If I'm recalling correctly, wasn’t the History teacher in Harry Potter the very worst? While others at Hogwarts do all kinds of active learning with potions and spells, History is taught by a ghost droning on about long-forgotten events. I guess I wonder if there is something all too common about the Harry Potter portrayal of history/social science teachers.
The social sciences are so badly done at Orem High, it makes me cringe. It’s so easy to make kids interested and make it fun and fascinating! And our kids’ teachers just give hideous worksheets and boring lectures.
I'm thinking about this because I just taught a bunch of scouts social science and it was a rewarding, almost thrilling experience.
While I have been in leadership in Scouting/Young Men for most of my adult life, I think, I’ve never before taught a merit badge class at one of these Merit Badge powwows. I did the last two weeks. It was a pretty neat experience. I had two different groups of boys for a total of 3 hours each over the two weeks, which is a pretty reasonable amount of time. I did Citizenship in the World. During the first week, the Egypt crisis was just really breaking. I downloaded the NY Times photo essay to my computer and projected it on the wall using our department projector. And we looked at the photos and talked about what was going on and why. Then yesterday, we talked about it again with a new photo essay.
I’ve rarely been so pleased with teaching in my life. Between the first and second weeks, a bunch of them had turned into Egypt wonks! I mean, that’s a bit of overstatement. But when I timidly asked if they knew what had changed in Egypt during the last week, a bunch of them knew the basics! I was amazed. I had a mini-debate in one class about how cool the news was (somewhere between sometimes cool and always cool) and one kid downloaded the most recent update on Egypt on his phone from the NY Times and read us the first couple of paragraphs of a breaking news story on whether Mubaruk had resigned or not. Everyone was interested to know.
The images of protestors behind scrap metal barricades throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails are of course utterly compelling to boys. They asked interesting questions (why aren’t there any women among the protestors?), discussed some basics of Islam and were impressed by the piety (pausing to pray to Mecca), talked about what might motivate them to go do something like that (most argued lack of shelter/food/job rather than lack of freedom, when I had them try to make a choice), and commented on whether they would be brave enough to be on the front lines or not. We discussed the repercussions for them and they wondered if gas prices had already gone up as a result. I promised them they would. Of course, not everyone was equally conversant or interested, but a few were and it was fun.
And we talked about possible comparisons with the American Revolution. I showed some clips of the Boston Massacre Boston Tea Party, and Lexington and Concord from the History Channel. They looked a lot like some of the images from the Egypt protests.
I got my favorite comment (“Wow, this class was way better than I thought it would be.”) And have maybe decided to retire early from BYU and go teach high school.
But I'm curious: Did others find social science teaching comparatively weak in high school? I guess it wasn't at my own high school. I had very gifted teachers in that area. But I'm wondering now that I see Orem High.
