P E Y T O N W O L C O T T |
| h o w w e t a k e b a c k o u r c h i l d r e n ' s e d u c a t i o n -- o n e p e r s o n , o n e q u e s t i o n , o n e s c h o o l a t a t i m e . Copyright 1999-2006 Peyton Wolcott |
| Modern Minutemen: Will Fitzhugh |
| Prolific founder of organizations Website: http://www.tcr.org |
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| (By a Concord Review intern) Leaving “School” Out of High School by NIKI LEFEBVRE Hoover Institution Education Next, Summer 2006 Our training shoes quietly slapped the rubbery surface of the track as we barreled down the final stretch. One by one we crossed the line and doubled over, desperate to catch our breath. Despite the burning in my lungs from the cold autumn air, I felt great. I had been in college for only a few weeks and was keeping pace with some of the older, veteran runners. Unfortunately, off the track, in the classroom, I wasn’t even keeping up with the other freshmen. After practice that night, despite the chill in the air, I took the longest possible route back to my dorm, dreading the research paper and the mountain of books and journal articles and notes and outlines that had littered my desk for weeks. I was just beginning my first semester of college and already knew I was unprepared. “How did you do it in high school?” asked my roommate, a graduate of a New Mexico prep school. How did I do it in high school? I didn’t. In my public high school, a small school in rural Massachusetts, I was a conscientious student with a straight-A average. But I never had to write a 12-page research paper. In fact, in high school I spent a lot more time on the track and engaged in other pursuits than I did studying. I was captain of the varsity cross-country and track teams, a class officer, president of the National Honor Society. I volunteered at a local women’s shelter, represented the student body on the town school committee, worked at a craft store. I was a Girl Scout. School was something else. Even in my Advanced Placement courses I did not have to write research papers. My classes rarely required me to fit even an hour of homework into my afternoon schedule, and doing homework on the weekends was an anomaly at best. As I tried to settle in at college, I began to realize that high school had involved very little school. None of my assignments ever required much time or effort, nor did “big” assignments occur frequently enough that I had to pare back my long list of after-school activities. Far more often than not, a 45-minute study period provided me with sufficient time to complete the day’s assignments satisfactorily. No Records, No Goals At my first high-school track practice, the coach gave everyone a list of school records. He challenged us to break them throughout the season. I had six classes on my first day of high school and didn’t receive one list of records to break, standards to meet, or goals to achieve. That’s why college was a shock. My high-school transcript may have been filled with As, but I quickly learned that an A in college cost much more. The five-paragraph essays, multiple-choice exams, and short homework assignments required by my high school didn’t fill my pockets with much college currency. And I wasn’t alone in being so broke. According to a recent survey conducted by the Indiana University High School Survey for Student Engagement, the majority of high- school students spend three hours or less on homework each week, and the majority of those students reported earning As and Bs. Only 22 percent of the 1.2 million high- school graduates who took the ACT Assessment in 2004 achieved scores that would deem them ready for college in English, math, or science. When did school get pushed out of high school? Most students will do what is expected of them, but so often more is expected on the athletic fields, in after-school clubs and jobs, in volunteer organizations, and in social circles than in the classroom. School must be more of a priority in high school if students are to succeed in college and beyond. Niki Lefebvre, a 2005 honors graduate in history and philosophy from Mount Holyoke College, is currently director of the Concord Review Society, and Managing Editor of The Concord Review [www. tcr.org]. Published by the Hoover Institution © 2006 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University |
| About the History Club Math, Computers, and Music all have after-school activities and there are thousands of science fairs and the Intel and Siemens-Westinghouse Science Talent Searches, but I wanted to organize a national club whose chapters would allow those students who are interested in history, and their friends, to enjoy reading, writing, discussion and the pleasures of history, a subject of which so many of our high school students have been found to be sadly ignorant. In the two annual newsletters, there are scores of accounts of the ways high school students have found to explore and enjoy history. We don't tell the chapters what to do, so naturally they think of a wide and creative variety of things to do. The newsletters are on the website, www.tcr.org, under National History Club. had little or no history either at my college preparatory school in California in the early 1950s, or later at Harvard College, where I majored in English Literature, so I have felt the burden of my ignorance of history more and more, and especially when I started teaching U.S. history in the high school in Concord. But I think there is lots of important history for high school students to read and think about which happened long before anyone even thought about the United States. I have learned that U.S. high school students often hate history and that half their teachers did not take history in college. The textbooks are deadly dull and the students are seldom encouraged to read a history book themselves, so most never find out how great history is until after they leave school. I hoped that the National History Club chapters might encourage some more high school students to learn some more history and even to read a history book on their own, and perhaps write a good history research paper, too. I think that ideally history is found in history books, but of course museum visits and the like can help. But I would argue that there is no substitute for reading what historians have written. Why are we so afraid to let our high school students read a history book? Reading a book is "hands on" learning, and it is also "minds on" learning, which is even better. _______________________ Robert Nasson who runs the History Clubs is a graduate of Lexington High School in Lexington, Massachusetts. He majored in Government at Wesleyan in Connecticut, where he was a pitcher on the varsity baseball team. He interned with The Concord Review in the summer of 2000, when we were beginning serious work on the National Writing Board. He came on full-time after his graduation in 2001, and when I started the National History Club in 2002, he took on that responsibility, and he has built it to 214 chapters at secondary schools in 39 states, with around 5,800 members, and there is a chapter in Pakistan and one in Poland. |
| Will Fitzhugh |
| Will Fitzhugh, Founder: The Concord Review [1987] Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995] National Writing Board [1998] National History Club [2002] Contact: 730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24 Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA 978-443-0022 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org Varsity Academics® |
| About William Hughes Fitzhugh Founder, The Concord Review, the National Writing Board, the National History Club National Council for History Education (founding member) The Historical Society (founding member) New England History Teachers Association (past Board member) National Association of Scholars (life member) Colonial Society of Massachusetts (resident member) The Cliosophic Society (honorary member) Editor and Publisher The Concord Review 730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24 Sudbury, MA 01776 USA 1-800-331-5007 Email: fitzhugh@tcr.org Website: http://www.tcr.org A.B. Harvard College, 1962 Churchill College, Cambridge University, 1962-1963 Ed.M. School of Education, Harvard University, 1968 Teacher, Concord-Carlisle (MA) High School, Social Studies, 1977-1988 Evaluator, Boston Public Schools Staff Development; American Academy of Liberal Education Charter Schools Program; Reader, Blue Ribbon Schools Program; Steering Committee 2006, ACT/NAGB Writing Test for 2011; ABCTE U.S. History Committee 2006; Evaluator, TAH Program at Mercyhurst College, 2006. Consultant, 2003-2006, on the writing and assessment of history research papers, for Teaching American History Grants in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Founded The Concord Review in March, 1987, incorporated June 1987. Tax-exempt status granted: June, 1988. Published 726 history research papers (average length 5,500 words) by high school authors from 44 states and 33 other countries in the first 66 issues. Established the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes, 1995 Founded the National Writing Board, 1998, now endorsed by 38 colleges and universities Founded the National History Club, 2002, now with 214 chapters in thirty-nine states Founded the Concord Review Society in 2003 Founded the TCR Institute in 2002 [Term Paper Study, 2002 |
How we take back our children's education: one person, one question, one school at a time. |
AASA - American Association of School Administrators ASA - Association of School Administrators CSD - Consolidated School District DOE - Department of Education ES - Elementary School HS - High School ISD - Independent School District JHS - Junior High School MS - Middle School MSM - Mainstream media NSBA - National School Boards Association NSPRA - National School Public Relations Association PS - Public School(s) SBEC - State Board for Educator Certification SD - School District Sup't - Superintendent TAKS - Texas Assessment of Knowledge & Skills TASA - Texas Association of School Administrators TASB - Texas Association of School Boards TASBO - Texas Association of School Business Officials TEA - Texas Education Agency TEKS - Texas Essential Knowledge & Skills USD - UnifiedUnited School District |
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Separatists in India's north-eastern state of Manipur have shot six male teachers in the leg for allegedly helping students cheat in exams. Two women teachers were beaten with sticks for the same offence, the rebels of the Kanglei Yana Kan Lup group said. The teachers were abducted from their homes after an exam on Thursday. The rebels said the teachers took up to 5,000 rupees ($110) for helping students cheat and warned of further punishment if the cheating continued. The Kanglei Yana Kan Lup (KYKL) is one of many separatist groups fighting Indian administration in Manipur. It said it abducted the eight teachers from their homes in and around the state capital, Imphal, because of reports they had taken bribes. --By Subir Bhaumik - BBC |
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| Copyright 1999-2006 Peyton Wolcott |
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| History is Fun! History Matters! by Will Fitzhugh February 2004—National Council for History Education Editor’s Note: In this piece Will Fitzhugh reminds us that there is great enjoyment for students in working hard at a challenging task and successfully accomplishing it. History can and should be as rewarding as the efforts that we see our students putting forth on the football practice fields, on the basketball practice courts, in the sweltering wrestling rooms, and on the long cross- country training routes. By sugarcoating the intellectual challenges of reading and writing history, by trying to “make history fun,” we may be sucking the real fun right out of it. [Joe Ribar, Editor] A large number of Social Studies educators experience difficulty, despite their many imaginative efforts, in “making history fun” for their students at all levels in our schools. One clue to the problem might be found in an analogy. Imagine what a hard time teachers would have in making movies enjoyable for young people if they began by preventing them from seeing any movies. They would have to show filmstrips about movies, take field trips to buildings where movies have been shown, have speakers come in who once saw a movie, etc. And none of it would work... Aaron Einbond—who won a Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize from The Concord Review in 1995 for his history paper on John Maynard Keynes when he was a student at Hunter College High School in New York, has now graduated from Harvard, earned a master’s degree on a Marshall Scholarship at Cambridge University, and is working for his Ph.D. at Berkeley—was invited in 1997 to speak to the 100th anniversary meeting of the New England History Teachers Association. He said, among other things, “History does not have to be made fun. It is fun.” Social Studies educators have set themselves two impossible tasks. First, they neither ask students to read a history book, which is the way most people get interested in history, or to write a history research paper, and second, for ideological reasons, they try to limit the range of student interest to current social problems in their immediate environments. The Progressive argument that little kids can only care about their home and neighborhood cannot stand before the fact that lots of kids are fascinated by dinosaurs and superheroes, which are very rarely seen in contemporary communities, and that most kids love fantasies of faraway people and great adventures. Kieran Egan of Simon Fraser University has pointed out that if Piaget is right that youngsters are only capable of concrete operations, how can their enjoyment of Peter Rabbit (etc.) at an early age be explained? When Harry Truman was competing with one of his classmates to be the first to read all the books in the school library in Independence while they were still in high school, no one had to try to convince him that reading was fun. He had found that out himself. One of his heroes, David McCullough says, was Gustavus Adolphus, who was not a resident of Independence, Missouri, at that time. We have evidence that the majority of U.S. high school students now graduate without ever having written one history research paper, and it seems likely that most graduate without ever having read a single complete history book, unless they did it on their own. The historian Sheldon Stern, in a study of state history standards just done for the Fordham Institute, found that “The option of writing a serious history essay is not available in even the best state social studies and history standards.” This constraining pedagogy is an excellent way to kill interest in any subject, and without interest, students will gain very little knowledge of anything, and our students’ ignorance of history at every level through college is now well documented by the ACTA study and the NAEP reports. It is easy to imagine how interest in and knowledge of baseball would die out if young people were prevented from watching games or playing them. Naturally we take sports too seriously to attempt to develop interest in them in any such foolish way. When it comes to history, however, we limit most students to social studies textbooks which give them too little information on everybody and everything to make it possible for them to get involved in the subject matter. So they are bored, and any frantic efforts to engage their interest without having them read and write are for the most part doomed from the start. Lots of students from all over are, like the small-town farm boy Harry Truman, fully capable of reading complete history books and becoming fascinated with the actual fun of history while they are still in school. A good research study of the number of high school students who actually read one history book before they get their diploma remains to be done, but the decline of the history term paper makes it very likely that that number is quite small and growing smaller. To those who would argue that reading a history book and writing a history paper are either too hard or not very important for high school students, someone should certainly suggest: “Try it. They’ll love it!” Students are shortchanged when they are discouraged from reading history and writing term papers in school, and they are not only less ready to benefit from further education, but also less likely to understand and value the freedom and democracy that have been handed down to them as well. |