RARE COLLEGE HISTORY SCHOLARSHIP

Begin forwarded message:
From: Matthew Schweitzer
Date: February 13, 2012 9:25:46 PM EST
To: Will Fitzhugh
Subject: Comments

Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

I thoroughly enjoyed reading your article about the "similarities" between dentists and history teachers. Although I have not often felt that way at my own school, I believe that is the exception, unfortunately, not the rule. Your comments are, as always, extraordinarily on-point.

However, I do not want to be the harbinger of complete despair. Recently, I was honored with the Dean's Fellowship for Undergraduate Research at the University of Chicago, a scholarship of $15,000 per year all four years to essentially conduct research with historians and leaders at any University of Chicago institute and research center—I couldn't believe that a school would "draft" a student to study history, and not to play sports! In my letter, written by Professor Sparrow of the History Department, he noted that what makes a wonderful student is someone "who take[s] the life of the mind seriously, and direct[s] his talents and energies accordingly." If only we could all be taught the importance of the "life of the mind."

Thank you again for your incisive and important commentary on the state of history education in this country.

All the best,

Matthew Schweitzer
Oakland, California
[his history research paper was published in The Concord Review, Fall 2011]

Please consider a subscription to The Concord Review, the only journal in the world to publish history research by secondary school students: www.tcr.org.

The Concord Review has been praised in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe. It has received endorsements from a cross-section of prominent historians such as David McCullough, Eugene Genovese, Diane Ravitch, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who said: “there should be a copy in every high school.”

Teachers Are Not Dentists

SchoolInfoSystem.org; Madison, Wisconsin

TEACHERS ARE NOT DENTISTS
(and students are not patients)

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
13 February 2012


If I were to attend a convention of dentists, I would expect to see a lot of panels and presentations on what dentists do. New veneer techniques, the best compounds for fillings, root canal methods, successful implant procedures and the like. Of course, there would be little to no attention to what patients do, other than whether they seem to be following the recommendations to brush, floss and use the rubber tip at home. After all, the dentists are the trained paid professionals and it is what they do that is important.

Conventions of history teachers, one might guess, would be different. Of course there would be panels and presentations on class management methods, grading practices, the best history slide shows and films, the recommended history textbooks, the most effective lecture techniques, and interesting field trips, perhaps.

However, as at the dentists’ convention, surprisingly there would usually be almost nothing on what the patients (that is, the students) are doing in history. After all, the teachers are the trained and paid professionals and what they do is the most important thing.

Or is it? Remember, a dental patient’s job is to shut up, sit there, and take it. Is this really what we want from students? In too many history classes, it is. A dental patient could, if it were practicable, leave her brain at home. A history student always has his brain with him in the classroom, ready for employment.

If someone were to propose a revolution in history instruction, it might be one that would accept the fact that students are not passive vessels, with cavities of ignorance for the teacher to drill into and fill with the necessary knowledge, but rather active, thinking, curious, growing young people with brains and a capacity for serious academic work.

But this is very hard for teachers to do in practice. When it is suggested that students might benefit from reading a complete history book on their own, and from working on a serious history research papers, objections are raised. Many history educators will claim that high school students are not able (can’t?, won’t?, never been asked?) to read a history book, and the universal argument is that serious research papers take too much of a teacher’s time (the teacher’s, not the student’s time—when students are spending 53 hours a week with electronic entertainment media).

History teachers say they cannot afford to assign, guide, monitor, read and grade serious research papers by their students. So our students now, almost without exception, go off to college, to face the term papers and nonfiction books at that level, and thanks to us they have never read one complete nonfiction book or written one serious history research paper. They don’t know how to do those things, because we have decided they couldn’t do them and have not asked them to do such academic work.

Nothing of the sort happens in sports. “Scholar-Athletes” (so often celebrated for their athletic accomplishments in the local paper) are not sent off to play college basketball never having been taught to dribble, pass, and shoot the basketball, or to play football, never having been asked to block and tackle. That would be irresponsible of us, right?

I notice that, while high school chemistry classes require lab work, and biology classes require lab work (and laboratories cost money), the science teachers do not claim that students are incapable of such work or that they do not have the time to assign, guide, monitor, read and grade lab reports.

I do realize that these days, STEM is imagined to be more important than the ROOTS of history and academic literacy—the ability to read nonfiction books and write research papers—but perhaps if we were to stop and think that our students are not passive dental patients, but young people with brains on board, fully capable of actually “doing” history, through reading books and writing papers, rather than just submitting to whatever presentation we have developed to keep them in their seats, then the day may come when a convention of history teachers will even include teachers talking about the academic work their students are doing in history, and even—imagine the day!—it might feature presentations by students on the papers they have written, and, in some cases, had published in The Concord Review. There have been 989 of such exemplary history papers now, by students from 46 states and 38 other countries since 1987, and on the few Emerson Prize occasions when the students were indeed allowed to talk at a meeting about their research, the teachers in attendance were well and truly interested to hear what they had to say.

NO BOOKS, PLEASE

No Books, Please
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
28 January 2012

In the most recent Quality Counts report from Education Week, Catherine Gewertz was kind enough to describe not only the high school student reading requirements from the U.S. Common Core Standards, but from the standards of several other countries as well. I quote from her report for its shock value to anyone who might still imagine that our secondary students could still be reading one complete nonfiction book during their four years:

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“Global Readings: Nations vary widely in the selection of readings and other language arts material that finds a home in the curriculum. In some cases, these are required texts [but evidently never complete history books for some odd reason—WHF]; others show up on lists of recommended titles; and still others are offered as examples of literature [no history wanted—WHF] that can satisfy academic standards and curricula.

In the United States, students in states that have adopted the Common Core State Standards are required to read The Declaration of Independence, the preamble to The Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights, and President Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address [that should take them the entire afternoon—WHF]. Readings suggested for 11th and 12th grade include As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner; The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell; and “A Raisin in the Sun,” by Lorraine Hansberry.

In Ontario, Canada, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is on the list of approved readings for grade 11 English classes.

New South Wales, Australia, requires 9th graders to read “The Lady of Shalott,” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a poem based on Arthurian legend, and at least one work by William Shakespeare [one of the Sonnets, perhaps?—WHF]

In Hong Kong, students taking the English-literature section of a required secondary school exam must pick from an eclectic basket of selections, from Shakespeare’s Othello and short stories by James Joyce and Edith Wharton to the iconic 1974 Hollywood film “Chinatown” and poems by Sylvia Plath and Langston Hughes.

In England, required readings for the national English-literature exam taken by many 16-year-olds include Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck; To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee; and Lord of the Flies by William Golding.”

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It may be premature, and eccentric, to celebrate the dumbed-down reading standards of other countries when compared with our own, but perhaps on their non-Literature standards, if any, other countries do require the reading of complete history books, but this report doesn’t say.

For our own students, it would be hard to come up with a livelier set of low expectations for reading at the high school level. As I suggested, the “texts” [we don’t talk about books any more] are all short enough to be read together by most secondary students in an afternoon.

I don’t believe that sort of workload would be found in the standards for their Latin, physics, chemistry or calculus courses, and even in United States Literature classes at the secondary level, most students read actual books, as in novels, don’t they? Or has that now gone by the board, ignored as they seem to be by the Common Core Standards?

In history classes, of course, in the absence of the rare teacher with demanding academic standards of his or her own, the assignment of complete real history books, even by popular historians such as David McCullough, has long ago vanished.

In the 2010 NAEP test of high school history students, 55 percent of Seniors scored Below Basic, which would be impossible to do if they had opened one history book or listened in one history class. Our students do worse in history than in any other subject, but our new Common Core Standards seem very likely to ensure that such a level of achievement is not disturbed in the slightest degree.

The Common Core academic expository writing standards, it should be noted in passing, are even more vague and superficial...

So let our Literature students get ready for their Common Core Standards requirements, just make sure they never read a complete nonfiction book, so that when they, and of course our History students, encounter such books at the college level, it will be a nice surprise for which they are completely unprepared.

END OF FAILURE

EducationViews.org; Houston, Texas

The End of Failure

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
January 18, 2012

Time magazine this week has an article about the failure of No Child Left Behind, and it highlights the failure of the Rachel Carson Middle School in Herndon, Virginia, to get the last 5% of its student body to achieve grade-level competence in math and reading. This outcome stems from the failure of the teachers, the principal, the counselors, the special needs teachers, the curriculum coordinators, the reading specialists, the math specialists, the superintendent, the state department of education and its staff, the governor, and, of course, the legislature of the Commonwealth of Virginia. While others, such as the federal government, publishers, professional development specialists and the like might share some of the blame, the first group is to be held mainly responsible for the failure of that 5% of the students at the school in question.

Is anyone left out of this analysis, which is the current analytic wisdom available for all school failures in the United States at present? Some might suggest some responsibility on the part of parents, but there is one group which always is, it seems, held blameless and harmless. The students.

I have heard of a time in this country, and even in some other countries, when, if a student failed in school, the failure was the student’s. Indeed, even now in Japan, according to Marc Tucker’s Surpassing Shanghai, there is the view that if a student fails academically, it is because he has not worked hard enough.

However, it is no longer possible to entertain the idea that a student is responsible for his or her own learning and academic progress in the United States. We like to think of a student in our schools as if under anesthesia on a classroom operating table, being operated on by our surgeon-teachers who are wholly responsible for the success or failure of the operation. Our passive students can not be held responsible for any part of their own education, because if failure occurs, it cannot be theirs. Our children cannot fail at anything, so if there is failure, as, apparently, there is, it must be ours—that is an axiom of our educational philosophy.

There are consequences that flow from this axiom, of course. Students who fail (my mistake)—students whose academic work is failing, understandably come to believe that the school and the teacher are supposed to “do” education to them, and that they have no responsibility for the outcome—whether they learn anything or not is not their problem.

Of course it is their problem, as they will discover when they go to community college or try to find a job, but we feel it is our duty to keep them from knowing that as long as we can.

Naturally, there is a sense of power and control for educators in accepting all the responsibility for student learning, and a noble sort of martyrdom when, in spite of all our efforts, students fail anyway. But in the process students are deprived of ownership of their own education and their own learning.

It was probably Alfred North Whitehead who wrote that “For an education, a man’s books and teachers are but a help, the real work is his.” How quaint that idea seems to us, that the student must study or the failure will be his, not ours. How we, as legislators, educational leaders, teachers, etc., would hate to have to give up any of "our" territory of study and learning to mere students. What do they know?

Perhaps this folly will soon run its course. One is permitted to hope. Perhaps we will take another look and see that it is the student who decides whether to come to school or not, whether to pay attention or not, whether to do the homework or not, whether, finally, to take his education seriously or not.

You can tell a born teacher by the earnest way he or she turns to a serious student who has a question, and, yes, “a teacher affects eternity.” But as Buddha pointed out 2,500 years ago, the student who makes the most progress “must be anxious to learn.” He was a good teacher and affected lots of people, but he knew better than to try to outlaw failure by removing all responsibility for learning from the students themselves, as we have seemed so dumbly determined to try to do in recent years.

SCIENCE ENVY

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
10 January 2012


Historian David McCullough was asked by a reporter recently if he started writing any of his books with a theme. He said that when he became interested in a subject he started reading to see what he could find out about it, but he had no advance idea of what would result.

Even those of our teachers who do work with students on research papers too frequently indulge in the science envy of requiring them to have a thesis. Students are asked to have some prior notion of the history they will read which they will test to see whether it is falsifiable or not.

Science is rich, famous and powerful, so it is not surprising that it is envied in our culture, but it should be remembered that its practice is to reduce, as much as possible, reality to numbers.

History does not lend itself well to a reduction to numbers, as it is about human beings, who also cannot very well be competently encompassed by numerical descriptions.

Words are the numbers of history, and words connote as much as they denote, they contain and evoke possibility and ambiguity in ways that the number users of science sometimes find annoyingly imprecise and quite uncomfortable.

The study of history should begin with curiosity about people and events: What was that person really like? How did that event come to happen and what resulted from it? These are the sort of non-thesis questions that our students of history should be asking, instead of fitting themselves out for their journey of learning about the past hampered with the straitjacket of a thesis.

Serious history students are often curious over something they have read about. They want to know more, and, when they have learned quite a bit, they frequently want to tell others what they have discovered. Like scientists, they are curious, but unlike them, they are willing to live with the uncertainties that are the essential ingredients of human experience.

Science has earned our admiration, but its methods are not suitable to all inquiries and we should not let envy of the success of science mislead us into trying to shrink-wrap history to fit some thesis with which students would have to begin their study of history.

David McCullough has reported that when he speaks to groups very often he is asked how much time he spends doing research and how much time he spends writing. He said he is never asked how much time he spends thinking.

The secondary students of history published in The Concord Review do not generally begin their work with a thesis to prove or disprove, but rather with wonder about something in history. The quality of their papers reveals that not only have they done a good deal of reading and research—if there is any difference there—but that they also have spent some serious time thinking about what they have learned, as well as how to tell someone else about it.

They have inevitably encountered the complex causes of historical events (no control groups there) and the variety of forces and inclinations both within and without the historical figures they have studied.

Some of these students are very good in calculus, science, and so forth, but they realize that history is a different form of inquiry and provides a non-reductionist view of the truth of human life, but one that may be instructive or inspiring in several ways.

So I urge teachers of students of history, who are asking them to write serious research papers, to let them choose their own topics, based on their own wonder and curiosity about the past, and to relieve them of the science envy of a thesis requirement. Let them embark on their own study of some part of the immense and mysterious ocean of history, and help them return with a story and an understanding they can call their own and can share, through serious research papers, with other students of history.

ELEMENTARY EDUCATION

Date: January 3, 2012 10:35:07 PM EST
To: fitzhugh@tcr.org
Subject: Elementary Academics

Good Evening Mr. Fitzhugh,

I read your article in American Educator, “Meaningful Work” with great interest. As I was reading the article, I felt myself cheering quietly inside as I agree wholeheartedly with your conclusions. I teach 4th grade reading and writing and have high expectations for my students. Your suggestion that a student be assigned a research paper, one page per grade level with the same number of resources, should be a requirement in every elementary through junior high classroom.

In the article, you also state K-12 teachers have been focusing on reading comprehension strategies—main ideas and audience—without texts which build knowledge and vocabulary. I too tire of the endless rhetoric from our ISD curriculum advisers telling us that we should be constantly utilizing summarizing, character traits, and so on in fiction short stories which are part of “diversity” education. Teachers must center on learning objectives being certain the students “get” what is trying to be taught, and “turn and talk,” “best practices,” and other pedagogy which have overtaken discussion and reason. If a teacher digresses from the supposed best practices and objectives, we are marked as unwilling supporters toward pursuing measurable goals for “achievement.” Thus, as you well know, the student is left behind in the foray of verbiage, rankings, and “performance” levels.

We need to get back to the basics. Yes, the social media and technology have severely changed students’ attention levels which in turn affects performance, like it or not. Do we as educators need to give in to media-tizing, or do we educate as perhaps we have learned by hard work and dedication to learning for learning’s sake?

Therefore, I have a question for you. I want to enable my 4th graders to read and write at a level which would aid them to eventually be college ready. I want to lay the necessary foundation for them to build their knowledge and vocabulary. Instead of practicing reading comprehension strategies for main idea and audience, what can I do? Where do I begin as far as life-long comprehension skills to teach my 4th graders? I need them to be reading more nonfiction and serious fiction, but our district has tight guidelines we must follow. How can I impart love for learning along with true life skills? I have always made it a practice to tell my students why we are learning/doing a skill and how it relates to the real world. Where else do I start?

Have you heard of the Core Knowledge Curriculum by E.D. Hirsch, Jr.? What do you think about it? My feelings are it is a great method of learning sequence, but department heads in our ISD have not even heard of Core Knowledge.

I would really appreciate your feedback as I would like to be the best possible teacher for my students. Thank you and have a blessed day—

High School Flight from Reading and Writing

from Academic Questions
10/11/2011

Will Fitzhugh

As concerns mount over the costs and benefits of higher education, it may
be worthwhile to glance at the benefits of high school education at present as
well. Of course, high school costs, while high, are borne by the taxpayers in
general, but it is reasonable to hope that there are sufficient benefits for such
an outlay...

Read the full article