Thanksgiving Themes

Warning: this post has little to do with teaching Humanities. At best, it may have some relevance to Colonial North America and the phenomenon of nativism.


As we head into the holiday season, I am aware of the divide between my own experience and The Ideal Holiday which I see celebrated in commercial culture and public spaces. The disparity can leave me a bit unnerved.

Fortunately, there is NPR! While chopping away on Thursday morning, there was lots of great programming about Thanksgiving history on KUOW94.9, which I am going to summarize for you in lieu of presenting any original ideas.

What struck me in the themes of this programming is that Thanksgiving has always been an artificial celebration. It is true that the original settlers may have shared meals with indigenous people and may even have offered feasts of Thanksgiving. However, as good Puritans, the pilgrims would have been as likely to fast as to feast and might well have found the idea of a Thanksgiving "feast" a bit presumptuous.

In fact, the Thanksgiving holiday was an observance tirelessly promoted by a New England woman named Sarah Josepha Hale, who expressly intended it to be a didactic holiday promoting the virtues of an idealized New England life. To her, it was an important feature that the holiday would involve a return to the countryside and to a traditional domestic sphere where women had influence. (Hale opposed women's suffrage, though she was interested in expanding women's access to education and influence.) Hale pitched the idea of a national day of Thanksgiving to five successive presidents until she finally won the attention of Abraham Lincoln, who declared Thanksgiving a national holiday right in the middle of the Civil War--at a time when the nation was literally tearing itself apart. So Thanksgiving was created to simulate a sense of national harmony and unity which did not exist. This makes me feel so much better.

While my holidays may never resemble the Currier and Ives model, I am relieved to know that the Currier and Ives model was an idealized mock-up from the very start.

In Praise of Primary Sources

The other day, I spied a book on Daren's shelf: Aspects of Western Civilization: Problems and Sources in History, edited by Perry Rogers. As I was flipping through this text, I was reminded of the value of primary sources. Primary sources provide students with a strong particular viewpoint on history. Purportedly objective or blatantly biased, they offer a vivid picture of a slice of time. And best of all, many primary source documents are short--or can be excerpted.

Recently, we included a New Deal cartoon from one of Daniel's lectures on an 11th grade test. Students were asked to analyze the point of view expressed in the drawing: what issue is this artist referencing? what is the cartoonist's critique?

On a more sober note, consider the Balfour Declaration:

His majesty's government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

This single sentence is a goldmine of information which students can discover for themselves in a fairly short amount of time.

Decoding primary source documents can easily be turned into a hands-on collaborative exercise. Besides their inherent value, primary source activities offer a low-cost way to reduce homework load on any given night. They support all kinds of productive classroom activities that require no preparation for the students--and they can really animate material presented in lecture.

The Avalon Project at Yale Law School has a huge selection of primary sources from 4000BCE to now. I have a few other sources for primary sources in the "Random Great Stuff" section of my Teacher Page, though these are mostly geared to the 20th century. The ABC-CLIO database that Nancy is test-driving this year includes primary sources for almost any unit. Our Northwest School Library also has (among other things) a multi-volume set of primary source documents entitled Daily Life through World History in Primary Documents and a Witness to History series which features lots of primary sources as well. See Nancy for other primary sources.

Experienced Teacher Retreat

When I applied for this retreat, I was imagining I would come away with 25 practical ideas which we could all immediately implement in our classes. It turned out not to be that kind of retreat. It took me a while to adjust--what? no homework?--but once I'd settled into the reflective mode, I appreciated it deeply.

The heart of Menucha Retreat Center was built in 1927 by Julius Meier, founder of the Meier and Frank Department store, as a country retreat near Corbett, Oregon. Herbert Hoover and FDR both stayed there and the place has such an old-fashioned feel that you expect to see Harry Hopkins at breakfast. (There's a speakeasy in the basement.) Twelve of us were there representing eight schools, led by our own Jen Kulik and her colleague Sallie Warmath from Salt Lake City, Utah. Neighboring schools included Overlake, Lake Washington Girls Middle School, Westside School and The Little School. Our focus during the three days was on reflection: our journeys as teachers, our current challenges and the reasons we stay in education.

One of the most useful activities for me was a workshop in the "professional portfolio." I had never thought much past resume and references, but this group seemed familiar with the professional portfolio. This includes a regularly updated resume, with some of the following headings:

• Education, starting with BA
• Job History, starting with most recent
• Special Interests
• Relevant Experience
  
• Related Training
• Skill Sets
  
• Successful Projects

Jen shared that she maintains a word document called "The Big One," in which she maintains a record of all professionally relevant experience and qualifications. She draws from this list to customize resumes for specific opportunities.

In addition to an updated resume, a professional portfolio might also include: a Statement of Teaching Philosophy, student feedback, a sample assignment or two, syllabi/course descriptions, certificates of attendance at relevant professional conferences, photos, playbills, anything that gives a sense of what you offer as a teacher. Happily, we had some time during the retreat to draft a Statement of Philosophy or personal Mission Statement to articulate what we set out to accomplish in our work. It was very valuable to reflect on my work as a teacher and those elements of it that are most important to me.

I am also grateful to have had the opportunity to step back a bit from the pace of teaching and to be reminded of its importance. I feel proud to be part of this important work--and to be in the company of such fine colleagues.

I hope to make some time at an upcoming Department Meeting for all of us to write Mission Statements as teachers. Don't worry: these won't be published anywhere but it's useful and kind of refreshing to be reminded of our ideals. One of the participants shared that she does in fact keep her Mission Statement posted near her desk and on her computer. She reflects on it often, changes it sometimes and refers to it to be inspired and guided as she creates her classes.

Marking Meaning

I came away from my visit to Annie Wright impressed with the usefulness of making organization explicit. I saw four classes that day. All of them in one way or another took advantage of themes, summaries and lists to organize and reinforce learning.

In terms of lists, three of four teachers explicitly specified their goals for the class. Three had a "Plan for Today" posted on the board. Two reinforced this with an announcement at the beginning of class. These simple gestures reinforced what the teacher was trying to accomplish.

In watching a class on the Book of Genesis, I got a sense of how much themes help students find meaning in material. As a student, it is easy to wade into a reading assignment and not know what is important. Providing students with themes helps them to organize and make sense of what they are reading.

The History Department at Annie Wright has 7 Themes that they work with when exploring historical material:

1. Patterns of Population (numbers and migrations)


2. Economic Networks of Exchange


3. Uses/Abuses of Power
   


4. Haves/Have Nots


5. Expressing Identity


6. Environment/Technology/Science


7. Spiritual Codes/Ethics

It was clear that the class had established these themes early in the year...so no explicit definitions were offered the day I was there. However, I saw that having categories helps students find their way in unfamiliar material: the students went through the text (a fairly short reading assignment: Genesis 1: 27-30) in small groups and identified passages that reflected or referred to these themes in some way.

Then at the end of class, the teacher and students summarized what the class had discovered. This too reinforced what they had learned. The teacher reminded them to continue to think in terms of the 7 themes while reading over the weekend. In this way, the students are acquiring a habit of thinking about these ideas when reading historical material and are learning to consistently look for this kind of information, to ask: what does this text show about the way X thought about ethical behavior? About the way power was shared (or not shared) in this society? About the way they related to their environment and used technology?

Most of the core Humanities classes have a set of questions at each grade level: i.e, "Who should rule?" in 10th grade and "What is the relationship of the individual to the state?" at 11. These questions/themes are a Good Idea and we should be sure to keep them in play.

Harkness Skills

In my last post, I described the philosophy behind the Harkness Table. It was clear from watching classes at Annie Wright that the students knew this philosophy and were consciously trying to enact these principles in their conversation. To describe a Harkness Table in action:

The conversation is almost 100% student driven. The teacher sits at the table with the students, asking an occasional question but mostly just observing and making notes. During the conversation I observed, the teacher was 100% un-bothered by moments of silence, some of them lasting longer than I usually allow. When a moment of disagreement verging on confusion emerged during the conversation, the teacher sat right through it, obviously paying attention but not jumping in to clarify. It was also very striking that the students in this class almost never volunteered a comment without referring to the text to support their contribution. I will sometimes let my students refer to Lord of the Rings or Oprah if they appear to be making a genuine attempt to illuminate a relevant idea. In this class, that never happened. Every comment included textual support:

"On page 71, column B," the author says..." or
"Going back to Mariah's comment about p. 68."

The students actually talked like this. Students were also trained in structuring their conversation.

"Adding on to what Michelle said..".
"The passage on p. 70 confused me because..."
"I think the importance of Cathy's point is also shown on pg. 68"
"I actually disagree. I think the real reason is on p. 72."
"I think we may have skipped over something." (Student adds point.)
"I think we might be getting off-track. X happened for a lot of reasons." (Student then summarized the conversation so far.)

Students actually said all of these things.

After 30-35 minutes of this, the teacher stepped in and asked the students to summarize the conversation: what were the major themes and ideas? It was at this point that he clarified the confusion that had emerged 10-15 minutes earlier in the discussion. He then asked the students to evaluate the conversation: what grade would you award yourselves and why? When one of them suggested a B+, he disagreed, pointing out that three students had not said a word during the class. One student pushed back and said that although some were silent, most had done a good job of "always digging deeper" in the text. It was clear that all the students would all get the same grade for the conversation. This self-evaluation was the end of class.

I will end by adding a list of the skills that the Harkness method wants every student to exercise in class. Some of these are quite self-explanatory, but students might need to be explicitly taught language for some of these things:

• organizing, leading the conversation
  
• summarizing, re-stating or clarifying the text
• citing specific quotations or passages from the text
• asking a question about the text
• commenting on the text, giving an opinion or reaction
• making a suggestion about the text or discussion
• summarizing discussion up to that point
• analyzing text or a comment or the whole conversation up to that point
• reacting to comments
• answering comments
• re-starting discussion
• filling in a gap
• arguing a point, disagreeing
• asking for new information
• asking for other comments, reactions
• comparing to other works

It was very striking to me how rooted in the text this work is. There was absolutely a culture of "Where's your proof?" "Where do you see this?" "Find it in the text." However, reading assignments are significantly shorter than reading assignments I typically give. For example, in one class I observed, students had been asked to read from p. 64-71; in another p. 1-10 and p. 17-20.