How to Teach the Class You Want to Teach

In an earlier entry, I mentioned the Humanities class that I taught for a long time.  What you don't know is that I had no idea that I would be teaching that class when I started out.  During my second year of teaching high school, our principal, Dan Howe, came to a few of us to see if we wanted to design our own classes through the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Being young and naive, I said yes.  So, along with John Hill and Kip Ormerod, we began the work on creating what we initially called Introduction to the Humanities.

Concurrently, there was another project that included me as well.  This was the ECCP block.  To this day, I have no idea what those letters represent.  They were created by Merle Rice our physics teacher, and he explained them often to me, but the concept never stuck.  Orv Schlatter, Merle, and I were given the task of taking the block Mark Tipple, Orv, and I  had currently and make it into a more project based class.  For those of you who are up on the waves of educational trends, we now call this PBL, Project Based Learning.  Along with the NEH, we created this in 1976.

In another entry I will spend time on the ECCP block.  I really want this entry to be about the Humanities class and how it came to be.  As we sat together and created this class, we each brought our own perspectives of the course.  We agreed that the focus of the course had to be on Socratic discussion, based around what the students felt was important.  We also came to a quick decision that the class had to be student centered.  The teacher was to be "the guide on the side", not the "sage on the stage."  We used that explanation so often to anyone who visited the class that it became an inside joke at the school.

What amazes me to this day is that the three of us were allowed to teach the class together.  John Hill was our choir director.  The rest of the day he taught the various levels of choirs.  Kip Ormerod spent the rest of his day teaching government and economics.  The original idea of the course was to have themed units that we would break down into lessons.  Then each day we would start with a focus, gradually posing questions that would come from our expertise in our areas.  In the end, the Humanities class was to view life from at least three different perspectives.

Here is what the early classes looked like.  The room was my classroom; the other teachers came to my room.  We arranged the desks in a circle; we placed ourselves randomly in the circle.  Each day the students could chose their seat as well.  We consciously chose different locations so that we wouldn't inhibit student discussion.  At no time did the class have more than 30 students.  Imagine having three teachers in one classroom with only 30 students!  Well, it didn't last long.  Eventually, John was needed to teach more music classes, so it was just Kip and I for a couple of years.  Then Kip was needed to teach more social studies, so for the last 20 years of the course, it was just me.  That was when the course name was changed to Literature of Humanities.  After the first ten years, the course was offered more than one period a day.  Eventually, so many students signed up for the class that half of my school day was teaching Humanities.

By the time that the course was all mine, it had developed into the course that we truly wanted it to be.  In the early years, we started the course informing the students that the course was theirs, so they would chose the units.  It was a blank slate.  After about five years, we changed it to a list of units that had been developed by the early classes.  The open ended feature of coming up with their own units wasn't abandoned, but seldom did a new unit come up that wasn't already on the list.

To give you an idea about what they units were, consider what a teenager would want to talk about.  Every year the units that were chosen were Love, Loneliness, and Alienation; Growing Up; Reality and Fantasy; Death and Dying; and The Future.  The other units changed from one class to another and included Rights and Responsibilities; The Arts and Life; and Growing Old.

Love, Loneliness, and Alienation was originally three separate units, but we found that they intertwined so much that it made sense to make them one unit. The Arts and Life was only chosen once even though it was supposed to be a major part of the class.  The best discussions were during Death and Dying.  The worst were any time that Growing Old was chosen.

Those teachers among you might question how to assess the learning in this type of a class.  That was our biggest concern too.  Tests were out because that wouldn't make any sense.  The decision was that students would be graded on their classroom participation in the discussions and the journals that they would keep.  Obviously, the journal was to be the summative assessment.  In the journal, students were to write down what actually happened in class each day and then respond with their opinion.  Optionally, they could have a third entry that was a personal area to write whatever they wanted.  This area was to be viewed by the other teachers and me if it was indicated to be okay.  The journals were graded weekly.

The idea for the third entry each day was to make sure that their writing would be something that they would want to keep.   I encouraged each student to keep their journals, put them away for ten to twenty years, and then return to them to see the teenager that they once were.  I don't know how many of them did that, but I do know that there are almost 2000 of those students out there.  If any entries of this blog get out to the rest of the world, I hope this one does because I would like to invite those students to go to their journals and reflect on their teenage years.  Then I would like them to share through this blog whatever they wish.

My goal is to show that this type of course still has a place in today's curriculum.  Maybe it is more important now than ever.  This is not for me.  My time in education is over.  This is for the teachers and students who have to make it through a day of constant pressure.  There is no place for the questions of life, ethics, reasoning, or philosophy.  In future entries, I will provide stories that prove my point.  To all of you who went through the class - I am an old man and have forgotten some of those stories.  I wouldn't mind being reminded.