fastest way to prove to anyone that ancient history is amazing and ridiculous and amazingly ridiculous).

The point of this rather long diatribe is to prove that Smokey and Daniels are right: textbooks alone cannot a student make. They need more. They crave more. If you can grab their attention at the start, a lot of the slogging and fighting you'd have to do is out of the way. They'll go out of their way to find the information that interests them. And textbooks? Just not that interesting.

I think, as a history teacher, I have more available options for a classroom library than anyone else. There's just so many options out there--magazines, newspaper clippings, biographies, historical fiction, primary documents, whole websites devoted to history! One of my absolute favorites is Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant, where she mixes humor, history, and comics (she does literature too!). Keeping a classroom library well-stocked and well-rounded will ease the dullness of the textbook, and help make history more palpable.

(Oh those crazy Romans)

UbD Reading: The Creeping Sense of Deja Vu

When reading the Understanding by Design section and its modules, I was struck by the sense of deja vu--I couldn't help but to feel like I've seen this before, and I started getting annoyed with the reading. I had to set aside the reading to sort out what I was feeling. Where had I seen this before? Starting at the end goal and making your strategy from there? Wait a minute--that's what writers do all the time! Little-known and slightly personal fact about me: I love writing stories, and over the course of the years I've learned (oftentimes the hard way) that any story starts with an end goal. You have your ending, good--now work back to it. Plan how you're going to get there. It's not easy, and sometimes it's frustrating because you want to skip right to that juicy ending, but all the work in the beginning and the middle makes the ending payoff so much the better. That being said, I looked over the reading again and scoffed. "This is common sense!" I said to myself, all smugness and eye-rolling. "You shouldn't just dive into your lessons--you need a concrete goal to work towards! Identify and then plan! What a bunch of hacks! Are they getting paid for this?".

What I didn't understand until well into Module F was that it hit me that I wasn't understanding what they meant by understanding and creating enduring knowledge. And now the egg was on my face. Good broad questions don't have a correct answer. Good broad questions are in-depth queries into a subject that can be debated and examined and reexamined. Good broad concepts lead to more active thinking from students, which leads to a better understanding of the material, which leads to enduring skills and knowledge. As I read over page 76, the lightbulb flicked on in my head and I said "Oh. Oooh. Oh. I see." The point of Backwards Design is not just to set up an end goal and then work within given parameters to that end goal. The point of Backwards Design is to challenge thinking and encourage critical analysis instead of spoon-feeding students answers.

My favorite thing about this reading, aside from the idea that we can shake up the questions we're asking to make them more in-depth, is the idea of "transferable" concepts. Concepts that transcend subject matter, that are universally applicable--concepts like humanity and morality--are some of my favorites concepts. They can be a great way to unite teachers across disciplines and unify those 'big concepts'.

D&Z Chapters 1&2: Reading and the Historical Narrative

Before we dive into the real meat-and-potatoes of this chapter, I'd first like to point how much I like the style Daniels and Zemelman use: it's breezy, it's approachable, and it made for a much more interesting read than Wilhelm. Considering that they are writing about reading strategies, I really appreciate how accessible they strove to make their work--meta-cognitive theories can be difficult to both explain and comprehend, so I appreciate the work that went to making this read enjoyable.

Onto the reading itself. When taking notes on the chapter, I excitedly made a note about page 10, and with a "YEAH!" of agreement. "Yes, there are a lot of obstacles to young people falling in love with math, science, history, language, and the arts. But that doesn't mean that our idealism is sentimental and misplaced..." (D&Z 11). I read and reread that line several times, with more and more mounting relief. As an aspiring teacher you hear a lot about the "real world" and how our careers won't be a remake Freedom Writers. Of course that's true, but at the same time you can't expect us to go into the classroom already dreading our students--it's not fair to them or to us! I've always believed that optimism tempered with realism is the best route to take, and it was nice to see that sentiment echoed. You can't win them all, but there's nothing to stop you from trying. 

  

The second chapter dealt a lot with reading and reading strategies, all of which I found fascinating--you never really think about how you're reading until it's brought to your attention! But the thing I loved most about these chapters was how history in particular was addressed. History is a text-heavy subject that requires both the analytic skills of English and the data-collecting skills of science--just look at the Common Core Standards for History on page 16! To be literate in history you have to combine qualitative sources with quantitative data, and that's no mean feat even for us history buffs. As a teacher, I'll have to help my students learn how to understand the who and the why and the when and the how--and the CCS make that goal seem so dry and clinical. History, as D&Z note, is a much a narrative as it is a science. 

It's the idea of history as a narrative that has always made history so much more fascinating, and what's excited me the most about learning and teaching history. It becomes so much more interesting and accessible as a living narrative, rather than a dead series of documents. Don't believe me? Check out this trailer for the History channel mini-series, Mankind: The Story of All of Us. 

If I can catch just a bit of the pulse-pounding awe a mini-series like the Mankind: The Story of All of Us inspires, then I may have just awoken a passion for history in my students. I love this trailer because it really brings history to life--it presents history not as a series of big isolated events, but as exactly what it is: an ever-expanding narrative of miracles and disasters and heroes and villains, the kind of story you can get emotionally invested in. I want my students to be able to read history not as a series of facts and dates and names, but as a narrative. They shouldn't only be critical thinkers--but imaginative thinkers too!

p.s. Don't eat at McDonald's.