The First Day in my American History Class by Jeff Schneider
The First Day in my American History Class
by Jeff Schneider
This is the first in a series of essays illustrating how I taught key lessons in my American History classes. I will post these regularly along with occasional longer articles on current or historical controversies, letters on specific topics and comments, some of which have appeared in listserves, online magazines and news papers.
Here is the actual beginning of my first class.
The introduction I used to the first lesson is now on You Tube. I walk into class. Wait for everyone to sit down, wait for quiet and then without saying a word, play this video of an Old Navy commercial which I had cut down to 15 seconds.
Then I began the class which is outlined below.
The first day is a preview of the style of the class students will be experiencing for the rest of the semester. Before they get the textbook, the students should already be thinking and gaining confidence in their own knowledge, and in their ability to participate productively without the stakes of grades or competition. I asked the students to take out a piece of paper and write down three events that occurred between 1492 and 1865. I explained that if they knew the date of the event, fine, but they did not have to. While they were writing, I put the two dates on the blackboard along the side of the classroom, because the the front of the room was usually taken up by the Smart Board. The Smart Board has its uses, but is not conducive to organizing a long series of dates and names of events spanning so many years. I told them that this was not a test and that they would not be expected to know the whole timeline by the end of the period. They would learn this material over the course of the semester and we would refer to it from time to time. It would help them understand the narrative or story of the history we were studying so they were to put their work for this day in the front of their notebooks.
It was crucial to be transparent about how I would teach and what and when they would be responsible for information or ideas. That is, the class is not a test: they will be given credit for class participation, and the tests and quizzes would never be surprises. I would say, “In my class you will be rewarded for studying.” This elicited laughs partially because many of the students did not believe me. However, I meant it literally. If they knew what we did in class they could get extremely good grades. This, of course would require that they do homework to prepare for class, since it is impossible to have a deep discussion about new material without prior preparation. The discussion in class held no stakes. It was a time for gaining understanding as they learned to read and write their way into American history. I expected that as the semester went on, they would improve their ability to learn and take the tests and quizzes by working hard.
Then after about 2 minutes I would ask for volunteers to tell the class an event from their list. I would ask if the student herself knew the date, and if she did, we would write it down. If not, someone in the class who knew the date of the event would help us out. Sometimes they would pick an event not between 1492 and 1865. This was a learning experience in every way. They need to know dates to understand how events turn out because the context is crucial to history. The volunteers would suggest when Columbus came to America, the Civil War, the Trail of Tears or the American Revolution and so on. We would do this until we had enough dates to delineate the periods for the first half of American history and we would name them. If there were key events missing, I would ask the class what happened or who lived between 1800 and 1840, for example.
By the end of the class we had the Age of Exploration, the Colonial Period, the Revolution, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitutional Convention and Ratification Periods, the Federalist Period, Jeffersonian Democracy, the Age of Jackson, the Antebellum Period and the Civil War.
Every time someone suggested a new event, movement or system, like slavery, the War of 1812 or railroad building, I would ask if anyone had something to add. We would discuss whether Columbus discovered America, for example. This is a question that the students often encounter in elementary school but it is worth discussing ascertain the level of sophistication of the students you are teaching. Of course the Native Americans were already here. So did Columbus accomplish nothing? The subsequent discussion establishes that Columbus discovered America for Spain and that Europe took up the opportunity of conquering or settling America. Should we say “settle?” Here are other points can you make about these questions. Did Columbus know that the world was round? How do we know the world is round? Today we have satellite pictures, but how can you prove it without going into space? When you see a ship approaching the horizon, the sails are the last part of the ship we see. It does not just fall off the edge of the earth. Someone might know that the Native Americans might be called First Peoples or Amerindians or Indians, If you look at the Lakota Times a Native American newspaper, you will see that all those names are interchangeable. The indigenous Americans do not always call themselves Native Americans.
The broader question of the use of the term Americans is also key: I remember that the textbook I often used in high school was called The Americans.It is useful to decenter the US from the rest of America: North, South and Central, the Caribbean, the Bahamas and Canada. The Canadians call our country the US and talk about living in North America. People who live in the US often assume that America refers only to us. It is interesting that the title of liberal textbook I used meant the US. One edition had pictures of people of many races and on the cover, which was supposed to be inclusive. Students from Cuba or the Dominican Republic or Brazil think of themselves as coming from America to the States, as some people say.
One purpose of this lesson, is to show students that thinking about history is a goal of the course. I always said that near the beginning of the year. Once, after a few tests, two students with very high averages came up to me: they just scored in the high 90s for the first time on my latest test, “Now we are trying to understand, not just memorize,” they said. They never had had to do that before.
For our final major topic for the first day let us come up with questions to consider about the Civil War. How did the Civil War start? What was the most important result of the Civil War? What are the other names for the war: The War between the States, the Brothers' War, the War of Northern Aggression. Each expresses a different opinion about the war. Civil War denotes massive death and destruction, the Brothers War implies an argument that was a blameless misunderstanding in our well-meaning family. The War Between the States refers to state(s) rights, a term used in the 1830s and 40s by John C. Calhoun and other Southern Democrats. I had actually never heard the phrase “War of Northern Aggression” until the early 2000s when I was a participated in the Advanced Placement US History Listserve. A teacher from Georgia actually insisted that it was the best name for the war. I was amazed; he seemed like such an educated guy. Another example: I attended a week-long seminar on slavery at the University of Maryland in the summer of 2002. On the last day one of my roommates in the dorm wore a red t-shirt from the University of Mississippi. On it was written Rebels, the name of their football team. He had the thickest Rhode Island accent I had ever heard. I had to explain to him that it had to do with the Civil War. He was amazed. In fact Ole Miss has changed their mascot from the Colonel to a land shark, but they have kept the Rebels nickname! “You could look it up;” as we say in Brooklyn.
The Declaration of Independence and the clause “all men are created equal are discussed extensively in my essay, “On Teaching All Men Are Created Equal.” (see it elsewhere in my Substack site.) It is not necessary to repeat that here, but it does offer an opportunity to introduce the idea of how I elicited aims for my classes to appease my various chairmen and principals. There was a rule in our in high school department that every lesson had to have an aim. I thought it was a mechanical procedure, but it did serve a purpose as a way to introduce a lesson. I always used a quote or a series of dates to lead off the lesson. For Declaration of Independence the beginning of the Revolutionary War was in 1775, the Battle of
Lexington and Concord. The Declaration was adopted on July 4, 1776, and the Treaty of Paris with Great Britain was signed in 1783. To elicit the aim I would say "What question can we ask about these dates in relation to the Declaration of Independence?" The students would offer "Why was it written so long after the war started and so long before the treaty?" Or “Why was it written at all?” I introduced this the first day as something to think about. Similarly with “All men are created equal.” It is a fraught statement worth thinking about especially in the age of Eric Garner, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor.... Equality is the American Creed, the ideal that makes us all Americans, that ties us all together as a diverse country, but its contradictions prompt our dreams of hope and our worst nightmares as a people.
Finally, I want to make clear that when I assigned longish documents like speeches or articles from historical journals, I never asked questions seeking specific answers, as I discussed in the examples above. Instead I asked the students to contribute by pointing to the sentences in the document itself that they thought were interesting or that they agreed with, disagreed with or thought were important. The first day was different because we had no reading, video or piece of music to work with. However, the students did come up with the facts that were at the basis of the lesson. This is something I learned from my father who was a biology teacher: when he taught classification, of animals he would start the lesson by asking the students what they classify, so that they would get the idea of a structure of related terms. They came up with hobbies, kinds of art music or kinds of sports. I began my career in 1968 teaching biology in an all-Black school in a suburb of Detroit. So I asked them what they classified. They answered Black people and white people. I learned an enormous number of new words that day. The discussion was wide-ranging and fascinating. We classified animals the next day. Teaching is an adventure, especially if you can sometimes go with the lead of the students. I guess that's what they call classroom management.