History is a conversation

History is a conversation, not a declaration, and anyone who says, "This is the Only One True Way to understand this event," is not doing history, but something else.

It is ironic that in all this fretting about how history is taught, students generally consider history to be the most pointless class they're asked to sit through. But we humans are hardwired to do history (even if we have trouble imagining that history didn't start when we were born). Let me use the analogy I used to use with my students.

Saturday night, at a big party, Pat and Sam have a big public fight, break up, stomp out of the party separately. Roughly five seconds later, the conversations start. What exactly happened? What caused it? What explains why it happened? Who's responsible for what happened? Which part of what we're hearing is reliable, which is second- or third-hand, and which is just stuff someone made up? What changed because it happened? How will this affect the way people act on Monday? What is the True Story of what happened?

There will be so many different answers to these questions. Pat's answers. Sam's answers. Their different sets of friends. People who have known them for a long time. It's possible that all these people will reach some sort of consensus about what happened; possible, but unlikely. And in the meantime, new tidbits may ripple through the conversation ("Did you know that Pat's folks were talking about divorce when the fight happened?" "Did you hear that Sam was developing a substance abuse problem?") New information will cause folks to re-evaluate information in retrospect. 

And if, for some reason, the Great Saturday Night Breakup Fight turns out to be a big enough deal that it sticks in people's memory (because part of the Conversation of History is "Does this thing merit being remembered and mulled over?"), as the various participants and witnesses age and learn and grow, they acquire new perspective. Fifteen years later, Pat may look back and think, "Yeah, I was just an ass back then," or Sam may look back and think, "Yeah, I just wasn't ready to talk about what I really wanted." The event may, over time, have harsh repercussions and harden into a bitter, angry turning point, or over time Pat and Sam may end up friends who remember it warmly as a small blip in their relationship. Turns out figuring out how to fit the chapter into a larger story is its own conversation. And some results may be unexpected; some stranger at the party may have seen the fight and determined that they would avoid any such event in their own life. Someone else may have seen something that every other observer missed.

Human beings are complex, and the ways in which we bump into each other are also complex and rich and, most importantly for this analogy, multi-dimensional, so that the conversation about a moment in human existence is never, ever settled. 

But, oh, how we love to settle it. We decide that This is the One True Story of What Happened, and (particularly if we use that story to help define ourselves) we may fight like hell against any different information, any different interpretations, any new perspectives. As much as we humans are driven to create a map of the world, we are equally driven to keep people from messing with it once it's built. We want the feeling of solid, settled history under our feet. We hate feeling it shift and tilt and move under us, and yet, we are doomed to either feel that shift or to expend a huge amount of energy to convince ourselves (and anyone who will listen) that it isn't shifting, that it shouldn't shift, that if it IS shifting that's because Nefarious Persons are messing with it with ill intent.

History is never settled. People who insist that schools should "just teach the facts" are arguing that we should take a steak, cut off the fat and the meat, wash off the juices, and let students lick the bone. It's like telling literature teachers that they should "just teach the words," but not the sentences they form. 

There's so much more to it, and that so much more is a conversation, a debate, a discussion, a search for other information, other perspectives. Ideologues and children are not very good at that kind of history, but it's the only kind worth doing. We are limited human beings, hemmed in by time and space and experience. We can never view any moment, any event, any slice of human experience in 360 degrees and infinite time, so we try and stretch the best we can. It's hard and one of those "strive toward a star you will never reach" things, but that's no excuse to try to reduce rich human history to a single simple story by denying the full depth and breadth of the thing. 

Education is about learning to become our best selves, to grasp what it is to be fully human in the world, and that means grappling with history--too big to hold in human hands or see with human eyes. A debate about whose One Single Truth should be taught is missing the point. Trying to reduce history (or education) to something small and simple is to cut away the important parts; we owe our students more than that. 

Speaking Of Indoctrination

The Board of Directors was excited when we arrived at the doctor's office because there, on the edge of the reception window, was a row of small figurines.

"Look! Paw Patrol!" they said happily. 

The thing is, we don't watch Paw Patrol. We barely watch tv at all, and what we watch is streamed ad free. And yet somehow, we know Paw Patrol. I've been through this before. My older children also rarely watched tv, and yet they knew who the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were. 

If you want to talk about indoctrinating children, let's talk about the hugely effective world of marketing. So effective that products leak through to children who don't even directly engage with the product or the typical marketing channels. Let's talk about how much money Coke, Pepsi, and the US Army spend to make themselves omnipresent in schools all across the country. Or even how parents themselves often slide into letting their kiddos get in on the latest cool cultural thing (just how many children watched the ultra-violent Squid Games). 

What all of these various indoctrinatin' influences have in common is that they are massive, well-financed, and coordinated so that the influence is coming at children (and adults, for that matter) from a hundred different directions, including both old media and new. 

Perhaps that's why folks who worry about indoctrination in schools like to imagine this vast web of communist teachers all connected and coordinated, a notion that is, to anyone who has actually worked with teachers, hilarious. Teachers did not agree on which candidate to support for President, or much of any other office. I suspect you'd be hard pressed to find a school building in this country in which all the staff agree on vaccinations or masking. And there is not a union local president in this country who would forcefully argue that union leadership is not at all like herding cats.

But sure-- some folks should go ahead and rail against a massive indoctrination conspiracy where none exists, while at the same time ignoring the ways a giant marketing machine tells your kids what they need to eat and drink and watch and buy to be happy. 

ICYMI: Good News Edition (11/14)

Happy to let you know that the twins have both tested negative for the Corona Pirates after their exposure to a positive classmate earlier this week. So that's a win. Now here's your reading for the week.

Learning Loss or Learning Found

A great real teacher view of the whole Learning Loss flap, by Sharon Murchie.

Stop Telling Students, "You Belong!"

At Education Week, Greg Walton offers an explanation for why telling students they belong might actually do more harm than good.

Teaching critical race theory is about liberating all of us

Rann Miller at The Progressive makes the case for having CRT influence your school's curriculum, and it starts with the most jaw-dropping quote you've read in a while.

"Helping kids of color to feel they belong has a negative effect on white, Christian, or conservative kids,” Mary Beeman, the campaign manager for a Republican school board candidate in Connecticut, said in October.

I'm a Teacher and I Feel Like I'm Failing My Students

Thomas Rademacher with one more piece about the morale problem eating at the heart of education these days.

Play is the most rigorous curriculum known to humankind

Teacher Tom with some insights about what is the best lesson for the littles.

Censorship and Book Burning: A Reader

Paul Thomas has assembled a batch of links to the most current raft of book banning stories in the US. Not encouraging, but handy.

Lost in the Hoarders' Closet

A very short post at Notes from the Educational Trenches, but an intriguing image nonetheless.

New Report Illuminates Constitutional Crisis in North Carolina's underfunded schools

In NC, there's been a battle going on between the courts, which want the state to live up to their constitutional mandate to fully fund education, and the legislature, which would rather not. Justin Parmenter looks at a new report that shows just how bad the situation has become.

Universal Preschool Cookie-cutter Pressure

Nancy Bailey takes a look at how early childhood education, including and especially Head Start, has turned into bad news for education and the littles.

How Edgenuity Ruined My Education

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider turns her blog over to one of her seniors, who has a few words to share about one brand of distance learning.

I'm adding a new feature this week which I suppose we can call "Stuff I Published Other Places" which is partly for my own benefit because I lose track of things. 

This week over at Forbes.com, I put up Charter Schools Fight for Their Right To Discriminate, which looks at two different charters--one in California and the other in Massachusetts, that are working hard to avoid being open to all students in their communities. Also this week was New Hampshire and Moms for Liberty Put Bounty On Teachers' Heads, which is about exactly that--M4L is backing the state's new gag law with a cash reward for the first person who manages to use the law to end some teacher's career. 

Current Pandemic Update (11/21)

So I was going to tell you how things are going in this neck of the woods. We get so many updates from major cities, I've figured all along that we might as well have updates from rural NW PA, an area that seemed, 20 months ago, to be well-positioned to weather this storm.

I was going to tell you that local schools are back to having spot outages. A class sent home to quarantine here, a building closed for a week there. Meanwhile, sports and dances and the usual stuff are going on semi-normally. Lets of things in the community are up and running again, some with huge amounts of caution and mitigation, and some not so much.

I was going to tell you that the already-thin substitute ranks are down to near-nothing. That when teachers miss, the dominoes fall all over the building trying to fill the gaps. That school bus routes are disrupted by that shortage (which, like the substitute thinning, has been coming for years). That school staff is getting covid. One known death so far. That school districts are dealing with it mostly by denying any responsibility ("You can't prove you contracted that at school") and, as a corollary to that, are requiring teachers to use their own sick days if they get the 'rona. 

I was going to talk about how the notification and tracking business is only marginally less ad hoc than last year, that we're still depending on the honor system and the word getting passed somehow by someone. 

The court just ruled that the state's department of health mask mandate for schools is void, but the final word is being held up for appeal, so districts are trying to get out the word that nothing has changed yet. Child vaccinations are under way, as are boosters (I've had mine; my wife, as a teacher, got one as soon as they were out). Just before they were supposed to get their boosters, my brother and sister-in-law were nailed by a breakthrough case of what the twins call the Corona Pirates; it was not fun, but they are fine. Pretty much everyone knows someone who has gotten either an unvaxxed or breakthrough case. Anecdotally, breakthrough is clearly less miserable.  

I was going to talk about how there's a sense that there's less above-ground discussion of the situation, but lots of undercurrent. No daily counts in the paper any more. Actually data remains hard to come by. Word is that the hospital is packed, mostly with unvaccinated cases.

I was going to talk about how that it all still remains concerning to we three children of my parents, who are in their mid-eighties and facing some of the challenges that come with being so well-seasoned, but are at least well-vaxxed. And how I also worry about my former colleagues and my wife, who are still leaping into this mess every day.

I was going to talk about all that today, and was prepping that very piece, when I got word that my two four-year-old boys apparently spent a day at pre-school earlier this week playing with another child who has since tested positive for covid. I certainly wish that things had worked out so that we got that information before we all went out to celebrate my mother's 88th birthday. Lots of levels of vaccination and masking and the power of youth suggest that we are probably all clear, but one never knows for certain, and I still have vivid memories of when Baby A's early brush with RSV earned us a life-flight trip to Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh. So now we'll spend some time anxiously monitoring every sneeze and cough and change in the already-normally-prolific river of snot and worrying about their ability to self-report symptoms. 

So I'm in a mood, and if you come at me with some of your bodily medical autonomy bluster or rantings about how wearing a small piece of cloth is an unacceptable intrusion on your liberty or how vaccinations are an unheard-of level of imposition on freedom or your Joe Rogan-style internet "research" or schools should be open because all children don't ever get it-- well, I'm generally pretty good at listening to folks with a wide variety of ideas, but I'm just tired and out of patience with your bullshit. 

[Update: Thanks to everyone who reached out to express concern. The twins were tested and cleared. My patience, however, remains at the same low level.]

PA: How's "Twenty Strong Men" vs. School Board Guy Doing?

Steve Lynch is a QAnon-quoting, insurrection-joining, Patriot Party-supporting, fully-Trumpified fitnes trainer who, you may recall, made a splash while running for Northampton County executive. He made a national splash by suggesting that the solution to all these Very Naughty School Boards was to take "twenty strong men" into the school board meeting and command the board to either resign or be put out.  

I'm going in with twenty strong men and I'm gonna give them an option--they can leave or they can be removed.

I wrote about him back in August. I am happy to report that Lynch lost his election bid. He lost it hard, by a margin of 8,000 votes in a 67,000 vote race. Though as one member of the public points out, it's discouraging that he go even 29,000 votes at all.

Lynch accepted his defeat with grace and dignity and respect for the democratic process he deeply loves. Ha! No, just kidding. He's not handling it well at all. 

Lynch and his supporters have been hanging out at the courthouse with the aim of monitoring the official ballot processing. That's because Lynch is pretty sure that skullduggery. Here's a Facebook video in which Lynch complains, among other things, that election integrity is "nonexistent." He's also in favor of throwing out votes that don't "follow the rules." He's also angry at people who do no research who didn't look at candidate's records. "How many of you voted for that other guy because you heard 'ooh, that Steve Lynch--he's an insurrectionist." Which, oddly enough, is actually his record. Also, he throws around some numbers about the votes that he thinks is wrong and says, "I don't know if this is some kind of liberal Common Core math," so that's funny. His point is that the election was fixed and corrupt, and in another post, he responds to people who think he's out of line:

This is for some of you knuckleheads that say "there's no proof of what you're saying that's going on inside this canvassing..." Newsflash, your county government that is run by this corrupt Administration won't let you do those things! This should be streamed in HD video at close proximity at every table that has canvassers so that We the People can see every ballot that they're going through. But they aren't letting you do that so we're exposing everything for you as it's happening. Until you're willing to get off your lazy rear end and get down to the courthouse to look at it for yourself keep your mouth shut! You are speaking out of pure ignorance and no one's interested in your opinion because it holds absolutely no water! We the People are so done with your blatant disregard to getting to the truth! Facts over feelings!

It's a nice portrayal of small time Trumpism. We represent You People, but also, you suck because you won't come down and support us. And you're ignorant. But We the People are done with You People. Also, facts matter more than feelings, unless they are facts we don't like and feelings that are ours, in which case my feeling that the facts of the election are wrong are what matter, you stupid lazy people that I represent.

I'm not just here for the schadenfreude. Lynch is a small demonstration of the challenge of dealing with Trumpism. First, it's clearly not conservatism, though it likes to pretend to be. Second, it is about taking power. Taking power through an election is the first resort, but if that doesn't work, just keep pushing for other routes, all the way to gathering twenty strong men and just taking it by force. Don't imagine that guys with Lynch can ever be convinced by facts or reality or well-reasoned arguments. 

Maybe Everyone Doesn't Think Schools Suck

Does it seem as if the Anti crowd-- the one demanding that schools re-open, that masks be discarded, that discussions of race be shut down, that the unions are trying to indoctrinate children, that school board members need to be intimidated--does it seem as if they are a large group, a rising wave that represents the majority?

Maybe not.

A new Axios-Ipsos poll indicates that US adults mostly think that local schools have done a good job with this mess.

There's not really a lot of surprise here. It has always been a routine finding that people think their own schools are just fine, while it's that darn national system that's in trouble. Years and years and years of insistence has convinced people that US schools are failing, but that continued drumbeat can't quite drown out their actual experience with their own school.

Same thing here. Note that non-parents have less confidence in how schools managed the pandemic than actual parents. Even two thirds of the Republicans show some support for how schools have handled the pandemess. Though it's also worth noting that the support is mostly lukewarm.

There were other results not included in the chart that are also worth noting.

The biggest opinion break came down to age, with respondents older than 65 the most supportive (78% good) and those under 30 the least supportive (62% good).

If I were a political strategist, I would look at that wide band of lukewarm support and see folks that could be moved. I would imagine that if I made a large enough, loud enough noise, I could herd them in the direction of my choosing. I would see a block of people who could be lost by a boneheaded move by a public school--either a real one, or a carefully amplified one.

So this survey (which like all surveys must be taken with a block of salt) is both good news and a cautionary piece of information. 

ICYMI: Project Time Edition (11/7)

 Here at the Institute we have a project brewing, and it's taking some actual time to prepare. But I still collected some reading for you this week.

Why my book has been removed from school shelves

An LA Times op-ed from Christopher Noxon, author of Good Trouble: Lessons from the Civil Rights Playbook, which has drawn some attention in Virginia for being about, you know, Black stuff. 

Loraine Superintendent deemed a hero

A fairly encouraging story in a dreary week, not the least because here's a superintendent who regularly drives the school bus.

Moms for Liberty- Williamson County is a hell of conspiracy theories and petty complaints

There's a new blogger in Tennessee, and he went and signed himself up as a member of MFL so he could see what he could see on the inside. Turns out it's not encouraging.

The demoralization of the American teacher

I'm not agreeing with all of this piece by Shane Trotter in Quillette, but it's still a good read with some worthwhile observations.

Self-care versus Sustainable Leadership

You should be reading Nancy Flanagan regularly anyway, but I'll just keep recommending her stuff. 

Virginia was not about education...but Democrats need to be.

Mitchell Robinson at Eclectablog directs some righteous anger at the Democrats and their continued failure to stand up for public ed.

Youngkin's campaign was about something sinister

Jan Resseger offers an analysis of the ugly subtext of the new governor's campaign

When should racism be taught in schools

CBS actually caught so much grief over this terrible headline that they have since changed it. But the article that comes with it is a pretty good look at CRT panic.

PA school funding on trial

Later this week, a trial will kick off challenging Pennsylvania's lousy funding system. This is a good explainer of what the big deal is.

Anti-Hillary group rebranded as anti-CRT group

CNBC has the story of 1776 PAC, which turns out to be an old anti group with a new mission.

This is a story about milk, but also about what happens when the press doesn't do its job.

This is a great piece from Parker Molloy, spinning off the CNN coverage of milk prices this weekend (don't worry--if you missed that mess, the article brings you up to speed) but also about what happens when the press lets people go on being angry about things that haven't actually happened.