Kinda not my President

A weird thing happened to me in January. We inaugurated a President I didn’t vote for. I know, I’m not supposed to be political and I don’t think I am by acknowledging I participated in our collective civic responsibility. I also don’t think anyone that knows me really questioned who I voted for so, let’s move on. I didn’t vote for Bush either but I began teaching in August of 2007. The tail end of NCLB. Enough has been said about that so I’ll leave it be, it is not the focus of this post. 

I don’t have to remind you 2007-08 was a remarkably energizing time in American politics. Regardless of the primary winner the Democratic ticket would be historic. I’m a political junkie so I followed the race like the good little political science degreed person I am. I talked about it a lot to a lot of people. Which brings me to this...

I’ve recounted this story with my students and it bears repeating here. Prior to teaching I worked at what is now Hard Rock Casino as a Hotel Supervisor. One of the last conversations I had with my supervisor was about the 2008 election. I won’t bore you with the whole thing but I will tell you in August of 2007 I remember thinking and saying “I don’t know who this Barack Obama thinks he is, he’s got great ideas but has no chance.” 

7 months later I voted for him in a primary and then in a general. I took students from my alternative high school to the inaugural ceremony at Greenwood Cultural Center in Tulsa. I had my dad bring my oldest son so he could witness it too. I told you that story to tell you, I was surprised but not as much as most, when Trump came from nowhere. Obama had done it… And NOONE knew who we was. We all knew Trump, whether we wanted to or not. 

I need to tell you another story too. Again, in my pre-teacher life I worked on political campaigns (I know big surprise). I worked on Brad Carson’s 2004 Senate campaign. Again, what happened in November surprised me, kinda… Because as election night lurched on I felt the exact same way I did in ‘04. If you remember it, you know why, if you don’t, that was a rough cycle for the Democratic Party in Oklahoma. 

So in a way I had been here before. It was a remarkably awkward time for me, but I did feel like I knew what I should do. I did what I did then, I started reading. It’s kinda why I haven’t blogged much at all lately. I just wanted to peripherally participate as much as I could. Arguments had become draining and maddening. I just didn’t want to do it. I also hid and watched a lot of Star Trek. 

But here I am now. With a President I don’t agree with and whose actions appear to show little or no regard for a number of my students, their families, and communities. The election absolutely changed the atmosphere and environment of classrooms, and schools. Perhaps equally (if not more) than communities. Schools, despite their history, and present can serve as remarkable places of safety, growth, understanding, and cohesion. The tenor of this election and the atmosphere created by its early months have made some of those places more difficult to achieve. 

I wrote about how there is just an atmosphere of anger and fear. We as a people are so mad at so much. Most of which we have little or no control over. We find ways to gain some control. And often quit thinking about those around us and those affected by us and our actions. 

Yelling online and in person about issues we know we cannot fix, and are probably not going to do anything about is what we have diluted our politics to. We get a sense of “we did something” but did we really? I’m not saying stop debating, I’m saying be smart about it. And just be smart. Read, study, learn what affects you and focus on those issues. 

The last thing I want my class to turn into is just a grinch and moan space. So we did some things a bit different in the second semester.

How I’ve managed this has not been smooth, I’ll be the first to admit. But, the historical lens I see the world through puts Trump in our cultural narrative. One of the things I’ve always said is “worst President ever is a high bar to reach. Several owned slaves.” Another perspective is what that office does regardless of who is there. 

For someone who hasn’t studied and is unaware of the deep history of this country, “back channel” sounds spooky. But, it’s not anything new. Context matters, and that is where the discussion can occur. Here’s another one,  “travel ban” HAS to be unconstitutional right? Immigration and deportations? Yeah, that too. Time and time again, context and conversation… 

Much of what President Trump has done and will do, has been done before in one way or another. I remember spending the last 8 years intrigued by the silliness of the anti-Obama crowd. The racism, vitriol, and just mean hatred was demoralizing. I lived through the Clinton Presidency and the conspiracy theory culture of the 90's. 

That is NOT what I want my classroom to become. But it needs to become something. Teachers do NOT have to become social and political. But Clara Luper was a teacher. And several other teachers and school personnel that stood up for their students and other points in our history. That action is a part of our professional legacy. I like that it’s coming back. I like that dozens of teachers put it on the line and ran for office. I hope that continues. But it won’t if we become complacent. 

Let me be clear, our obligations as teachers isn’t to teach kids what to think, it is to teach them how to think. We don’t force them to do things, but we shouldn’t get in the way either. We have to be there to encourage and assist. To provide guidance and, of course, be proud of those that do get engaged. Challenging them with that charge also emboldens me to it. It has made be a better teacher and forced me to take account of what I prioritize and on what I focus. 

So my solution is this, the best thing I’ve come up with using the teachable moments. Giving them a perspective of a historical event they can relate to is what will help make it real to them. It can show them how these events, choices, and people really do affect what they can and cannot do. It can and will stir emotions, but we live in a political world, one does not have to participate, but you give up a whole lot when you make that choice to sit it out. 

Like I said yesterday (I know two days in a row!!!), we have been given several opportunities to see our past actions in real time. The above examples are just a few. And this administration is showing no signs of changing course, so we can only expect more examples. This is how I’ve decided to manage this. I hope it works. 

What do you do when history happens??? Write I guess...

It is Summer so I have time to write a bit. @BlueCerealEduc decided to share something that made me think and feel guilty about not writing. Not that it’s worth reading, but it is something I tell my students all people should do. The article is a plea from academia to make your voice heard. Go read it here. History is happening folks and it's our job to write it. We discussed in class several times this year “the past is what lasts” and you cannot tell your story once you are gone.

The story makes some remarkable points and is absolutely something that needs to be done. I’m going to keep up with this more especially since I plan to make my students do something similar this upcoming year. They have no idea how much they are going to love this!

I’ll discuss current topics of concern as they come up and in future posts. For this entry I want to discuss something else. I’m teaching a seminar for TPS Summer Professional Development (shameless plug check it out here) on teaching History in Today’s world. I can blog more about that after I present but as I was doing laundry at 4:30 this morning (I have a weird sleep schedule) a thought came to me. I spent countless class periods last year discussing the importance of studying the outcome of historic events. More often than not, the aftermath is more critical than the instance.

Too often our discipline focuses on the timeline. Just what and who happened. In doing so we, as has been stated before, dilute history to rote memorization of names, dates, and body counts.

There were faces to those names and stories before and after those dates. There are narratives (notice plural)  that go along with that timeline. There are also scarring, traumatic, and corrosive open-wounds metastasizing beneath the lost voices of those body counts. Those wounds are not going to heal on their own. And we are going to keep making them worse, and creating quite a few new ones along the way if we don’t alter our behavior. They will continue to flare-up, and we will continue to have the same conversations over, and over, and over.

We are told ad nausea (and as a history teacher I absolutely hate this phrase) “Those that don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” Here’s the thing, we know our history, and we are STILL repeating it. Why is that? This statement is logically false, if taken literally. We cannot do the exact same thing with different people, technology, and cultures. So only a fool would take it literally, right? Then why, when we try to make those comparisons we are constantly countered with the “well, it’s not exactly like that” argument. It almost feels like some institutions and people, at the very least do not want to talk about these problems, or at the worst, do not want these problems remedied for any number of reasons (see: money and power). And that is absolutely for several other blog posts…

To reiterate, there is no such thing as an identical historic event. But there are several similarities within several similar events. We have to be willing to see those similarities. We have to be willing to own our ancestors mistakes. They are our situation now. And we have to be willing to learn and grow or we are going to leave them, and any new ones we create for our kids and grand kids to deal with.

We cannot use our historic events as lessons if we don’t take the time to compare, analyze, and create an understanding of our common cultural and human nature. Of course we don’t have slaves anymore (well kinda), so why do we need to know how “personal liberty laws” played out? We just need to know it happened right? Wrong. There is a world of difference between the experience of American Slavery of the 17th and 18th Century and the situation Undocumented workers face today, but that’s the point. I picked this one because it is right in the wheelhouse of the “not exactly” crowd. It won’t be identical but it does give us a road map. I would encourage you to think about this when events happen. Ask, has this happened before? Go study and find out about those “other times”. What worked, and what didn’t. We don’t have time to analyze and road map how our decisions today will play out, but we can make good guesses off of past experiences.

If history teaches us anything, it is that our actions can echo through generations. We need to understand that when we make decisions. We need to understand that when we vote and when we support candidates and causes. And we need to be able to transfer what we learned from past experiences and make better choices the next time an opportunity presents itself. Because believe me we are going to have plenty opportunities to make big generation-echoing decisions in our near future.