The History Teacher 

by Billy Collins

Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.
The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
"How far is it from here to Madrid?"
"What do you call the matador's hat?"

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan.

The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,

while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off. 

My supervisor returned my weekly reflection today with this poem attached to it. She did this because in that reflection I told of a class discussion we recently held that might have been one of my favorite moments of the semester.

We have been reading Lois Lowry's Number the Stars, a novel about a young girl living in Nazi occupied Denmark during World War II. Her family helps a Jewish family escape to Sweden and throughout the story we journeyed through themes of bravery, friendship, change, hardship, truth, and even man's inhumanity to man. Before reading we studied World War II and the Holocaust and wrote research papers on it. Students memorized and performed speeches on the topic that were EXTREMELY powerful. On our final day of reading Number the Stars we held a class discussion to wrap up the novel. I asked them to think about what they had learned from the book and why they think Lois Lowry wrote it. This spiraled into a discussion about evil in the world, wars between countries, and fighting the silence "that is evil's greatest co-conspirator." They asked questions about what the rest of the world knew about Nazi Germany and when did America get involved and why didn't someone stop it sooner? They processed the answers and asked more question and fed off each other's knowledge. We went well over our reading time and students continued the discussion as they worked on the next assignment.

The reason I enjoyed it so much is because I love to see young minds processing what they learn--especially when what they learn is a very hard truth. Throughout their studies (especially of history) they will encounter things like this time and time again. And unlike the teacher in poem mentioned above, I want to expose them to these truths. It is from these that we learn the biggest lessons about humanity and about the power in our voice. Our classroom functions like a little society, and in one of the speeches they memorized, they quoted British Prime Minister Tony Blair saying "We remember above all that the Holocaust did not start with a concentration camp. It started with a brick through the shop window of a Jewish business, the desecration of a synagogue, the shout of racist abuse on the street." I discussed this quote with a few students, pointing out that big things happen because little things were not stopped. This is the reason we hold class meetings when there are conflicts, we deal with issues through conversations, and above all else we are respectful toward others. So that they know there is power in their actions and importance in their words, and as another one of their speeches quoted "no one can make us into bystanders without our consent."

I leave this uber-long entry with a quote from Maria Montessori that visits my goal of instilling in my students an understanding of actively working for the good of society. This is what we work toward. This is one reason I teach.

"The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity, as often happens in the case of old-time discipline. And all this because our aim is to discipline for activity, for work, for good; not for immobility, not for passivity, not for obedience."