Problems
About five years ago, right about the same time I began coming to Yale for National Initiative seminars, I discovered the one element that would make me a better history teacher: information. Now before you give a big whopping 'DUH' response let me explain. For lots of years I was under the impression that the textbook almost uniformly drove the material my students needed to know as it was aligned to the goals of the AP College Board curriculum. Once I was master of that information what I needed were the pedagogical strategies to put me over the top. In my mind, it was methods that cured the madness.
That same year, the great historian David McCullough came to Charlotte to speak about his forthcoming book and said a wonderfully provocative thing that changed my mind for good. He said, and I am paraphrasing here, if you teach history you need to "tell the stories." In other words, captivate students with the astonishing tales of great episodes and characters in our past. He went on to tell the audience the kinds of stories that were he felt were so alluring. I was so impressed that I went out and bought his biography of John Adams and the journey began.
Slowly I began to see that it indeed was the stories that drew interest from my kids. This is not to say, of course, that the AP requirements were not top priority or that the state standards were being ignored; nevertheless, I found that the more I knew, the more stories I could tell that interested my kids. Suddenly, Mr. Joyce became a cool teacher, wow! Then I realized that my students' test scores began to improve as well. But then I realized something even more important. It takes a lot of time and effort if you really want to know your history.
Most recently I have been on a campaign to read Robert Caro's three (soon to be four) part biography of Lyndon Johnson. I have read parts one and two, but it took nearly ¾ of a year to do it. These books are tomes, and there are thousands more just like them. In fact, it seems that every important work that is published these days is a minimum 700 pages of narrative and another 200 in notes. Shelby Foote's three-part history of the Civil War is enormous, Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals is so thick it would kill a small animal, and Gordon Wood's The Empire of Liberty requires hand trucks to be moved. My sarcasm notwithstanding, it is true that all of these are important to current scholarship in American History but also inaccessible to the average student. Reading this kind of work requires a mammoth amount of dedication, not to mention time. I don't mind it because I love history but there are other more important considerations here.
It is a given that my primary task is to teach students the material associated with my subject. But I take it as an additional part of my job to interest students in the learning of our past. Right or wrong, I think learning our nation's history is and should always be considered an important element to one's personal, social and intellectual growth. It is also my belief that students are not willing to take on the challenge of learning American history because it seems like more than they can do.
So on the one hand the learning of history can be troublesome to students who have come to believe that history is filled with rote lists of absolute facts. When they encounter so many perspectives they can be turned away by what they might see as relativism. And on the other, biographies and histories are often huge compilations of material that most students will see as beyond their capability to digest. Therefore, I pose this unit as a potential solution to these problems.
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