I said, “You know, there are really only about six dates I want you to remember from this year, but I want you to remember them for the rest of your life.” That got them curious, so I wrote them down.
1215 – signing of the Magna Carta
1492 – New World and Old World meet – Columbus
1607 – First successful English colony at Jamestown
1776 – Signing of the Declaration of Independence
1787 – Ratification of Constitution
1861 – Civil War
“That’s it,” I said.
“What about all those other dates in our textbooks?” they asked.
“Even if you learned some of those dates, do you think you’ll remember them for the rest of your life?” I asked.
They said no.
And then I asked, “What about 1820? Do you know anything about 1820?”
They said no.
“What are we going to do? You don’t know anything about 1820! Or, perhaps you do. Look at this timeline. There are six dates and events on it. It looks like nothing was happening in 1820. Do you think that’s true?”
“Of course not,” they said.
“Look at this timeline! What do you know about 1820?”
They looked at the timeline. It took a few moments.
Then someone said, “It was before the Civil War.”
“YES!” I cried. “Yes. It was before the Civil War. You know that, because you know 1861 was the beginning of the Civil War.”
“And if it was before the Civil War, what was going on?”
It took a few moments. Then someone said, “Slavery was going on.”
“YES!” I exclaimed. “Yes, slavery was going on in 1820, and before it, and after it.”
I asked, “What else do you know about 1820?” I was getting excited now.
Someone said, a little quicker, “It was after the signing of the Consitution!”
“YES!” I cried again. “It was after the signing of the Constitution. You knew that. And what does that mean?”
“We were a country.”
“YES! We were a country. And we had been a country for a while, right? About how many years?”
“About 40 years.”
“And what do you think happened in those 40 years? Did the signers of the Constitution live forever?”
“The founders had all died.”
“That’s right. Or almost all of them.”
“And the people who had fought in the Revolutionary War.”
“That’s right. And so, who were these people of 1820? How might they be different from those people of the 1770’s and 1780’s?”
“They didn’t have that war. They didn’t have that revolution. They were born in the U.S.A.”
“Just like Bruce Springsteen, right?”
They didn’t get it. But I went on anyway.
“So, even thought you haven’t memorized ANYTHING about 1820, you KNOW a lot about it, because you know about these six dates. And you can make sense of ANY date. You have these dates and events as benchmarks. You can see what was before, and what was after, and you can figure a lot of things out. We could go on and on about 1820 now, don’t you think?”
They understood.
I’m into what kids KNOW. I think they know a lot. They like that I think that. I like helping them to realize that.
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Zen social studies. I love it. I want to be in your class.
ReplyDeleteI'm taking a class on curriculum, and as I read, I often think about your burning questions, your packets of half-sheets that the kids collect up during a unit.
Great stuff.
To the idea of trying to teach them dates, YES.
ReplyDeleteTo the classroom where they have to investigate, YES.
To the teacher who teaches students to speculate, YES.
To the teacher who does more than list and berate, YES.
To teaching into and through facts to educate, YES.
What a delight this was to read. Thanks.
It's a demo, man. Just this discussion. Then people sit and think about ways they could use it in their classrooms, with their subjects. Beautiful stuff.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we should try writing our book again, but this time throw it open to more people. This would be a vignette in it.