Lessons I Learned from Teaching U.S. History

 Lessons I Learned from Teaching U.S. History

By Jeffrey M. Bowen

 I learned some unforgettable lessons from my first year of teaching U.S. history to high school juniors and seniors in 1969.   Nearly all of my students were white and economically advantaged in Bethesda-Chevy Chase, Maryland.   My curriculum was framed by a thousand-page tome entitled “The American Pageant”.   A department mentor supplied a course outline, some time-worn mimeographed worksheets, and a cranky overhead projector.  Mostly I was left on my own to journey through the textbook’s exhaustive chronology of political, economic, and military developments.     

Naturally I wanted to help my 125 students remember enough to pass the course and graduate.  Yet I also rationalized that I could use history as a tool for critical thinking and big ideas about American character.  

Was I ever naïve!   I was trying to inspire interest in a textbook crammed with the publisher’s mind-numbing interpretations.   Besides boring my classes with a slew of forgettable historical facts, I was doing little to make our past relate to the present.  

 In 1969 we were passionately, sometimes violently launching the beginnings of the civil rights movement.  I had watched the skylines of Baltimore and D.C. burning the year before, as the national guard patrolled our streets.  There was growing discontent over the Vietnam war, and protests were getting louder and lifestyles were turning psychedelic.   My students and I remained comfortably oblivious to events of the day.  It actually surprised me when just one of my most rebellious students skipped school to listen to the daily reading of the war dead on the steps of the Capitol.  I persisted in disassociating the day’s issues from my teaching though ironically, by Valentine’s Day, I had received my draft notice and would spend the following year in Vietnam.

Another fallibility was my tendency to lecture and harness myself to the textbook as a main resource.  I was only trying to stay one factual step ahead of my most assertive students, but I was defaulting to advice I once heard from a workshop presenter: “I am here to teach, you are here to listen.  Raise your hand if you finish before I do!”  

Finally, our textbook, which still sits on my bookshelf, comes back to haunt me.   The American Pageant has been reprinted 13 times, but it continues to prove its original author’s observation: “Old myths never die – they just become embedded in textbooks.” 

Pageant is just one of 18 current texts examined by historian James Loewen whose best seller, “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” makes it abundantly clear that we are still trapped by Eurocentric misconceptions that “precolonial” native Americans had little to contribute to our culture, lacked technology (including guns), and had no idea what was really meant by property ownership.   Multicultural diversity and mutual accommodation were quite real 300 years ago, but the textbook I used as a resource never let this interfere with the story that white society was superior in every way and sanctioned by God.  

If I were teaching our history today, given adequate primary sources, I would start by coaching students to understand that acculturation works in many reciprocal directions.  I would ask them to enliven their learning by investigating their own ancestry as well as the embedded roots of today’s hot issues.  I would urge my students to ask why questions, the kind that demand the use of primary sources and live interviews.  

As for our native population, these days I would ask my students to consider what is meant by “America First” when we have 326 Indian reservations in our country, each one considered a sovereign nation.  Indeed, I have learned that history is a moving target.  We interact with it constantly, and thereby it changes. Ignoring our past may not mean that we repeat its mistakes, but its echoes send important messages. 

  Fortunately, as my first year of teaching flew by, I began to discover how to make U.S. history an empathetic experience.  An English teacher colleague and I were given time to co-teach a short course on World War I.  By mating historical events with fictional novels, we tried to immerse our students in the emotional grips of war and its devastating consequences.  We sought to help students feel how others felt, and to encourage and integrate different perspectives.   At other times, I staged debates and encouraged my students to present reasoned arguments, so they could advance and defend both sides of issues.  I started to rely on cooperative and differentiated approaches, hoping to individualize lessons and to avoid the one-way street of endless lecturing.

As I gained ground in teaching, I grew to appreciate the challenge of making history topically relevant and fair minded.  It is tempting to grab pieces out of context, but it takes enlightened teaching to help our children see it clearly and without premature and poorly informed judgments.

 Our collective civic future is at risk.  We have let our own history become a stomping ground for publishers rather than fertile territory for critical thinking, for exercising communication skills, for self-discovery and compassion.   There are multiple dots between America’s past and present.   When we connect those dots, we must look between the lines to see and feel the whole landscape with its many different routes to truth.