Say When.

I was once asked if I will be a teacher who is a “sage on the stage or a guide on the side?” I am afraid however of devolving into the Video-Cabinet sith lord.

I am trying to be history teacher, but even with significant resume revisionism, I’m not one. I’ve taken history classes, but I’m no historian. Wearing feathers . . . does not make you a chicken. This is the way it always is with the copyrighted Liberal Arts education.

I desperately want to give my students quality instruction, rich in examples and strong in scaffolding. I am afraid of becoming the teacher I met in my field experience last fall.  He had a cabinet of videos related to World History (have you met him too?) As a connoisseur of the History Channel from it’s golden days, I know it was a beautiful collection.  However I know it’s the Dark Side; when I said he seemed like a nice guy, one of his students said, “do not defend him,” he’s a horrible teacher.

A year later, I’ve been trained in the Light Side.  We are supposed to have students “doing history”.  Here’s the identity crisis: I am not a historian. My best history classes were seminar style. My best papers were five pagers on architecture and social history.  I gave a devoted analysis, however I lack virtues like  “historical thinking”, sourcing documents or some kind of dialectic forensics. Passing on this trade, in a master apprentice fashion is not going to happen. It is, as my fellow apprentice teacher said the other day, “pie in the sky”.

I would call the master teacher and accuse my fellow apprentice teacher of slipping to the Dark Side already, but in the words of one much greater than I, “First, remove the log from your own eye, then remove the sliver from your neighbor’s eye”.  So where do I begin?  I am willing to do better.  I do not want to just teach the products of historical methods, but I don’t know how to do that, specifically.  I can read all I want about the historiographical constructivism of the  “Salem Witch Trials” or the “Starving Time” lesson plan, but how do I translate these examples into a unit on Egypt?  I feel like I am unable to produce a quality lesson plan for every day – much less any day – because I lack the time to assimilate high quality information and make decisions about how to best present that information.  Furthermore, I have been trained to design lessons, but perhaps, like any novice, I have the vocabulary but lack the fluency.

Whatever I learned in my undergraduate may not have been “history” with a registered trademark, but it was a social science and it was in the liberal arts.  For me, it takes time for ideas to peculate before they can be articulated.  If I am going to write good lessons, I am going to need to do a lot of reading, expand my time for ideas to grow before working an end product.

So, there, I’ve got it.   Is that it?

P.S. You might ask what good is a liberal arts degree if he can present on the fly, but think of the children.