Tag Archives: Teaching History

Trauma-Informed Teaching in Native American History

November 17, 2023 admin Leave a comment

In conversations with colleagues across the country at the American Society for Ethnohistory meeting in Tallahassee, one thing we all agreed on was that our students seem to be reading less, and reading less closely. Participation in class discussions had declined, as had attendance. I was disappointed in myself in that I had not succeeded in breaking through, in getting students to engage with the material and do the reading, but I was reassured, I guess, that I as not alone. Still, I had to try something new.

It went really, really well.

We were discussing some particularly brutal stories from the Plains Wars during the Civil War Years, beginning with the Dakota Uprising in Minnesota and closing with the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado. They could read about both events in Native America, but I wanted them to go deeper into the material. I recently read a fantastic article by historian and artist Taylor Spence called “Rethinking the Colonial Encounter in the Age of Trauma.” He is a great historian. His essay appeared in a really useful volume entitled The Routledge Companion to Global Indigenous History. Both the article and the book are well-worth your time. Spence suggested to me a new way to teach this subject, a trauma-informed approach that could lead students to feel deeply the impact of the events they were reading about. Following Spence’s lead, I assigned them Waziyatawin’s “Grandmother to Granddaughter: Generations of Oral History in a Dakota Family,” which appeared in the American Indian Quarterly back in 1996. Waziyatawin (Angela Cavender Wilson) wrote a searing piece of family history. I suggest you try it in your courses.

Waziyatawin’s grandmother, Elsie Cavender, had received a story from her grandmother that she shared late in life. She told Waziyatawin of the family’s forced march after the Dakota Uprising, and how soldiers, in an act of irrational and senseless violence, murdered Elsie’s great-great-grandmother. It’s a brief essay, and Elsie Cavender’s account is roughly a page and a half. I asked my students to tell me what happened. They gave me a competent summary of the story. The Dakotas were marching towards imprisonment at Fort Snelling. They confronted white people in towns “where the people were real hostile to them.” They white people threw rocks, and poured scalding water on them. They camped at night, living on rotten provisions provided by the army. They marched onward. They moved too slowly. The soldiers grew angry, and stabbed Elsie’s Grandmother’s grandmother with a saber. She bled to death on a bridge. When her family returned later, the body was gone, but they saw dried blood on the wooden planks.

I told the students I wanted more. Go deeper. Summarizing what you read, after all, is no great achievement. Spence suggested that the students attempt to imagine deeply what it would have been like to be present when those soldiers murdered an elderly woman for no reason at all. So I told them to think of their senses. If they were on the bridge where the killing took place that day, what would they have seen, heard, smelled, tasted or felt?

My students jumped into the assignment. You would smell the rotten provisions the soldiers distributed, one student observed. The relentlessly irritating sound of the squeaky wagon wheel, another pointed out. They would have heard that. The dust, the sight and smell and sound of the cattle would have been difficult to miss. They were rolling now, but they were staying away from the violence. It took them a bit, but they got there. The soldiers’ profanities, their angry, barking orders in a language the Lakotas did not understand; the screams in response to unbelievable and senseless violence; the blood pouring from a mortal wound.

We had spoken early that day about the reliability of oral testimony as evidence. One student predictably and appropriately suggested that it might be like the old game of Telephone, as a story changes as it is passed from one hearer to another. But think of each of the sensory events you just identified, I told the students. I asked them to think of their earliest memories. What made those memories particularly powerful? Each of them, individually, affected the senses in a memorable fashion. Each was easily capable of etching itself into the minds of successive generations of storytellers. The events that Waziyatawin recalled for us, I suggested, were of the sort that would not be easily forgotten.

We are not supposed to teach history in a way that makes our students feel bad about who or what they are. We should not make them feel guilty or uncomfortable about the past. That is what lawmakers in a growing number of red states have demanded. They have proscribed the teaching of certain topics. They have singled out the 1619 Project, and the histories of slavery, and racism, as topics that should not be taught in ways that make white people feel uncomfortable. These right-wing politicians have said much less about Native American history, but clearly they would be bothered by things I teach in my classes: the Paxton Boys, for instance, or the massacre at Gnadenhutten. These politicians are calling for an education fit for sociopaths. They want students to feel nothing but love of country.

My students felt badly about the history they read that day. Again, some of them had tears in their eyes. When they read Silas Soule’s account of Sand Creek, in which he describes the mutilation of dead Cheyenne and Arapaho women and children, well, they felt this as well.

But here’s the thing. They felt badly, to be sure, but they did not feel ashamed of their race. They did not feel guilty or responsible for the crimes of the past. This is what the Republican dingbats miss. My students felt connected to people very different from them who lived a century and a half ago. They understood the meaning a past event at a much deeper level than they may have done previously, and the emotions were heavy indeed. They grieved. They had, I would argue, learned a lot. I sent a message to Dr. Spence to tell him how well his class exercise went, how much my students learned, and how thankful I was for his good work.

Let’s say you are walking down a crowded city street. Your foot catches a person walking in front of you, and they trip and almost fall. Without thinking, if you are a decent person, you apologize. You are not debasing yourself when you do this. You worried that you might have hurt somebody, that they could have fallen and been injured. It’s not about you. You apologize because you are not a dick, because you care about other people, because you worry that your actions could have caused for someone pain or sorrow. You say you are sorry because you felt sorrow.

I have thought about this a lot when I teach. Why do we say sorry? I want my students to appreciate the past on its own terms, to feel a connection to the people they read about. The students in my class obviously could not undo the past. They could not apologize or express their sorrow to the Dakota woman murdered on that bridge. But they did understand something at a deeper level than they might otherwise have done, and that made them wiser and more capable of understanding other people. They felt empathy. And they cared about this particular piece of the past more deeply that they would have done if I had merely told them about the Dakota Uprising and Sand Creek. They may not remember much of my class a couple of years from now but I am confident that they will remember this.

Current Events

Do You Need to Worry about AI?

January 18, 2023 admin Leave a comment

“The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.”

I do not think we need to freak out about Chat GPT, not yet anyways. I write these words as one who can not explain how this particular artificial intelligence system operates. I also do so as a teacher who long has been critical of those of my historian sisters and brothers who give to their students the same rote assignments year after year. If you are one of those unimaginative teachers, well, you may in fact be toast. A student who uses Chat GPT to respond to an essay prompt asking her to explain the meaning of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” for instance, will be able to produce a very nice essay that I expect will easily surpass your very low standards.

I have been reading about Chat GPT for the past several weeks. I listened to an hour-long radio show on the local NPR affiliate that explored the question of how menacing this technology might be for educators. I understand that experts in information technology who know more about these systems than I ever will are deeply concerned. So let me tell you where I am coming from, so you can decide if you want to read any further.

The vast, vast, majority of students, I believe, are honest. The vast majority of students want to have a positive experience in the classroom. They want to learn, even in those classes they are compelled to take to fulfill a requirement that may have nothing to do with their major. I believe, as well, that the small number of students who cheat do so when they are bored and uninspired, because they lack confidence in their ability to do the coursework well, or because they are so stressed out that they do something dumb out of desperation. In each of these instances, I believe, the instructor bears some significant responsibility for the student’s cheating:

she or he failed to engage the students, to convince them that the subject he or she taught was worth learning about and that the students had thoughts and ideas worth sharing, even when the work was extremely challenging;
she or he failed to convince the students that they had the ability to do the assigned work, whatever self-doubts that student felt, or to offer the student the sort of assistance needed to successfully complete the assignment;
or because she or he failed to pick up the vibes in the room, which are not at all difficult to discern for instructors who teach with their eyes, ears, and hearts open.

So I played around with Chat GPT. I understand that the technology learns and improves over time. That may be so. I fed into the system three different assignments that students in my classes might complete. In the first, I asked it to write a short reaction to the Supreme Court case of Oliphant v. Suquamish (1978). This is a topic students enrolled in my Indigenous Law and Public Policy course might choose for their journals. I next asked Chat GPT to write an essay explaining the disappearance of the Lost Colonists at Roanoke, a topic about which I have some strong feelings that you can read about in The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand. Finally, I asked it to write an essay on the historical significance of the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, the subject of a book I published in 2015.

Chat GPT produced answers that were competently written. The grammar, word use, sentence structure, and paragraph coherence all are better than what many of my students are capable of producing. I suspect that the gap between a student’s conversational and written English would be readily apparent as a “tell” that a student has used an AI program, just as it is for older, more low-tech, types of plagiarism.

The entry for Oliphant was factually correct and covered most of the major points in the case. But it was also devoid of analysis and so absent of feeling about this destructive case that the essay felt flat. It did not quote the decision, nor did it provide any citations.

I felt the same way about the essay on the fate of the Lost Colonists. One possible explanation is this, the essay reads. Another explanation is that. A third explanation posits something different, and yet another says something else entirely. Each of the four explanation has been advanced by a scholar. Each of the explanation is plausible. What Chat GPT failed to do, however, was provide compelling analysis and argument. There is no stewing over difficult documents here, or wrestling with ambiguous evidence. When I make assignments, I do not ask students to come up with a list of likely explanations derived from secondary sources. If you are like me, you ask them to wade into the documents, to ask questions, and offer an explanation supported by primary sources. Good historians will quote those sources as they attempt to make their case successfully. We make arguments, not lists. We also expect students to cite fully and frequently. Chat GPT does none of these things.

The essay on Canandaigua was surprisingly bad. Significant factual errors occurred. Redundant paragraphs made the same point over and over with slightly different wording. No quotes from primary sources, and no citations were present. A student using Chat GPT to write a historical research paper will be caught by all but the most inattentive instructor.

Perhaps I am too sanguine. Chat GPT, as I understand it, will learn and become more proficient. Perhaps students will use it as a crutch, as an outline generator, to which they will add bits and pieces of appropriate material to allow the papers they generate to look and sound like student work connected to a specific classroom context. There is nothing to stop a student from throwing in a couple of quotes from other readings to give the paper a veneer of having been researched. All of these things could happen. If you ask students to do work in stages, to submit outlines and drafts, I still expect that you will make it very difficult for students to use Chat GPT.

Look, I find what I teach very interesting. I like to share it with students. I am interested in all sorts of questions about the past. If I cannot inspire my students to take an interest in the subjects that I am teaching and that I have devoted much of my life to studying, or if I fail to convince them that it is important, that is my failure alone. I am failing as a teacher. Almost all students–and I truly believe this–want to learn. They want to be turned on by an idea. They want to benefit from the classes they take. Even the quietest student in class has something of value to say.

Please, teachers, do not look at your students as potential cheats who you must constantly surveil. Will some students attempt to cheat? Will some of them engage in plagiarism? Yes, I suppose some might, if you let them. Good teachers, who are interested in their students, who engage with them in the process of learning, and convince them of the importance of what they teach, have little to worry about.

Current Events, History and Historians

I Watched The White House Conference on American History So You Don’t Have To

September 20, 2020 admin 5 Comments

In his comments at the close of the White House Conference on American History, a gathering that did not take place at the White House and that included few historians, President Donald Trump offered a chilling vision that is one more sign of the country’s steady advance towards despotism.

Trump wanted to “preserve our glorious inheritance: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights,” though nothing has threatened them so much as his administration. The Constitution, he said, “was the fulfillment of a thousand years of Western Civilization,” and “no political document has done more to advance the human condition or propel the engine of progress.” So he said.

Only enemies of the American state would disagree with him. He denounced “a radical movement” that “is attempting to demolish this treasured and precious inheritance.” These enemies of the American people have demolished statutes of slaveholders, that they have engaged in protests and riots. “The left-wing cultural revolution” visible everywhere, he said, “is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.”

He denounced Howard Zinn, whose forty-year old People’s History of the United States terrifies the right. Zinn has lived rent-free in the minds of think-tank denizens like panelist Mary Grabar for many, many years. Zinn, Trump said, wrote a “propaganda tract” that tries “to make students ashamed of their own history.” The 1619 Project, meanwhile, “rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principles of oppression, not freedom.”

Those pushing these views are disloyal. Trump said that. Like America’s enemies, they “want to see American weakened, derided, and totally diminished.” Teaching “critical race theory” to our children, he continued, “is a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words.” Thus “Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together.” These ideas are so dangerous, in other words, that they must be suppressed. They are poisonous and they must be rooted out and eliminated. Indeed, the President boasted of having “recently banned training in this prejudiced ideology from the federal government.” We will reeducate those exposed to these subversive ideas.

The panelists, mostly white men speaking at a panel organized by the President of the United States at the National Archives, played variations on this theme. There was absolutely nothing new here. They could have plugged in the National History Standards in the place of the 1619 Project, and it would have been a 1990s flashback, or “multiculturalism” for 80’s Night. With no sense of irony these well-compensated denizens of Right Wing Think Tanks and ideologically-connected Colleges lamented their marginalization. And, one by one, they expressed their fear of ideas, taught by historians, that they know they cannot refute. It was a disgraceful affair, capped by the President signing an unconstitutional executive order establishing the “1776 Commission” to indoctrinate American children with “patriotic” values. Because he is afraid of them being indoctrinated.

I know many friends who have laughed at this President’s many monstrosities, but we are not laughing any more. This is dangerous. It is no joke.

When I hear how colonists wiped out close to 70% of the Indigenous population of the Americas and dispossessed them almost entirely, I do not believe that the country was founded on principles of liberty and equality. When I figure that more than 2/3 of the people who crossed the Atlantic to come to English America between 1630 and 1780 came in chains, liberty and freedom do not compute. When I remember that nearly 50% of enslaved children born in Virginia died before their fifth birthday, and that the United States abolished slavery only after a bloody Civil War and after our former imperial overlords in Great Britain, it does not seem to me that freedom and equality are cardinal American values, whatever we say about ourselves. When I realize that in the very same speech in which the President claimed the country was founded on such glorious principles he denounced those who want to take down monuments to white supremacy and congratulated himself on the punishments he has decreed through an unconstitutional executive order for those who damage them, all I see is hypocrisy and the emptiness of his arguments. I walk away from this still convinced that the widely held notion that this country was founded on principles of liberty and equality is the biggest lie in American history.

We can hardly expect a country founded by those who enslaved millions to have done otherwise than to create a republic based on white supremacy. And when I hear so-called historians, like some of those gathered at the President’s Conference on American History, claim that the Revolution is unfinished, that we are still engaged in the work of crafting that “more perfect union,” I am left unmoved. We have been at this for close to two-and-a-half centuries, I might point out. How much longer will it take for you to admit that our commitment to liberty and equality may be highly qualified at best?

The biggest lie in American History has been challenged in all sorts of ways. Historians, like those involved in the 1619 Project, have done so. And so have so many of the young people protesting out in the street.

The response of these “historians,” for few of them actually had any training in history, is not to engage with the evidence or to present interpretations of their own rooted in primary source research. Rather, they challenge the patriotism of those who write these histories, and who question “these truths.” You cannot possibly love the country if you believe these things, they say, and your thoughts are so dangerous that they must be suppressed.

At one level, there is nothing new about any of this. History has always been political. I think of the debates chronicled in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream years ago. I remember reading of the treatment received by Charles Beard after he published his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. Much of what Trump’s chosen panelists said about Howard Zinn’s People’s History and the 1619 Project was said about the National History Standards twenty-five years ago. History as academic discipline versus history as civic education and indoctrination; history as a scholarly pursuit versus a set of comforting myths we tell ourselves about our past; history as a method for studying change over time versus history as a dogma, the challenging of which is dangerous and subversive: it has all been done before.

So the arguments presented at the White House Conference were all pretty familiar. I have been at this for a while, and I have followed the “History Wars” over many years with great attention. I have seen this before. The notion that historians are unpatriotic, that they will destroy their students’ love of country, and that they are teaching kids to be ashamed of their nation’s past, has been repeated many, many times. But what strikes me as new, this time, is the stridency with which the President and the speakers at this conference cast their opponents not merely as historians with whom they disagree about the past but as enemies of the state. They advance a coward’s ideological purity that casts historians as dangerous subversives. The President likened them to child abusers, aligned with leftists, anarchists, and socialists. Oh, they are so frightened. And they will strike those who frighten them. This long ago ceased to be funny, and is one more reminder of how much is at stake in the coming election.

Liberal Arts

This Is Not A Lament

April 10, 2019 admin 2 Comments

We all know that we live in tough times. A number of small, private, liberal arts colleges have gone belly up, a product of mismanagement, declining enrollment, or a combination of the two. Funding for public higher education is either flat or falling, and some schools have dramatically cut back on programs. Western Kentucky University, for instance, recently announced an end to 101 academic programs. Faculty members do more with less.

Demographic changes, meanwhile, have made their impact felt, as colleges compete for a declining number of prospective first-year students. Institutions with deep pockets and strong reputations are able to offer generous packages of financial assistance, while state colleges and smaller private institutions struggle to keep up. Adjunct faculty do an increasing amount of the actual teaching at institutions across the spectrum, and universities seldom replace departed faculty members in uncertain times. I may be part of the last generation of tenured professors.

Perhaps predictably, this sorry state of affairs has produced some soul-searching. Some commentators or critics have explained that the current crisis is the fault of the academy itself. The demographic trends could have been visible to anyone who looked, they argue. At the same time, professors, more interested in pursuing their overly-narrow research interests, do not put adequate time into their teaching. This hyper-specialization spills over into the classes they offer. Quite simply, colleges are not offering classes that students want to take. Try to find a military or diplomatic history course, they say, and you will search for a long time. Maybe professors would be better off teaching relevant courses for their students than dunking on buffoons like Dinesh D’Souza.

Please.

Can we give it a rest?

Of course, there are serious problems in higher education. I do not want to dismiss the seriousness of the crisis.

But let’s not blame the liberal arts or their practitioners, and let’s not look to their alteration, diminution, or elimination as a solution to the deep structural problems afflicting the academy. At SUNY-Geneseo, where I teach, the number of majors in our history program has increased in each of the last three years. Our liberal arts programs are healthy and vibrant.

There are a couple of reasons for this. We have outstanding teachers in our department, and we encourage faculty to pursue their interests, to share their passions with their students. Instead of requiring old-school survey courses in United States history and Western Civilization, a tired model if ever there was one, we emphasize the discipline of history. We study continuity and change, measured across time and space, in peoples, institutions and cultures. We teach students to formulate questions, to answer them in a manner that is honest, thorough, and disciplined, and to write with grace and style. We offer no courses in military history, it is true, but we offer courses that our students find relevant and important and that teach students the skills of the historical discipline. They learn to work with facts, evidence and explanation. They study the history of everyday life, histories written from the “bottom-up,” and histories of groups traditionally underrepresented in other historical accounts. They want histories shorn of the patriotism and myth that they see as characterizing parts of their high school experience. But they study as well the classics. They read widely and they read deeply.

Many of us are active researchers still, and our scholarship informs our teaching. Some of us focus on topics that are narrower than others, but we are working, exploring, asking questions, and examining our own assumptions as we examine the evidence. We bring this research into the classroom. We deploy a variety of teaching styles. Some of us lecture. Some emphasize discussion and form our students into groups to analyze the reading. Most of us do both. Over the years, I have sat in on discussion classes where little has been accomplished, and others where the resulting conversations were so stimulating that my mind raced for the rest of the day. I have sat in on lecture courses as a student that bored me to tears. And I attended lectures that changed my life.

If you were young once, you might remember how an idea could turn you on, how a topic about which you knew nothing could consume you, and inspire you to dig deeply for more knowledge. Students hunger for knowledge. They want to think big thoughts, ask and answer important questions, examine the contours of their own existence. They want to learn the skills of their particular discipline, yes, but many also want to talk about meaningful citizenship. They want to understand the world they live in and the people in it, and how to make their world a better place.

There are scholars who write on “narrow” topics, to be sure. Some publish and present their work to small groups of like-minded scholars. There are writers in the liberal arts whose writing is difficult and jargon-filled. But there are others whose work is accessible, urgent, and available. They write about subjects of immense importance, and they do so with energy and style. Their work sheds light on the human condition, and they share their work widely with readers and with their students. They may not write about war, politics, or diplomacy, but they explore what it is to be human, to live in community with others, and how we got here. Those who read their work find it powerful and important.

Students love their courses in history.

In our current political climate, however, they hear from politicians and policy-makers that to be educated is to have a job, and that little else matters. The president, his party, and their propagandists dismiss the value of the life of the mind. They dismiss the liberal arts as elitist, or as dominated by topics that are “politically correct,” largely because they distrust the democratizing potential of free inquiry, and resent the calls for justice that lie at its core. Professors should teach the facts, they say, and they should not indoctrinate their students. They express that fear frequently. They worry about freedom of expression and freedom of speech on college campuses, but what they really fear is open debate and the discussion of topics that challenge their assumptions. When we ask students to consider the meanings of freedom, equality, and power, to explore the inconsistent relationship between law and justice, and to examine the yawning gap between our reality and our ideals, between the way things are and the way things ought to be, they see a threat. They fail to understand how it is essential to a thriving republic for citizens to ask these deep, probing questions. They fear the questions and those who ask them.

We who teach these subjects must push back against this style of thought. We can talk about how liberal arts students will find work, about how they make decent money, and how students need to be adaptable because today’s students will likely be doing many jobs that do not even exist. Many have made the point about the economic value of the liberal arts. But there is a larger, cultural force against which we contend. Anti-intellectualism and resentment against the privilege that colleges and universities seem to represent are powerful forces. It will not be easy, but it is essential, that we engage those who hold these views. We are, after all, educators. And our most important job, in addition to teaching the students in front of us, may be to explain to a skeptical public the importance of the work we do, and how wrestling with big ideas is necessary not only for meaningful citizenship, but for a richer life.

History and Historians, Liberal Arts

Hey, Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone!

April 13, 2017 admin Leave a comment

We’ve come to that point in the semester where I begin to see on Twitter and on Facebook and elsewhere “bloopers,” students’ answers to questions on their midterms or finals that are so wrong that their professors or teachers find them funny.

I would urge you to think twice before you post things like this, for those student bloopers may reflect more poorly on you as a teacher than it does upon the young people enrolled in your courses.

When I began my teaching career back in the mid-1990s, my first tenure-track job, I shared space in a department with two former “Jeopardy” champions Our offices were small, and a packed in closely along a strip of contorted hallway on the eighth floor of the college’s Liberal Arts building. I could overhear the conversations in other offices. And I can remember one of those Jeopardy champions meeting with a student during office hours to review for an upcoming test.

“Abraham Lincoln’s first vice-president was?” I can remember him asking.

Dead silence. Nothing. The poor student did not have a clue.

“Hannibal Hamlin,” my colleague said.

“Oh.”

And so it went. And nowhere, in any of this, did the most important question of all appear: Who cares? So what? Why should I, some kid enrolled in a general education course I have to take to complete my requirements, care about Hannibal Hamlin? In what ways did he, or his vice-presidency, matter? My colleagues tested students on how well they could memorize facts that, by themselves, meant little, and mattered less.

There was in that department as well a Missouri Synod Lutheran Pastor, who divided his time between his church and the department, and who used to brag that being a college professor was “the best part-time job in the world.” He gave his students multiple choice exams, with one of the choices a joke, a crazy answer that he liked to think was funny. He liked to share his exams with me. He thought they were funny in the way that people who do not know how to tell jokes think things are funny. When his students chose, for example, “D: A Heavy-Metal band” as an answer to the question, “What was the Black Death?” he would laugh at their lack of knowledge. He couldn’t believe, he said, that the students would fallen for this and he would shake his head in dismay at their ignorance. “Kids these days,” he may as well have said.

No, I thought. You have it all wrong. Both of my colleagues had it wrong. It was possible, it seemed to me, that students do not know who Hannibal Hamlin is because you did not convince them that this individual mattered, that he lived a life that they ought to know something about. Or that the lectures and the notes and the memorization of facts, or the mammoth textbook you assigned, sucked all the life out of a subject that is so inherently interesting when taught with passion, planning, and attention. Or, perhaps, they may have chosen to identify the Black Death as a metal band because you failed to convey to them the significance of this event. You may not have interested them in the topic. The students may not have cared about what you told them. That is sad. They may not have cared about you.

I cannot criticize students for this. I encourage my students, as they read the books I assign, or listen to our discussions, to ask themselves and to ask me, “So What?” If I cannot handle that challenge, then I am not fit for this line of work.

I have been teaching a long time. I have worked with some truly wonderful colleagues, committed, dedicated, and creative teachers. But there are those who quiz their students, to keep them honest, to give them an incentive to do the reading that these instructors believe they would not otherwise do. Others offer exams that serve no purpose other than to demonstrate what students do not know or, perhaps, what the instructor failed to teach them.

I hated exams when I was a student. It was not because I did not want to work. I loved history. Even before I declared it as my major. I loved the work in the library, and the reading, and the discussions. I can remember the first primary source from the library’s special collections that I held in my hands, a pamphlet written by the interesting Pennsylvania loyalist Joseph Galloway. It is important for those of us who teach to remember what drew us to this field in the first place. Every historian I know is a voracious reader. Yet I know of no historian who reads for enjoyment a textbook. But I prepared for the exams. They caused me stress. I memorized what I was expected to memorize. I saw students who knew the material as well as I did at a conceptual level choke, or have a bad day. And I know that I never learned a single thing taking an in-class examination.

Instead of trying to find out, in effect, what our students do not know, it might be better to assess them in a way that allows them to show what they do know, and to demonstrate how thoughtful and creative and worth listening to that they actually are. One of the greatest parts of this job is the opportunity it provides me to be inspired by and learn from my students’ insights.

In my nineteen years at Geneseo, I have never given an in-class exam. I have never used a scan-tron form or a blue-book. I give students take home projects, short papers, really, and give them a week or more to work on them. Some of the questions that will be appearing soon on the Resources page of this website are ones I ask my students in the Native American survey course. In my humanities course, in which the students read works from Antigone to Hamlet, I pose for them big questions. Recently, for instance, I asked the students to reflect on Roger Rosenblatt’s essay that appeared in the Atlantic last year, an essay I have remarked upon for this blog in the past. It is a harrowing depiction of the capacity of human beings for evil and violence, but also about the possibility that beauty, and love, might survive even our darkest moments.

The strongest essays show me students who are thinking deeply, wrestling with huge questions, and who are striving to understand the great works that they have read. I can see from the essays that the students took the assignment seriously, and I can see not only that the books I assigned mattered, but how they mattered. I think back to the best of these answers often. I think of the non-traditional student, a bit older than his classmates, coming back to make another try at college after spending time with the Army in Iraq. I have mentioned him in this blog before. I could see him working through his wartime experiences as he wrestled not only Rosenblatt’s observations, but with Thucydides’ admonition that “war is a violent teacher” and the call in the Gospels not only to love our neighbors, but our enemies as well. Or the student, a volunteer in a hospice, now on her third or fourth major, fighting her own demons as she wrote an essay that moved me to tears. Or the guy from some part of Francophone Africa, arrived in nearby Rochester through one of the refugee resettlement programs, who described the slaughter of his own family as he struggled to understand what was worth fighting for, dying for, and perhaps killing for. And the kids with the more comfortable or conventional backgrounds, who are turned on by a text, whether Augustine’s own struggles to define who he was as a young man, or Antigone’s decision to resist an unjust law, or Cicero’s command that the man of virtue must serve the commonwealth, even when that service offered the frightening prospect of criticism or condemnation.

My point is that I learn a lot from these essays, and I am a guy who still has much to learn. I rethink my own beliefs and assumptions about the texts I assign based on what my students write. I reconsider how I teach them. I see in them things I had not seen before. I learn.

If this is not your experience, and if you are one of those professors out there who likes to post student bloopers on Facebook or Twitter, or even if your default position is one where you assume that the kids know little and care less, I would urge you take a good, long, look in the mirror. I love history. If you are bothering to read this, there is a good chance you do, too. Many of our students have been taught by over-worked and underpaid teachers, racing to cover as much material as their states require for their students to be able to pass whatever standardized test awaits them at the end of the year. I have watched my own kids as they take their high school history classes. Watching them work through their assignments–the busy work and regurgitation and memorization–I would not blame them for a second if they did not like history as a subject. In my mind, it is not at all unreasonable for these students to expect us to sell them on the significance of what we do, on why it all matters. We should not shy away from this challenge. And if you are concerned by your students’ shaky grasp of the facts, or bothered that they do not know things “that every informed citizen should know,” you might be asking the wrong questions. Before you laugh, consider what you are doing. Facts are important, but they are only the most basic building blocks of history, and they have little value without creativity, interpretation, and imagination.

And here’s a final point. When you laugh at student bloopers, you come off as smug, arrogant, and a bit of a prick. I doubt you would laugh about that student’s answer with that student sitting right in front of you. Teaching matters. It is hard work. It takes great effort to do it well. The failure of your students might be, at least in part, a failing on your part as a teacher.

Native America: A History