Class idea: current events

I want to talk about current events class. You may have a current events class in your class right now. Maybe it works something like this you tell every student to bring in an article, that deals with some current subject in the news, and then you spend — or more likely waste — an entire class, talking about the various articles. Does that sound familiar?

Try something different. Ask each kid to bring in an article, but set it up a little bit beforehand. Create a box. In the box put a number of slips of paper, each of which has a region of the world or a region of the news to report on. Make sure that none of the categories are something silly, like movies or sports. Sports news is interesting, but it doesn’t shape the world nearly as much as economics or politics — things that our kids generally avoid. And although sometimes major sports events shape public policy, it’s much better for kids to become invested in political and economic news. Unfortunately many kids are not particularly interested in this kind of news…

How to get them involved?

This is what I’ve decided to do with my own class. I have such a box. In the box are about 20 slips of paper, each of which has the name of a major region of the world written on it. The categories include subjects like: the Middle East, South America, North America, Africa, European Union, Great Britain, Asia, Australia, India, Russia, and China. There are also bits of American domestic news included in the box: things like economics, business, technology, science, culture, plus the Northeast, the South, the midwest and northwest….

Every week on Thursday I assign each group of students to a “desk”. The desk is not actually a physical desk in the classroom, but an area of concern. They get an entire week to find two or three important headlines from that region of the world or that area of American domestic news. The following Thursday, a week after getting the assignment, our class comes together. One of my American history sections plays the role of the United States department of defense. The other section gets to be the US department of state. And yes, they ask each other questions – and yes, they are allowed to lie.

After every story, I asked the students what their department should do about it. Sometimes they decide to ask for more information from the other class. This involves sending a memo to the relevant department — either state to defense, or defense to state. The result is that the two classes are asking questions to one another about the business of the nation.

The second thing that they got to do, is make a “recommendation to the president.” Recommendations to the president get posted on index cards on that narrow strip of bulletin board above the whiteboard in my classroom… you have one too; I’m sure it’s useless. Except its going to fill up with advice to the president…

Someone in class today asked me, “Mr. Watt, who gets to play the president? You?”

I replied, “well, Mr. Obama is the president. “And then I explain, that Mr. Obama gets to be the president. (Maybe Romney will replace him, but it doesn’t seem likely) Meeting, that the president actually has to make decisions, and those decisions are based on the real news. And the president has to make decisions based on the recommendations of the Department of Defense, and the Department of State.

Do you see where this is going? By posting our recommendations to the president, our classes get to see exactly what it is that the president does and what advice he must have gotten from the people that report to him, and advise him. So, my students also get to see how decisions are actually made in the real world, and compare their own results with a public decision-maker’s actions. They get ro be part of a decision tree, not all of ir.

Presidents receive information from subordinates, in the same way that CEOs get advice from their subordinates, as school principals get advice from their teachers and subordinate administrators. In other words, my students as they’re learning current events, have to role-play out the decisions that other people are doing this work for real in the government, amd get to see what results actually happened in the real world. Call it fantasy Department of State instead of fantasy football.

Kids live in a highly complex world. For most of their lives, kids today have been instructed or enabled to live in fantasy worlds.. Some but not all of them are video games; some of them are imaginary ideas about wealth and power that they have picked up from television and from the Internet. But such fantasy realms can only offer preprogrammed responses, not genuine decision-making. Fantasy sports league are at least rooted in the statistics of real players…

So current events classes can be gameified. Presidential decisions are actually involving thousands of people making small decisions based on the news that they have available and sending data up the chain of command. By helping them role-play out a part of that decision-making process, I hope to teach my students to be better decision-makers as adults. In other words, the play is the thing in which we catch or at least learn the conscience of our kings.

N.B.: today’s blog entry was assembled using Dragon dictation for the first time. I am planning to post this directly as I am traveling today, but I hope that the ideas here will be somewhat obvious, even before I’ve had a chance to clean up the text. Have a lovely weekend.

First Content, then Context

Today I stepped away from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations in class to concentrate on the history of the late Roman Empire, so that they would understand the time in which Marcus Aurelius lived.  In the past, we’d read from a textbook the night before, I’d give a lecture, and they’d be bored; then there’d be some questions in the textbook for homework.

YAWN.  I’m tired just thinking about it now.  How did I survive so many years as a teacher doing just that?

Today I fell back on that old pattern, but with one important difference.  This time, they had been armed with a primary source. They already knew Marcus Aurelius from his own words.  I wasn’t telling them about him; they already knew him, better than any textbook could tell them.  Sure, they probably didn’t have the perfect comprehension that I’d like them to have, but it’s the first week of school.

They were actually interested in the lecture today. They got what it was like to live in Marcus Aurelius’s empire — that these legions on the frontiers were simultaneously a source of protection and a source of worry. That their generals could be the loyal servants of the emperor; or they could be ambitious, venal men, ready to do anything to become emperor themselves.

What was the difference?

The difference was that they were already engaged.  They’d spent four days puzzling out the words of a world leader from two thousand years ago — a world leader who cared about honor and duty and having a sense of right and wrong.  They actually thought he would have been a kind of cool guy to meet and get to know.  And in a sense, they DID get to know him.

And hence, they wanted to know more — so they sat still for a lecture, and absorbed the information they needed about his empire, so that they could understand him better.

But it’s still a bad habit.  I did them a disservice by not making them dig out the information themselves.  I spoon fed them a bunch of data instead of making them go digging.

So tomorrow we’re going to start on Suetonius’s description of the reign of Nero.  Sure, it’s a hundred years and more earlier.  But they now have a sense of what good government looks like; now they’ll have a chance to see really bad government.  And we can start talking about how to read primary sources against each other, instead of relying on a one-voice textbook.

I’ve been thinking about what sort of mental assignment to give them to work on, and I think I just figured it out.  Please feel free to comment on this idea, but here’s the assignment: Pick a line or a part of a line from Marcus Aurelius, and then find a parallel moment where Nero violates this advice. Explain what Marcus Aurelius’s advice to himself is; and explain how Nero violates that principle or rule.  What is the result of this failure?

Suetonius is full of details about life in the empire — the theaters, the baths, the games, the chariot races and more.  They’ll get more of a taste of the daily life in the empire from that than from any lecture I can give them.  And it continues the principles I learned at NECC and in every writing class I ever took: show, don’t tell.  If they read about Nero’s fantastical shows, and the way he suborned the Olympic Games and other contests, they’ll feel the same outrage that Suetonius did in telling it, and they’ll have a sense of how awful it can be to have a self-serving, insecure and monomaniacial blockhead as absolute ruler.

This is the thing, though… As teachers, I think we forget that a TEXTBOOK IS NOT CONTENT. It provides context, but it’s not content in and of itself.  This is particularly true in history, where a textbook is usually a Chronicle — a list of events and persons grouped by geographical region and time period.  Thus a textbook provides an overview of a given place and time. But real content is composed of the stuff of history: not dates and places and obscure people centuries-dead-and-dust, but rather the stories of their deeds, the reasons for their actions, and the things they left behind.  That’s the material historians work with, not chronicles… but stories and reasons for stories… the things that underly the chronicles.

Marvin Minsky said to me this summer while I attended Constructing Modern Knowledge that stories exist in order to provide DNA with important information that would otherwise be lost to catastrophic failure.  DNA passes itself on to another generation through sex and reproduction, and that’s a success. But the failures don’t transmit useful information that way; only stories do… to borrow the Nero example, “don’t put 19-year-old boys in charge of your Empire — especially if the teen in question is insecure, overly sexed with poor moral senses, and too fond of flattery, and profligate with money.  It’s a sure way to start a civil war.”  That’s a useful story for kids, because it reminds them to be strong, secure in themselves, and to be good financial managers, as well as sexually responsible and mature. Those are important lessons at the age of fourteen to fifteen.  Will they get it all at once? Maybe, maybe not.

By contrast, my official textbook mentions that Nero was a good but vicious administrator, a murderer, and a persecutor of Christians.  That’s not content; that’s a summary. It doesn’t explain how Nero got that way, or how he got to be emperor in the first place.  Moreover, Marcus Aurelius persecuted Christians too — why does he get to be a “good emperor”?  Because he was generally a decent man in other ways…  and that’s the kind of thing you can learn only from teaching content, as opposed to starting from context.

So remember… teach content first… then provide the content.

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