“History is like an amusement park. Except instead of rides, you have dates to memorize.”
Marjorie Bouvier Simpson
Flash back to the 11th or 12th grade, and you and your classmates are sitting before your high school's assistant football coach. On this day, he is your “history teacher,” and he is supposed to lecture on the causes of World War I. You have read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August to prepare for the lecture. Your “history teacher,” however, is so excited about Friday’s game that he breaks out the projector and shows grainy film footage of a night, ten years before, when he blew out his knee. He rewinds the film again and again to show the exact moment a white helmet crashed into his leg and negated a scholarship offer from a “big time college program” (if you can call Mars Hill a “big time college program”). The bell rings and you stumble to your next class wondering if Austria-Hungary would have been better served by an emperor with the attention span of your history teacher/coach.
Sound familiar? Well there is a program designed to ensure that budding young historians do not suffer at the hands of poorly-prepared teachers. For the past three years, SCDAH has been a co-sponsor of the Teaching American History in South Carolina program, which provides professional development support to teachers by offering a series of 10-day summer institutes, which take place in the Pee Dee, Upstate, and Midlands. A history professor, or master scholar, leads the course, and provides content instruction in American history. Participants also take part in master teacher workshops and cultural institution presentations. Classes are held at local museums, libraries, and historic sites across South Carolina, and all activities utilize local primary source materials or objects relating to the periods or themes being studied. Participants conduct primary-source research and create original lesson plans.
The program’s goal is to ensure that our state’s history teachers offer accurate and engaging curriculum to their students, instead of regaling them with tales about how they “won the big game” (which is more than Kaiser Wilhelm II could say). For more information about Teaching American History in South Carolina, please contact Don Stewart at stewart@scdah.state.sc.us or 803-896-6224, or visit the website at www.teachingushistory.org.
Friday, September 25, 2009
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Oh, boo on this tired cliche of idiot teachers and history coaches. I can't decide whether we should just cancel sports programs to eliminate the dual-coach-teacher career path, or if I should call this Don person and hold him responsible for policing our history teachers, since that's what this program seems to be for. Thanks for the suggestion.
ReplyDeleteLet's just be glad that this cliche seems to be more of a thing of the past. Also, the various TAH programs around the country have no power at all to police teachers in any way. These programs are simply meant to help teachers become better at what they do. Teachers that take part in my TAH program do so voluntarily, and they are paid for their time with us.
ReplyDeleteThere are certainly good and bad teachers everywhere and plenty of coaches of all sorts that are great teachers as well. Teaching is definitely one of the hardest and least appreciated professions out there (and underpaid in many cases). Most teachers I know are very professional and dedicated, and they take their work seriously.
The example used above was from a true experience of one of the staff members many years ago.
I was taught in high school (not that long ago) by coaches and they were always well prepared and enthusiastic about their subject. Somehow, I doubt that a coach that only cares about a game would be interested in the Teaching American History program.
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