NATIONAL HISTORY CLUB

Robert Nasson
January 23, 2013 
Director, National History Club
[established 2002]


In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in a craft. He talks about Bill Gates and the Beatles and that although both were blessed with extraordinary talent, they also put in the necessary time and hard work to become experts. In essence they became who they were because of practice.

In today's history and social studies classrooms students are no doubt working hard and putting in quality time; however, it remains to be seen whether they are retaining the knowledge of what they learn. We've all seen the studies displaying the lack of historical knowledge among students, but is anyone really shocked by these? Every time I see one of these new studies I think to myself, "Did they really expect to find anything different?"

I was speaking with a history teacher in North Carolina the other day and he was upset that the curriculum in his 11th grade history class had been shifted to covering only post-Civil War to the present day. When I asked him what was happening with the pre-Civil War part his reply shocked me—it was being moved to 8th grade.

The problem we face is that by the time students finish with an era they are moving on to the next, and will probably never return to the previous one. So those students in North Carolina who study Colonial America to pre-Civil War will probably forget most of what they learned by the time they are Juniors. It's like asking John Lennon to put away his guitar and then pick it up three years later and not miss a beat.

I wish there were an easy way to remedy this. Unfortunately, with the long list of requirements and classes that students need to fulfill there's no simple solution. I think one of the best ways is to get students interested in the subject outside the classroom, so that they can develop a passion for history on their own. By getting students learning and thinking about historical events, figures, and eras outside the classroom they will be more likely to remember the content from previous classes and, in turn, it will also make history in the classroom more approachable and valuable to students.

As Director of the National History Club (NHC), I have seen hundreds of middle and high schools try this approach with much success. Created by Will Fitzhugh in 2002, the NHC was designed to promote the reading, writing, discussion, and enjoyment of history at the secondary level. and to allow after school chapters of the National History Club to share ideas and activities with each other. The thought was that by getting students involved in history outside their own classrooms we would be able to create a network of chapters from around the country that could learn from each other.

Our model was based on a bottom-up approach, where students and their Advisor(s) would design and implement their activities, rather than take orders from us on what they should or should not do. We use the “teach-by-example” approach, and this has led to a wide array of activities in 460 chapters, for our 13,000 members, ranging from Veterans Day ceremonies in their schools, to field trips to such historic sites as the 16th Street Baptist Church, Alcatraz, Gettysburg, and Arlington National Cemetery, to hearing such speakers as Howard Dean, Eli Wiesel, and Colin Powell.

While we leave the direction of each club up to the student members and the Advisor, we produce Newsletters and use other communication methods to highlight the chapter activities, thus allowing each school to get fresh ideas for things to do. In addition, we have a few contests and awards programs that recognize the truly exemplary students and chapters that are part of the NHC. We hope that every student who is a part of his or her school's history club chapter will be a lifelong lover of history once they graduate.

I often say that history is like a jigsaw puzzle—what starts out as a collection of pieces can be put together with patience and passion. As the jigsaw puzzle comes together you begin to see the picture more clearly. With history you may never have that perfectly clear picture because events and historical figures are so complex, but the more you know of history, the easier it is to understand the world that we live in. By studying the events of the past we can better prepare for the future. And if the leaders of the future are to come from the students of today then it's essential that they understand who we are and where we came from.

For more information please visit: www.nationalhistoryclub.org

SIX/FORTY-ONE/SIX PLAN

13 January 2013

Carol Jago, Past President of the National Council of Teachers of English, and Will Fitzhugh, Editor of The Concord Review,

are pleased to announce their:

SIX/FORTY-ONE/SIX Weekly Reading Plan for Students

The Kaiser Foundation finds that Americans aged 8-18 spend 53 hours a week (A WEEK) with electronic entertainment media.

Jago and Fitzhugh propose a new initiative which will ask students to spend SIX HOURS a week reading a novel, SIX HOURS a week reading a history book, and that will still leave them FORTY-ONE HOURS a week, or almost six hours each day, for their various electronic entertainment media...

It could be called the 41/6/6 Plan or the 6/6/41 Plan if either would appeal more to the media when covering this transformative and bold and new and exciting and innovative initiative.

Tweets and other comments on this wonderful and useful new initiative are welcomed.


Will Fitzhugh

“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog

THE MIND OF STUDENTS

EducationViews.org; Houston, Texas
SchoolInfoSystem.org; Madison, Wisconsin

THE MIND OF STUDENTS

 Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
31 December 2012

What is on the minds of our students? We mostly have no idea. The Edupundits all seem to agree that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality. But isn’t the most important variable in student academic achievement really student academic work in the end?

The teacher can know a lot about her subject, can speak well, tell wonderful stories, have good control over the class, and so on, but if the student is thinking about something else, what is the result?

I have known first-rate teachers whose students didn’t do any work academically and mediocre teachers who had some students who achieved a lot academically.

All those hundreds of people spending many millions of dollars and countless months of effort on teacher assessment never seem to wonder what is going on in the minds of our students in a given class. How many times has an evaluator, visiting a class to judge the work of a teacher, ever thought to ask a few students, in those moments, what they know about the current subject, or even what they are thinking about at the time?

The Hindus say the mind is like a drunken monkey, and even a sober mind is pulled in many directions at once, by memories, worries, ideas, desires, impressions of all kinds, and even, occasionally, by the subject matter of the class the student is sitting in. But the point is that while we are teaching, even though we may get a student question from time to time, or we may ask a student for a comment from time to time, during the vast majority of the time we spend teaching, we have not the slightest insight into what is occupying the minds of almost all of our students while we are teaching our brains out.

A recent study found (mirabile dictu) that students who don’t come to class learn less than students who do. But the fact is that even when students do come to class, their attention and their minds may very well be absent from class. There are countless objects of interest to distract the minds of students from the current work of any class as presented by the teacher.

This is not to say that wonderful teachers cannot draw and hold the attention of almost all the students in their class for amazingly long stretches. But students have many concerns, both personal and academic. Not only the next athletic event, or personal relationship, but even the subject matter of the next class or the last class may occupy the minds of some or many of our students while we teach.

Teaching and learning are at least as subtle and complex as brain surgery, and the surgeon has one single anaesthetized patient, and the help of four or five other professionals, while the teacher may have thirty conscious high school students and no one to watch for signs of student distraction, if any...As every teacher knows it is ridiculously easy for a student to show every sign of serious attention while their mind is actually kilometers away on some other matter entirely.

Stitching knowledge and ideas into the existing mental and memory frameworks of students is a lot more difficult and intricate an undertaking than most of those designing teacher assessment projects even want to think about, but it is the actual daily venture of our teachers.

My main interest and experience are with history at the high school level, so I am not sure what bearing my suggestions would have for calculus, chemistry, or Chinese language courses. But I believe that the attention of our history students can be captured and rewarded by asking them to read at least one good complete history book each year, and to write one serious Extended Essay-type history research paper each year while they are in high school.

If they read and report on a good history book, the chances are that they will have given it their attention, and learned some history from it. If they write a 6,000-word history research paper (and I am regularly publishing 8,000-15,000-word papers by secondary students from 46 states and beyond), they will clearly have had to give the historical subject of their research their attention, and they will have learned some history (see: student academic achievement) in the process.

Of course, we should continue to try to recruit and retain the top 5% of college graduates as our school teachers, and we should encourage them to teach their hearts out. But unless we begin to look more closely in an effort to discover what, academically, is going on in the minds of students, we will continue to ignore the main engines of academic work in our schools. I hope one or two of our more elite and well-funded Edupundits may give this idea a passing thought or two.

-----------------------------

“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog

UNMENTIONABLE

SchoolInfoSystem.org; Madison, Wisconsin
EducationViews.org; Houston, Texas

UNMENTIONABLE

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
4 December 2012

Since the disaster of the Marxist/Victims-history standards produced by UCLA in 1996, which were censured by a vote of 99-1 in the United States Senate, (the one negative voter thought the “standards” were even worse), History has become, in the comment this year of David Steiner, former Commissioner of Education in New York State, “so politically toxic that no one wants to touch it.”

This situation has developed in part because every tiny little multicultural group in the country is outraged if their history does not receive equal (or better) treatment in any history textbook, and in part because the late Howard Zinn’s proudly Marxist textbook of United States History has sold more than 2 million copies (not bad for an anti-capitalist who believed “private property is theft”).

Most of those who write about the dashing new nonfiction reading suggestions of the Common Core lament the altered and unreasonable burdens on English teachers, and they all seem to have forgotten that most of our high schools have both History departments and History teachers as well. But it seems to be inconceivable and unmentionable that our History teachers might dare to assign history books (nonfiction) and history research papers (nonfiction writing).

The story of how all reading and writing became the complete monopoly of the English Departments is surely a long and complicated one, but however it developed, it seems clear that our History departments have given away any responsibility for assigning books and research papers they may once have owned to the English teachers.

In an October 24, 2012 article in the Wall Street Journal, Michael S. Malone argues that even tech company CEOs are now looking for people who can tell stories (about their enterprise, their product, etc.), and so Mr. Malone of course looks to the English departments to offer the needed expertise in storytelling:

“Could the humanities rebuild the shattered bridge between C.P. Snow’s two cultures and find a place at the heart of the modern world's virtual institutions? We assume that this will be a century of technology. But if the competition in tech moves to this new battlefield, the edge will go to those institutions that can effectively employ imagination, metaphor, and most of all, storytelling. And not just creative writing, but every discipline in the humanities, from the classics to rhetoric to philosophy. Twenty-first-century storytelling: multimedia, mass customizable, portable and scalable, drawing upon the myths and archetypes of the ancient world, on ethics, and upon a deep understanding of human nature and even religious faith.

“The demand is there, but the question is whether the traditional humanities can furnish the supply. If they can’t or won’t, they will continue to wither away. But surely there are risk-takers out there in those English and classics departments, ready to leap on this opportunity. They’d better hurry, because the other culture won’t wait.”

Where did we lose the understanding that History is all storytelling, with the additional benefit that it is based on evidence, which is not always so important with fiction? Mr. Malone mentions English and classics departments (“classics to rhetoric to philosophy”), but perhaps for him History has lost its membership in the Humanities? He wants “imagination, metaphor and most of all, storytelling...and myths and archetypes of the ancient world,” but he leaves unmentioned the sources of the greatest true stories (nonfiction) ever told in the world—our Historians.

Nevertheless, he is in the mainstream of those who, when asked to think, talk and write about reading and writing in the schools, faithfully and regularly default to the work of the English department and its wonderful world of fiction as the only place to introduce nonfiction!

When did the ideas of having our high school students read an actual complete History book or two and write an actual History research paper or two disappear into the woodwork? The result is that our students arrive in college poorly prepared to read nonfiction books and to write the required term papers, not to mention their inability to do any research.

Neil Postman tells us that “Cicero remarked that the purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present.” That freedom seems more and more out of reach among those who cannot even think about History, which has made History the most unmentionable among all the necessary academic subjects in our schools.

Master of None

Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review

In 1968, the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts, awarded me a degree, saying I was a Master of Education. In those days, it was possible to get such a degree at the age of 22 or 23, after a year of course work. Now, what does that mean: “Master of Education”?

Michelangelo finished his immortal Pietá at the age of 21, so perhaps he was a Master of Sculpture at that age, but it is said that he was around marble dust even as an infant, and he had been carving sculptures in marble for many years by the time he was 21.

My understanding is that in Medieval guilds, it took some time to be acknowledged as a Master in any of the crafts. One had to serve a number of years as an apprentice, then some years as a journeyman, then, if ready to do so, it was necessary to offer a “Master–Piece” of work, which, if accepted by the other Masters of the guild, could earn for the craftsman the rank of Master in that craft. Of course these days we throw around the term “masterpiece” without much thought of what it meant, just as we can call something a “classic” when it is brand new, or even a soft drink. J.S. Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” is a classic, but then these days so are one version of Coke, and the Army/Navy game.

The degree of Master has to be earned over time even now in other fields as well. The one best thing for me that came out of my time at the Harvard Ed School was the recommendation by my advisor, a kindly professor of statistics, that I read Professor Eugen Herrigel’s book, Zen in the Art of Archery. This fine book lead me to a lifelong interest in Zen and related subjects. But I have to say that one cannot become a Zen Master of Archery, or of any of the arts, not to mention meditation itself, by the age of 23 after one year of study.

But surely there are better parallels to the Master of Education. What about earning one’s Master's license in the Merchant Marine? No, that takes a long time and a lot of hard work, too. What about becoming a Master Sergeant, for instance in the United States Marine Corps? Well, no, that takes quite a while and a lot of experience and knowledge as well.

I worked with a high school student once on the Boston’s North Shore, who needed to graduate early because she had been accepted in a Master Class with the violinist Fritz Kreisler. Turned out she had been flying very early in the morning twice a week to study violin at Julliard in New York. She had been invited to join that small Master Class, but it was a chance to study with a Master, not a quick trip to a Master’s Degree of her own in Music.

There is a famous story around now, speaking of Master musicians, of a teacher in Los Angeles, I believe, who took his class to hear a Master cellist in concert and to meet him afterwards. The story says that one of the students asked him how he came to be such a good musician. And the cellist said, after a pause, “Well, first, there are no shortcuts.” But then he was not talking about the path to a degree as a Master of Education, on which, I would argue, shortcuts are the order of the day, and have been for many decades.

Some academic Master’s programs try to redeem their right to the name by requiring a thesis (a modern imitation of the Master–Piece). Perhaps in physics or in molecular biology, such a thesis could really demonstrate mastery of the subject. But my Master’s program in Education did not require a thesis, and the general opinion is, I understand, that most theses written in the field of Education do not rise to the level of mastery required in the hard sciences by any stretch of the definition.

I would conclude with a couple of suggestions. First, when educators who are Masters of Education, including me, talk about educational mastery, it might be useful to retain some skepticism over whether they know much about mastery of any kind in any field. Second, we might consider whether to try to make a Master’s Degree in Education mean something one day.

And finally, I have to confess that, after nearly thirty-five years of work in education, I have come to the view that Mastery in education is very hard to achieve. If we pretend otherwise, by passing out meaningless degrees, we end up by avoiding most of the many serious questions about how we might actually get better at educating the children in our charge.
 

 

ADULTS ONLY

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
24 October 2012

I may be one of a tiny minority who think that schools are for student academic work.

Of course, sports, concerts, social programs, dances, and all sorts of other youth activities are important, but students don’t need schools to do them in.

My view is that without student academic work, all the buildings, bond issues, budgets, school boards, teacher unions, superintendent and teacher training programs, Broad/Gates/WalMart grants, local-state-federal education departments, NCLB, RTT, CC, CCSSO,  Schools of Education, standards projects, legislation, regulations, and all the rest of the Adults Only paraphernalia surrounding education in this country these days are just a waste of money and time.

The Education Punditocracy, including blogs, magazines, newspapers, foundations, Finn/Hess/Petrilli, etc., and even my friend and inspiration, Diane Ravitch, among hundreds and hundreds of others, are completely preoccupied with and absorbed in their consideration of what Adults are doing in education. The actual academic work of students takes place at much too low a level to attract their notice. They seem to be making the assumption that if they can just fix all the Adults Only stuff, then somehow student academic work will take care of itself. But they don’t pay any attention in the meantime to whether students are actually doing any academic work or not. And they have not learned that the students, and the students alone, have the power to determine whether they will do any academic work, and also what its quality will be.

To reiterate: without student academic work, all the rest of the bustle, noise, commentary, and the hundreds of billions of dollars spent will amount to nothing, so it should be important to pay attention to student academic work, should it not?

I came to understand this because for the last 25 years in particular, and for about 10 years before that, I have been fully engaged in efforts that completely depend upon good student academic work, and I have been fascinated to discover how few Education people (I’m not talking about actual teachers) seem to be involved with that, and that just about every one of them, though laboring away quite seriously and conscientiously, seems to spend all their time on the Adults Only matters, and to have almost no interest, other than to give it lip service and quickly move on, in the serious academic work of students.

If that should somehow change, and if student academic work were to become the central focus of what we pay attention to in education, there is a chance we might see more of it, and that its quality might improve too. But if we continue to ignore it and focus on Adults Only, that most assuredly is not going to happen. As the Hindus say: “Whatever you give your Attention to grows in your life,” and we have been giving, IMHO, far too much attention (almost all of it) to the Adults Only aspects of education and far too little to student academic work.

To test what I am saying, if a kind Reader would go back over articles, books, blogs, and speeches on education in recent years, please do let me know if you find any that talk about student science projects, the complete nonfiction books they are reading, or the serious history research papers they are writing. I believe if you look closely, almost all that you find will show people caught up in what Adults Only are doing, should do, will do, must do, or might do, and there will be little to no attention to the actual academic work of students in our schools. But please prove me mistaken, with evidence, if you would be so kind.



------------------------
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics™
blog: www.tcr.org/blog

Scholars or Customers?

Scholars or Customers?

EducationViews.org; Houston, Texas
October 16, 2012
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review

Diane Senechal, Ph.D., has written a book (The Republic of Noise—2012) about the virtues of solitude for young people living in our mad, mad, Wireless World.

I fear she may be insufficiently aware that every moment one of our high school students spends in reflection, musing, thinking, contemplation, meditation or indeed in solitude, unless those moments are product-focused, can grow, over time, into a huge barrier to sales of computers, software, games, and other products of our marketing efforts in educational technology. After all, the business of education is business, right?

To put it plainly, thinking, and other sorts of reflection, constitute a serious threat to all efforts to meet hardware/software sales quotas, especially in the huge and growingly lucrative education market.

This should make it clearer why the companies which are the commercial engines of our economy, especially the technology companies which are concentrating on education for a large portion of their consumer marketing and sales, are so opposed to having students read actual nonfiction books or spend time working on history research papers while they are in high school.

While it is true that having students read one or more complete history books while they are still in high school may not only teach them some history, but will also help them to get ready for the nonfiction books they will be asked to read in college, and that any work they do in high school on serious history research papers will better prepare them for college writing tasks, it must be borne in mind that both of those activities can seriously cut into their use of social media and associated products, and limit the time they will spend buying and using video games and other important products!

We have to decide if we want our high school students to be scholars or customers! Apple Computer did not spend $650 million or thereabouts to persuade our students to read books and write papers to further their education, but instead to buy iPhones and iMacs to help distract them from homework and other obstacles to buying products. As Mark Bauerlein noted in The Dumbest Generation, one sign in an Apple store promised that the MacBook would be “the only book you will ever need.”

There has been attention recently given to the disadvantages of colleges inflating grades and doing other things in their attempts to attract paying customers, because treating students as customers interferes with the essential responsibility of Upper Education to serve and challenge them as students.

But even in Lower Education, the multi-multi-billion-dollar market in digital equipment and software has employed major efforts to induce students to spend 53 hours a week with electronic entertainment media, according to the Kaiser Foundation, while most of them spend no more than 3 or 4 hours a week on homework.

There are always a few people who don’t get the Word to “dumb it down!!” Since 1968, the International Baccalaureate Program has required a 4,000-word (16-page) Extended Essay for candidates for the Diploma, and that may very well have resulted in some students reading complete nonfiction books.

In addition, the Advanced Placement Program of the College Board, while it has not yet managed to include a serious term paper (a small pilot experiment is now underway), nevertheless has not exiled some teachers who go ahead and assign them anyway, a good number of which have been published in The Concord Review since 1987. In fact a special issue of AP history essays was published by The Concord Review in 1995, and this issue is available on the website at www.tcr.org. But those teachers (and students) have always been outside the mainstream with their efforts.

A few high school students, in some cases inspired by the exemplary work of their peers published in The Concord Review have worked to read for and write their serious history term papers as independent studies, some ranging from 8,000 words (32 pages) up to 15,000 words (60 pages), but with no encouragement from the electronic entertainment, computer/software, and STEM communities, these scholarly “mountaineers”  have not been numerous over the years.

If we continue to value hardware and software sales over education for our students, we will sell a lot of products, but we will also naturally continue to have students in need of extensive remediation, and to produce unemployable graduates. However, if we decide to relax our visa barriers for skilled immigrants, we may continue to count on them to carry our civilization forward or at least keep it going by making use of the benefits they bring with them from the non-commercial educations still available in other countries in South Asia, East Asia, and elsewhere.