We think we recall the way we were taught!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2022

Overwhelmingly boring, but safe: How should kids in Virginia, or anywhere else, be taught American history? 

In truth, it's very hard to devise a grade school curriculum, especially at such polarized times as these. We think we recall the way we were taught when we were in grade school.

This takes us back to the no-longer existent Mystic School in Winchester, Massachusetts, back when Joe Bellino was lugging the ball for the Winchester High School Sachems, on his way to the Naval Academy and a Heisman trophy.

(Yes, that was our school's actual name—see Mystic River. It was part of the Winchester Public Schools. We kids played marbles in the schoolyard, then glumly trooped inside.)

If memory serves, the way we were taught was astoundingly boring, but it was also safe:

Thirty kids would sit in the classroom holding thirty copies of some history textbook open to some designated page. The teacher would call out names, one at a time, and the youngster whose name had been called would read the next paragraph of the day's assigned chapter aloud.

Was that really the way it worked? We actually think it was! If so, it was astoundingly unimaginative, but it was also safe. 

Here's what we mean by that:

As long as some such procedure is followed, at no point will teachers be inclined to start spouting off with their own unique ideas about some topic or other. We kids would just drone along from the textbook. No teacher input required!

Under some such system, it's easy to define the curriculum—you just have to look at the textbook! The textbook may contain outright errors or limited frameworks, but at least the errors and weird ideas aren't coming from hundreds of different sources. This shields everyone from the vagaries of fate. 

In that way, some such system is "safe." For us kids, it was also amazingly dull, and it was an extremely limited way to proceed in the face of thirty inquiring minds, or possibly one or two fewer. 

Most states take a different approach today. In states like Virginia, large groups of education professionals are gathered together for the task of defining the state's curriculum. 

Rather, they define the "standards of learning" for each grade—the various things the kids should learn in each year of their public school journey. The state's three million public school teachers are directed to take things from there. And yes, they actually refer to those "Standards of Learning" as the state's "SOLs!"

Under this system, there won't be some single textbook to which teachers are forced to restrict themselves. On the other hand, the resulting grade-by-grade curriculum guidelines will often drift toward incoherence, as you can possibly see by clicking here.

(As in this Washington Post report, we're linking to "a draft version of the SOLs that had been in the works for months: a more than 400-page document produced in consultation with museums, historians, professors, political scientists, economists, geographers, teachers, parents and students.") 

Apparently, suggestions were thrown in a Waring blender and that lengthy word salad emerged. The Post report tilts toward the idea that these were admirable guidelines—signposts of obvious pre-Youngkin worth.

Reading a single mandated textbook can be unbelievably easy. By way of contrast, deciphering 400 pages of highly pomposified technospeak can be extremely hard.

Teachers may scream and tear at their hair. At some point, chaos may reign.

When we were in fifth grade, our regular teacher had to be replaced for some unstated reason. A long-term substitute—Mrs. E—suddenly appeared in her place.

Mrs. E had surprising ideas of her own. More on that tomorrow!


38 comments:

  1. "We think we recall the way we were taught!

    Overwhelmingly boring, but safe"

    Someone who found history boring, overwhelmingly boring as a child, should never have been assigned to teach social studies as an adult. Children deserve teachers who are enthusiastic about the subjects they teach. Not hacks who are going through the motions to earn a paycheck.

    One problem with the teaching of history in K-12 schools is that history professors at the college level are overwhelmingly male. So are most of the students who declare history as their major. Yet males are under-represented in teaching generally, and more so below the high school grades.

    Ultimately, history is about people and the things they thought and did at various points in time. That trope about women being interested in people while men are interested in things should thus not apply. So why are there so few women history majors and even fewer female professors of history?

    There is a lot of focus on the lack of women in STEM disciplines, but what about increasing their participation in majors such as history, and yes, philosophy?

    Somerby implies that the parts that liberals want to add back into the history curriculum might spice it up, since he calls the traditional whitewashed curriculum boring. It may be the fights over curriculum are making such info seem like contraband or taboo information, always enticing to children who are trying to figure out what the adults are not telling them. But otherwise, there is no reason why the details of slavery or Indian massacres should be more fascinating than other aspects of history. That leaves me with the belief that history/social studies may be suffering from a lack of well-educated teachers capable of making the non-forbidden parts as interesting as the hidden parts.

    Shows like Drunk History demonstrate that it is certainly possible to make history entertaining, without distorting its truth one way or the other. Yes, they used humor, but they also reenacted scenes and put words into the mouths of historical figures, which makes history more relatable to everyone, not just kids. But you have to know something about history to use resources effectively in the classroom. It seems clear to me that Somerby was out of his depth, especially given his complaints about the curriculum guide which was supposed to help him create better lesson plans. I'll bet he taught chapters out of the textbook, reading just-in-time to stay ahead of his class, and did nothing beyond that and testing. No wonder it was borning for him and the kids.

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    1. Have you ever been to Stochastic Steambaths? It's in the vicinity of the Toronto airport. I encourage you to check it out.

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    2. Digby also mentioned it.

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    3. I'll bet you're the same guy who kept talking about Rachel Maddow's lambs.

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    4. No. What about them?

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    5. My husband and I read to each other several nights a week.

      I’ve loved being read to since I was a child.

      We just finished Stephen King’s book Later.

      Very spooky. Not a book to read before bed.

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    6. No one is under the illusion you are a female nor a wife.

      If you actually read more, you would not be so easily conned.

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    7. Actually, there’s every indication that I am female and a wife and am not trapped in a man’s body.

      I’m not an anonymouse either.

      Hallelujah.

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    8. Every indication? Not from what you write.

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    9. You’re stereotyping both genders.

      Anonymices are in fits of righteous indignation 24/7, but go very easy on themselves.

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    10. Cecelia disdains Anonymouses almost half as much as Republican politicians disdain Republican voters. And Cecelia has utter disdain for Anonymouses.

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    11. I don’t disdain you. I feel bad for you. The anonymouse life is fraught with drama.

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    12. I feel the same way abut the Right, and their inability to understand basic mathematics.

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  2. "at no point will teachers be inclined to start spouting off with their own unique ideas about some topic or other"

    The point of teaching is not for teachers to spout off with their own unique ideas. I had a very conservative history teacher who did that and it was extremely irritating to those of us who not only disagreed but chafed at how much time she was wasting with such diversions. Children are not a captive audience for such spouting and teachers who do that should not be teaching, in my opinion.

    Teachers should be explaining difficult concepts and providing context for statements in the textbook. For example, a textbook might list the four causes of WWII. A good teacher will be familiar with those theories in greater depth and spend an entire class period explaining each of them, with reference to what was happening in each of the countries involved. The content of textbooks is academic consensus. Spouting off one's own ideas is not. Children will not be able to tell one from the other, so it is malpractice to mix one's own theories in with reliable information.

    Somerby says: "The textbook may contain outright errors or limited frameworks, but at least the errors and weird ideas aren't coming from hundreds of different sources."

    Textbooks are reviewed by experts in various fields before they are published. Then they are reviewed again by school districts (or state boards) before they are adopted. They should not contain errors. But if an individual teacher has the hubris to think he has found an error, he should verify that he is right and let the published know. They publish errata sheets for each text book. After a textbook has been used for a year, there are no longer unidentified errors, but there are arrogant social studies teachers who think they know better than the experts. It is a cheap trick to enhance one's authority with students by criticizing their textbooks, speciously.

    Somerby conflates this chapter reading method of teaching with the content of what is taught. These are two separate issues. The reason why teachers teach in that "safe" method is not for safety but for convenience. It requires no preparation whatsoever. So a teacher can use his spare time in other ways. It shortchanges the kids and the school and is despised by better teachers. It also, unfortunately, tends to be used more with lower track students than bright ones, partly because such kids are not assigned the best teachers. Somerby is right to complain about this approach but wrong to attribute it to safety instead of laziness.

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  3. Somerby today is continuing to confuse teaching methods -- how something is taught -- with standards of learning -- what is taught, the content of lessons. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the VA controversy, which is about what is taught, not how teachers teach.

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    1. Somerby often feigns on-the-spectrum traits when it suits his agenda.

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    2. Somerby is ultraviolet.

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  4. "On the other hand, the resulting grade-by-grade curriculum guidelines will often drift toward incoherence, as you can possibly see by clicking here."

    When you click the link, expecting to see some example of incoherence, it instead leads to the entire document. We are left to decide for ourselves what WE might consider incoherent and not told what Somerby considers incoherent. If I were to read an engineering document, I might find that majorly incoherent because I am not an engineer and do not know the terminology or science. Why invite readers without any teaching background to look at a professional education document, where they might find incoherent something that is plainly understand by teachers? That is dishonest on Somerby's part. He should be able to narrow down his objections to a few clear-cut examples, not just wave the book in our faces.

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  5. "Apparently, suggestions were thrown in a Waring blender and that lengthy word salad emerged."

    We have Somerby's word that this is "word salad" but again he doesn't bother providing any examples. The one yesterday seemed comprehensible to me, so I do not trust these blanket assessments. And I especially do not see how this can excuse the obviously political changes made by Youngkin's stacked committee.

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    1. (What I have written is only to display the sordidness of Somerby's disposition, who rather than move to another blogging platform to live plentiously well, and give us commenters more elbow-room and space to breath in, his fanboys will crowd and throng upon one another, with the pressure of a beggarly and unnecessary weight like they did at Digbys.)

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    2. Digby doesn't have comments.

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    3. All the crossed out parts in the draft probably confused Somerby.

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  6. "Reading a single mandated textbook can be unbelievably easy. By way of contrast, deciphering 400 pages of highly pomposified technospeak can be extremely hard."

    Somerby implies that the 400 pages did not contain any background to help teachers plan their lessons. Actually, the draft provides examples of how to develop core skills via specific teaching activities for each grade and subject area and it defines learning outcomes. That is why it is 400+ pages long. Somerby implies that it is a vague overview but it is extremely details and specific to the point that a teacher readily could use the suggestions about how to teach kindergarteners about cause and effect relationships to develop a classroom activity, perhaps a game of "what would happen if..."

    I think the problem may be that Somerby never took education classes in college, so he doesn't know the jargon of his field. Words like "understandings" and "learning experiences" may not have specific meanings to him. Pages 13-15 are key -- the rest of the book applies these in specific terms, by grade, to content areas. He may not know what "scaffolding the understanding" means in terms of learning, but there is a lot in the book to help teachers do more than follow a textbook.

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    1. The point of the core learning skills is to help kids learn to think critically, express their ideas, understand what they read, discuss pros and cons, contrast and compare, etc. These is what Somerby seemed to want for kids yesterday. The point of those 402 pages is for kids to engage in activities that would develop such skills, not memorize the facts from a textbook about the years 1920-1933.

      Somerby should be applauding the curriculum guide that he instead maligns. It is far more capable of accomplishing what Somerby himself says he wants than the 54 page stripped down preface (much longer than the preface of the old draft) to be followed by a similar curriculum guide. It only seems shorter now because the second half has yet to be written.

      Meanwhile, Somerby is blowing smoke everywhere and pretending he doesn't know how to use the tools of his former trade. And maybe he doesn't, but that doesn't make it the fault of the State of VA. Professional, trained teachers are able to decipher what Somerby is apparently baffled by. But that's OK because he left the classroom 50 years ago.

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  7. How do we know that teaching has improved since Somerby's days in the classroom? The NAEP scores have uniformly gone up since then.

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    1. Pointedly those scores went up after he left the teaching profession.

      Somerby did not give a fuck about his students.

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  8. In the days when I used to work as a technical writer, I used to encounter people with very little respect for the job. They reason that everyone knows how to write, therefore it is a job that anyone can do, except most people are qualified to do other jobs and don't have to be writers.

    Teaching is similar. People assume that anyone can teach as long as they know the subject material. For K-12, the material is what we all learned in college, so anyone could be a teacher. They aren't because people know how to do better jobs and thus don't have to teach for a living.

    In fact, there is a large technical literature on how to teach well, including how to help students acquire learning skills and specific competencies (cursive writing), how to manage a classroom and help students stay focused, how to organize and convey complex material to students, how to motivate those who are uninterested in doing the work, how to identify and correct student misunderstandings, diagnose and help with learning problems, and so on. This is all above and beyond the content taught, whether math or history. People do not have this understanding simply from having been a student themselves. Yet that is what Somerby began his teaching career with -- no exposure to teaching skills, only to content, because Teach for America was hostile to educational methods of that time period. They thought that only enthusiasm was needed, only caring, not any actual skills. Education has come a long way since then, but you wouldn't know it to listen to Somerby.

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  9. It just boils down to Somerby doesn't know how to teach core concepts instead of names, dates & events.

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  10. On Friday Somerby teased: "Coming: The demographication of everything"

    Not surprising that there was nothing on this topic today or over the weekend. I'll bet Somerby skips talking about poor Mrs. E tomorrow. At least he didn't shred her reputation without evidence before moving on.

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  11. As of 2019, history accounted for slightly less than 1.2 percent of all bachelor's degrees awarded, the lowest share in records that extend back to 1949. Most students major in business. It’s hard to blame them for that since big corporations dominate our government and society. And history can be pretty depressing, though we should take some pride in what progress we have made towards enlightenment.

    Gore Vidal called us “the United States of Amnesia.” That is also the title of a documentary of his life made in 2011 that is worth watching. An IMDb summary: ”In Gore Vidal's America, the political coup has already happened. The right have triumphed and the human values of the liberals have been consigned to history. But how did this happen and who organized it? In this film Gore Vidal's acerbic, opinionated and informed approach rips away at the facade of the new America.”

    “Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are the three great evils that have befallen the world” -- Gore Vidal

    I would add that the more fanatics of these religions a country has the more backward and stupid it is. The fact that we have a large percentage is what makes the USA the most backward and stupid among the economically prosperous nations. Chris Hedges explains the mobilization of the evangelicals by the Republicans in his book “American Fascists The Christian Right and the War on America.”

    Republicans, like Gov. Youngkin, must appeal to these religious fanatics to have any hope of winning elections. What kind of history do they want? America was a part of God’s great plan to establish capitalism so His chosen few can get rich exploiting the heathen and await Jesus coming on a cloud any day now. They get angry when they hear that someone might be teaching anything that doesn’t fit that story.

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    1. Gore Vidal was awesome, but we know more now, we know that those on the right are not genetically determined, but come from unresolved trauma, often in childhood, that leads to an obsession with dominance and authoritarianism, which then often leads to brain development divergence.

      We can't just stop at religious fanaticism, or racism, or sexism etc., those have causes that, importantly, are not written in stone. When we look at how humans have lived for over 95% of their existence, the traits of right wingers did not exist - it is an unnatural state of being for humans.

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  12. Children should study the foundations of mathematics.

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    1. Sure, but when society has "advanced" to the point that you have to attend school for 12-20 years just to get a career that you'll probably hate, just to have enough money for the basic needs of survival, then society at that point is in severe need of some kind of reset.

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    2. Lots of propaganda there. Lawyers hate their jobs but most others with advanced degrees make pleny of money and like what they do. Those low in education have fewer choices and make less money — still. There are stats on this — try the Dept of Labor website.

      People with more education do better on other measures, such as health & longevity, divorce, mental well being, net worth, crime, and so on. Lots of intangible benefits. Most subjects get more interesting the deeper you dive. But not everyone wants to do hard intellectual work, just like not everyone wants to do hard manual or even skilled labor.

      Mathematics teaches kids persistence and mental discipline. How to stay focused when thinking gets harder.

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    3. Hunting and gathering — that’s the life for me.

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    4. It is now called migrant farmworking.

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  13. “Teachers may scream and tear at their hair. At some point, chaos may reign.”

    According to my sources, Virginia’s Standards of Learning framework dates back decades. Plenty of time for chaos to have reigned.

    Can’t recall if Somerby has ever discussed or noticed them before today, but he hasn’t attempted to show if the alleged “pomposity” and “techno speak” have always been a part of them, nor has he given any reason to assume the current SOL is any better. In his view.

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  14. "Another MAGA Republican just put a bullseye on the back of an innocent American citizen; this time, it is Randi Weingarten, the President of the American Federation of Teachers. Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State under Donald Trump, accused the teacher of being more dangerous than Kim Il Jong, XI, and even Putin, who is actively committing genocide in Ukraine and threatening nuclear warheads to be used in Europe."

    He also said that kids can't read or do math because of liberal stuff in the school. That is not supported by NAEP scores. Perhaps these sorts of political attacks are a reason why the nation instituted NAEP testing in the first place -- to defend teachers and school districts from political fear-mongering.

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