To Teach Is To Touch the Future

I've hear this phrase bandied about, but I've never really given it deep thought. This morning, I did. I seem to do some of my best thinking in the shower, for some reason. I was standing there thinking back to my interview at a local high school and I started reflecting back to how I differentiated myself from those memorize-and-regurgitate teachers who demand very little critical thinking from their students. Sure, some people learn more easily that way and therefore make good grades. But should you learn that way? As for me, I answer an emphatic no. I wish I had some statistical information to back this up, but I will bet anything that almost none of the [good] leaders and innovators of the world learned in this manner. You almost certainly cannot make the world a better place by doing so. We so desperately need critical thinkers who are able to make connections between the successes and mistakes of the past and the events of today's world and beyond. As a teacher, my main task is to teach history and the social sciences. But my subgoal is no less important (and, honestly, it is probably more important): as a teacher of history and the social sciences, I encourage students how to think critically, rationally, and intelligently, looking below the surface to what lies beneath. In the study of history, there are no simple answers. Yes, we still need to learn relevant "facts," such as names, places, and events, but we cannot and should not stop there. Sure, we know that December 7, 1941 was when Pearl Harbor was attacked and when we entered World War II, but this attack was not a discrete event that took place in a sterile environment. You cannot stop there and move on to the next event...a critical thinker would wonder why the Japanese kamikaze pilots left their homes and families for a suicide mission and would then seek to uncover chains of events leading up to this attack. That thinker would then look past the causality to the results of this event. For instance, what happened to Japanese Americans following the attack? As a teacher, I have asked my students to look for parallels in today's world--for instance, our treatment of people of foreign descent following the 9/11 attacks. A memorize-and-regurgitate teacher stops with the event...so how does this help us to raise a new generation of leaders and innovators? It makes me wonder what kinds of history teachers our former president had. Were his teachers passionate about teaching, leading, and encouraging critical thinking or were they going through the motions while thinking about that weekend's football game?

Don't get me wrong, I'm okay with athletics, but only if the coaches put learning first. It's hard to do both well, I know, but I find it tragic that so many put sports first and students second. A football scholarship might get you into a great school but what happens when the real world steps in? There are no worksheets in college and movie days are few and far between. My son is in one of those classes and I do everything possible to enrich his learning at home. But what happens to the other 29 students in his class who go home to parents who have no interest in (or memory of) history? What kind of future will they have?