Here’s what I want my students to do: understand some of the main events and trends in history, get exposed to some of the possible interpretations of those events, learn some historical skills, practice these skills by doing the kinds of things historians do, think and write historically, create their own interpretations, and read some primary sources that contain great ideas that we need even today.
To actually achieve all that, each student would need to do the following tasks each week:
1. Read a textbook or Wikipedia or something that narrates events.
2. Gather, understand, evaluate, cite and use primary sources in their writing in support of their own intepretations.
3. Converse with others to entertain various opinions and interpretations.
4. Read and analyze primary sources assigned by me.
Consider these the four juggling balls of learning history. Each is a slightly different shape, and so easier or harder for a certain individual to handle. But it’s necessary to have them all in the air to achieve some understanding of the discipline. As a semester continues, the sound of dropping balls is common.
And I’ve noticed a pattern.
A and B-level students will keep them all in the air to some degree, because many of them are intelligent and can strategize the time spent on learning. They will occasionally set one aside, depending on their own talents and interests. But they will juggle all four balls most of the time, completing almost all if not all of the various assignments.
Mid-level (C and high D) students will drop a ball early on, and they’ll drop whichever is most difficult for them, regardless of how many points are involved. Most don’t pick it up again, and if they do, they’ve already forgotten how to juggle that many.
And if we look again at the four balls again, there are serious qualitative differences, regardless of which ones are “hard” to work with.
1. Read about the facts: this is what everyone is used to doing through 12 years of schooling, so they expect it and think it’s most important. It’s the easy, round ball. But at college, it’s just the foundation.
2. Understand and use primary sources: this is kind of fun, because they get to discover these on their own and see everyone else’s, so also a fairly round ball. But it takes some work, and some time, to keep it going.
3. Discuss: this is also something they’ve done before, a round ball that’s a little slippery. It’s hard to learn to discuss history critically, but because it seems simple, they’ll set this one aside to deal with the first two when they run short on time – they see it as an extra (many see it in a classroom as an extra also), not real learning.
4. Read and analyze primary sources: a ball with weird stitching, this involves reading English at a level many of them have not achieved, so it’s hard and they put it aside a lot.
So what’s the problem? All students strategize and choose what work they want to do, right?
Take one of the sets of primary sources I assign – selections from Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, Beowulf. All have moral lessons, lessons about becoming an adult that can be very meaningful to a 19-year-old, particularly one who’s male, has a tough relationship with his dad (if he has one around), and isn’t sure how to make his own way in the world.
The high-level 19-year-olds will read and learn, but many of them are from higher socio-economic groups in our society, and have gotten the moral lessons elsewhere anyway (they implicitly understood that Star Wars wasn’t just a sci-fi tale). The mid-level students are the ones who need the lesson, but they’re the most likely to avoid these readings.
But I can’t make those sources the whole class. Without the context (#1 – the facts) teaching sources like these is teaching mythology, or ethics, or literature, not history.
We must have the context. But mid-level students read too poorly to do it all, so they pick up a few facts, find a few sources, write some, and skip the hard reading.
So perhaps my own maturity has encountered their efforts at maturity.
As an inexperienced instructor, I too focused on facts. I was into the textbook and the facts I presented in my lecture, and tested them on that. They wrote essays on those facts, the kind you find in essay banks on the internet. After a few years, I began emphasizing interpretations, then more recently I’ve focused on collecting sources and developing historical writing. Now I’m thinking about morality – what is the importance of history if not to teach lessons?
Yes, this is unpopular. The development of social science since the 1940s says that History should be an objective pursuit, while the continuation of History as a humanities class says we are teaching core values. But the social scientists missed the point of historical study – the very focus of scientific endeavor is guided by the needs of society at that particular moment in time. It’s a natural, Dead-Poets-Society kind of thing to try to help young people by using the universal texts that have helped others shape themselves as individuals, in some case for thousands of years.
If I emphasize those sources more, it may also solve another problem I have – the current cultural focus on storytelling. I’ve never been able to relate to it, this urge to put everything (and in some cases every minute of ones life) into a story. But stories that matter have a lesson to them, which is why they’ve been around so long.
Now to get the C and D students to focus on them.
