Catching Up on Things: History 111 Fall 2010

Sorry for being offline for the past two weeks. This past month, just in time for our string of three-day Jewish holidays, I moved back to Columbus and started teaching again at Ohio State. On top of all this, I did not have an internet connection at my apartment until last night. (While I might miss New York and Silver Spring, what I am paying for my half of a two-bedroom apartment goes a long way to making up for things.) I hope to be back posting on a regular basis, though likely a little less often than earlier in the year.

So to get things back on track, I would like to invite everyone on board my new teaching experiment. For this quarter I decided to run my History 111 class as a book club. Instead of using one textbook and doing a survey of European history from antiquity up until the Enlightenment, we will be doing a series of shorter books on specific topics. Ideally, I would like to do secondary sources, but I am open to doing primary sources and even good historical fiction. While I picked the first book, Bart Ehrman's Peter, Paul & Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend, subsequent books are to be picked by the class. We have already voted for the next book, Robert Harris's novel Imperium, which deals with the life of the Roman orator Cicero as told by his servant Tiro. It is similar to Robert Graves' I, Claudius, though it is, I believe, more accessible to a general audience.

I was inspired to do this in part by the wonderful book club I have here in Columbus and in part by my desire to take Alfie Kohn seriously to see what might come about with implementing some of his ideas. (See The Book Club: or How to Destroy School.) If the Alfie Kohn model of education could work anywhere it should be in a college where there is at least some degree of self-motivation among students. By allowing students to pick what books we read I am allowing the opportunity to structure the class to suit them. I still will be maintaining graded assignments, including homework. For example, as in previous years, students are supposed to email me a question or comment about the reading before class. (An idea I took from Prof. Louis Feldman.) I then structure my talk around responding to these questions. That being said, this is a rather open-ended assignment and serves to further make room for student input.

What attracted me to Ehrman was, one, he writes about the historical Jesus and early Christianity, topics of popular interest. He writes in a balanced fashion which, while not openly hostile to orthodox religious sensibilities does a very effective job of explaining how an academic approach differs from an orthodox one and for its superiority. Two, Ehrman provides an entry into the historical method as he talks his way through texts and how to use them. What Ehrman does to the New Testament is what historians do to all texts, sacred or otherwise. Part of what is subversive about the historical method, a Pandora's Box so to speak, is that it is impossible to accept it partway. If you accept the historical method then you commit yourself to applying it to all texts, the Bible just as much as Julius Caesar. Regardless of how orthodox your eventual conclusions, the moment you agree to subject the Bible to the same cross-examination as any other text you have put a knife into orthodoxy, committing yourself to the Kantian charge of placing everything before the bar of reason. There can be no return to innocent belief.

So this experiment seems to be going well even if I seem to be speaking a lot more than I might have liked. If anyone has book recommendations, please feel free to post them.

My Ideal Job

As I mentioned earlier, I am not going to be back at the Hebrew Academy for the fall. The administration might have liked what I did, but they decided that they did not have anything to suit my particular skills. While this was going on, as a favor to the school librarian, Gila Suchter, who has been a very dear friend in letting me take over her library as my private office, I have been serving as a semi-official research paper guide for the elementary school students doing projects on the Holocaust. This has mostly consisted of me answering basic questions and gently angling them away from Wikipedia toward internet sources that end in .gov or .edu. If things go really well I try to get the student to open a printed book. While talking over my predicament with Mrs. Suchter, it hit me that this semi-official job would be the perfect official job for me. I could be the school's official research advisor.

To the best of my knowledge, this is a job that I am making up, but there has to be someone out there who is already doing this at their own school; the need is just too obvious. Think about it; research projects, usually papers are something that all schools give out, starting at a young grade. All sorts of classes, science, English, and history, assign research projects. It is a perfectly reasonable way to get students to apply what they have learned in class to a project of their own choosing and which they have to take responsibility for. The problem with an assignment that is so reasonable that every class would resort to it is that everyone knows that everyone else is doing it so no one feels any responsibility to teach research skills and it falls through the cracks. I am just as guilty as anyone of this; my students have had several months to do their research papers. Every once in awhile, I have opened the floor to questions about the paper, even allowing the majority of a class period for this, and am always available outside of class, in person, by phone or by e-mail, to talk. That being said, I do not formally teach research skills. Writing a paper is something from outside of class to be grafted on. Time must be made for it, but it is not an integral part of the class and as such it all too easily gets pushed aside in favor of official course material. (The Alfie Kohns of the world would use this to argue against research assignments and they may even have a valid point.) What is needed is someone to take on this job as an official responsibility. It is not enough for research skills to be a side thing that all teachers in theory teach. If no one is actively taking responsibility then it will not get done.

This does not need to be an official class. I could simply be on call a given number of hours a week in the library for students who need me and I could make my rounds to the various classrooms to give ten-minute introductions advertising my services to students. This is not a writing center, though it could easily be incorporated into one even if I personally would prefer to work out of the library. In my experience, writing centers are run out of English departments and therefore focus on the technical mechanics of writing. If students ask for help in terms of research ideas, that is secondary. I am a historian; my primary training is not as a writer. Whatever skills I picked up in writing came on the side. (One of my justifications for this blog is that it serves as an ongoing exercise to help me become a better writer.) I can be useful, at a pragmatic level, for helping students formulate a thesis and getting evidence for it. If I actually know something about the topic, I can point you to something specific. Even if it is something that I really know nothing about, I have good enough instincts to usually be able to guess where you might want to go with a topic and what some of the potential issues might be. Everyone needs an intelligent person to throw around ideas with, particularly in the beginning stages of research. In my own personal experience, not having someone usually leads to boredom and inefficiency.

This is the perfect job for me. It involves me doing what I love best, jumping around various ideas to see where they lead. It plays to my strengths while avoiding my weaknesses. I get to be the intelligent, enthusiastic, likable person who actually cares about teaching students, while avoiding having to engage students, maintain classroom discipline and teach a specific course. Most importantly, it gives me an excuse to sit in the library every day and read. With this job, any book interesting enough for me to read is probably going to be something for me to recommend and therefore a necessary part of my job.

The administration loved the idea. They agreed that they could use someone to fill such a position and that I would be the perfect person for it. Unfortunately, they do not have the budget to do it. If anyone out there is in a position of influence at an elementary or high school and likes this idea and would like having me on board to put it into practice, feel free to contact me. (Keep in mind that hiring me comes with the bonus of having me running around your school and all the unforeseen consequences that come with it.)

The Book Club Classroom (or How to Destroy School)

There is another possible working model for Alfie Kohn's homework free class that is worth consideration, the book club. When I lived in Columbus I co-chaired a book club for those on the autism spectrum. Every week we would meet for an hour and discuss around fifty pages of a given book. We did books ranging from two to four hundred pages so we did a different book about every one to two months. We did short stories like Isaac Asimov's robot stories, Sherlock Holmes and H. P. Lovecraft. We also did full novels like Killer Angels, Twilight, Catch-22 and Sabriel. Like any classroom, we had a range of people in the club. In our case, we ranged from graduate students in literature to people who had trouble picking up books to read to begin with. Not everyone did the reading every week (some less often than others) so we usually did not have full participation. Also, not everyone came every week. No one was forced to come to book club. We were there because we liked the company and liked talking about the books.

It is not unreasonable that our book club could be used to replace a literature class. The sort of "class" this would give us would be much more democratic and there would be no mandatory homework or tests. The teacher could come to the first day of class with some suggested books and the students could come with some of their suggestions. Everyone could make their case for their book of choice and, afterwards, everyone could vote. The book with the most votes wins. Other books that did not win can still be considered for the next vote and it would be even expected that books (like presidential candidates) will lose in their first run, which will serve to bring it to people's attention, only to win on the next try. After choosing a book, it will be announced that we will be discussing a certain number of pages or chapters for the next class. Some people will do the reading and take part in the class discussion and others won't. When the book is finished we can vote on the next book and the process continues. Since no one has to do any of the assignments there is no reason to give tests or even to give grades. Everyone is in class because they want to be. Some people might actually want to talk about the books and others might just want to hang out.

This process could easily be adapted to history. Greetings class in modern Jewish history, I am your teacher. For this coming week would you like to talk about Hasidism, the Enlightenment, the Holocaust or the founding of the State of Israel? Once we have picked the topic I can point you to the relevant parts of the textbook, primary sources, and outside academic literature that you may wish to read. Please feel no pressure, do the reading if you feel like it and if you would like to actively take part in class. If there is a topic that really interests you, I will gladly help you do further research and will even to write a paper. I am not in charge of you; you are all here because you wish to be. I am simply here to help run discussions and so that my particularly training in these fields may be used.

The potential problem with this is its mandatory nature. Those students who do not do the non-mandatory reading are for all intents and purposes not in class and are no different from the students who do not bother to even show up to this non-mandatory class. One can certainly make a very good case that modern Jewish history and even literature are not of critical importance and that therefore there is no need for them to be mandatory. These are nice things for students to engage in and so they should be available for those students who wish to take the classes. The moment we decide that class should be mandatory then we commit ourselves to making sure that students actually come to class and actually doing work. This means that we actually have to check to see if the work is being done. This means graded homework and tests.

The question of payment raises similar issues. As long as I am doing the book club on a volunteer basis it is only something of interest to me whether anyone actually gains something from coming to book club. The moment I become a salaried teacher then I become answerable to the school, which directly pays my salary, and to parents, who indirectly pay my salary. Obviously, they are paying me to run my book club classroom for a reason and it is only reasonable that I offer some hard evidence to show that their money is not being wasted. By assigning homework and tests I can procure hard empirical evidence that my students have mastered the concepts that I was paid to give over (or that my students are lazy/stupid and it is not my fault).

In theory, this book club model can be used even for math and science allowing us to turn the entire school system into a series of book clubs in which students can pursue their interests without ever being forced to do homework or take a test. Teachers would either be volunteers or baby sitters hired for their particular academic training. This would mean the end of mandatory schooling. Let us be honest, this means my childhood dream of destroying school would come true, leaving students with clubs to attend (if they wish). The adult me might also be willing to do away with school, but is this Kohn's plan?

Between Lecturing and Homework: Alfie Kohn’s Teacher Trap

Alfie Kohn, in his book The Homework Myth, offers a challenge aimed at the very structure of how we ask questions about education. Most of the book is devoted to attacking the institution of homework. Kohn, though, wishes to completely overhaul the entire system of education. He even objects to the hierarchal authoritarian structure of the teacher lecturing and giving grades. In the dystopian description of modern-day education:

Teachers are invited to consider how often they call on students to answer questions, whether they're allowing enough time for a response to be formulated, maybe even whether they are unconsciously calling on more boys than girls. But they are assuredly not prompted to think about why they are calling on students in the first place. Why should the teacher's questions, as opposed to the kids', drive the lesson? What would happen if the students didn't raise their hands – and had to figure out together how to avoid interrupting one another? What would happen if the power was shared and classrooms became more democratic? (pg. 91)

May I point out that even Congress has an elaborate set of rules as to who gets to speak? I guess this just goes to prove that members of Congress really are a bunch of children.

I like to think of myself as an open-minded/open-eared conservative. My philosophy is one that would easily be recognizable to historians as that of the reforming conservative; someone who is defending the status quo, by suggesting modest changes in the hope of forestalling the radical overthrow of the system. This certainly applies to my views on education. I operate within a conservative framework; I lecture, I ask questions, I hope for responses and I most certainly do assign homework. The content of my lectures may be slightly unorthodox and my style of speaking certainly is. This does not change the fact that I operate out of distinctively orthodox foundations.

To take Kohn up on his challenge, out of sincere respect and a belief that he asks a question deserving a response, I would gladly support a more democratic classroom where the students take a more active role in deciding which questions are important. The graduate school seminar comes to mind. We would have as many as a dozen students in a room talking about a given topic. The professor would be there, but he would usually be just one of the people there taking part in the discussion to such an extent that it would not be immediately obvious to an outside observer which person was the professor, particularly since there are middle-aged graduate students. I have been in classes where every week a student was assigned to lead the discussion. Often it would be that student, and not the professor, lecturing for most of the class.

Before I get carried away by my fond dreams of graduate school and attempt to replicate the graduate classroom there is the reality that I am not dealing with graduate students. This is more than just semantics. There is a profound difference between college and high school students that I have taught and my colleagues in graduate school. Students in a graduate-level history program have usually spent years studying history. (In my case, I have been actively into history since I was in second grade.) This means that our graduate students have a wealth of technical facts such as names and dates at their fingertips to give them an advantage. More importantly, our graduate students have absorbed a historical method that allows them to read and comprehend historical information. (In the interest of fairness, I happen to have a number of very smart students in my class; the sort of students that I might be tempted to try a seminar-style class with.)

I probably do not know much more about fifteenth-century Japan than my students do. Yet my background in European history allows me a way in so that I can read and comprehend an academic work on fifteenth-century Japan and walk away from reading it with the ability to say something intelligent on the topic in ways that my students would not be able to. I know something about governments built around religious authority. I understand saying that the political authority speaks for God and that all religious dissidents are political dissidents, traitors to be killed. I am not going to get caught up in "this is so intolerant." I have the model of feudalism and can appreciate the dynamics of such a hierarchal society to come to a daimyo system. I have chivalry to help me with bushido. (My European frame of reference and bias would be a problem when I get to a higher level. You get through college by using various models. Graduate school is about learning how these models are all wrong. Right now I am concerned with getting to the stage of learning that this is all wrong.) Furthermore, while I may not have the primary source material in front of me and certainly would not be able to read such material in the original, I know enough about how primary sources work to have a good guess as to how my book is handling it and what might be some alternatives. Thus I would be able to engage the book and ask the right sort of question. My students, facing the same task, would find themselves lost, bored shortly followed by their minds' closing down. They would need someone to guide them; someone like a teacher giving lectures.

There is another problem with this approach of bringing graduate school to my high school classroom. We were supposed to come to class in graduate school after having spent hours reading through articles and even entire books. We have a word for this in the English language, it is called homework. The same sort of homework that Kohn would have us believe is the cause of so much that is wrong with education. Our graduate students need homework in order to take part in a meaningful conversation; how much more so high school students who lack a basic background in the field to begin with.

Kohn has set a no-win situation for us teachers. He does not want us to hand out homework, because he believes that it kills interest in learning. Early in the book he condescendingly tells us to give better lectures and we will have no need to assign homework. Sure I can stand up and just give out the information (which is what most of the students want). This would be a hierarchal situation where I, the adult teacher, feed the students like little children. For good reason, Kohn objects to such a situation and tells us to try including students in the process as active learners. Of course, this requires having students work things out without me. This also requires that the students have some sort of knowledge base to work from that is supposed to come from some magical place known only to Kohn. In the real world, we turn to homework to allow students to do these things. (I could turn my class into study hall but that would simply be homework done in school.)

The more I lecture the more my class becomes a hierarchy and the students passive learners. On the good side, I can assign less homework. The more homework I assign the more my students will have to do homework. On the good side, the more they can take an active role in class as equals instead of being passive learners. As with most teachers, I believe in trying to find some middle ground between the two. This makes me guilty, to at least some degree, of creating a hierarchal classroom and killing my students' natural love of learning. I guess Kohn would think that I am a truly horrible teacher.