Rules: 45 minutes, 750 words, edit later.

4:00 PM.

Why do I teach history the way I do? I have 180 days, maybe a few less, to cover all of American history. I can count on a range of student backgrounds — some will have ready made timelines to build upon and others will know very little — as well as the casual and reflexive dislike of history class.

So I could do it the way I was taught: start at the beginning and try and get as close to the present day as I can. If you do it this way, it’s hard to ensure that the themes of the beginning of the year carry all the way through, although it’s certainly not impossible. This way allows for the usage of a textbook, which is a kind of security blanket for any teacher, but I don’t have a textbook. Or I could do it thematically — come up with five or six themes and then use those as anchors for the year. You can skip around chronologically when you do it this way. I’ve seen some classrooms where this works very well.

Here’s what I’m going to do and why:

Quarter one: reading a survey text (Jill Lepore’s These Truths) and developing a podcast script that traces one theme in American history from 1492 up until the present. I want students to finish first quarter with a sense of the value of looking at all of American history. When pondering a policy problem, I want them to think about examples not just from the present day or the past fifty years, but from across three hundred years. Using a mix of discussion, primary source analysis, and mini-lectures, I hope there’s enough diversity each week to keep the kids interested.

Quarter two: making a short documentary for C-Span as part of their annual contest. The important work here is identifying a problem they want to address in the film; my job is ensuring that the documentary features real historical context. What are the structural elements and historical processes that shape the issue they’ve selected?

Quarter three: studying two eras in American foreign policy — the war in Vietnam and the Global War on Terror — with an eye towards assessing America’s role in the world. For the final assignment, each student creates two works of art based on primary source documents; the written component is a guide to those primary sources. These two works of art should allow for a comparison between the two eras and highlight the promise and peril of diplomatic, military, and economic foreign policy.

Quarter four: Here we look at Philadelphia’s place in American history, trying to assess how the larger trends we’ve discussed all year emerge in this city. We make a photo portfolio, a brochure on an understudied event in Philadelphia’s history, and we learn enough GIS to create storymaps on various topics.

The good news:

• There’s a range of different projects here where students can develop an understanding of the American past and then use that to create something new.
• There’s a balance between social, political, economic, and diplomatic history.
• There’s an emphasis on high-level secondary sources; there’s also time and space for research and grappling with primary sources.
• At the end of the year, they have a podcast, a documentary, an art exhibit, a photography portfolio, a brochure, and a storymap (mixture of their prose and maps they’ve made.).

The bad news or at least the questions I ask myself:

Am I moving too fast? I gave up on coverage long ago — it’s not possible in a compulsory setting — but I do wonder what could happen if I dropped C-Span (which I won’t do, ever) and read Lepore over two quarters. There’s never enough time for anything — why I gave up on multiple case studies during the museum unit and limited it to Vietnam and the GWOT — but is there enough depth here?

How do I make sure that the technical elements of the projects, whether recording audio, making videos, making the artwork, or learning GIS, do not take overwhelm the content? What process pieces do I build in to put kids in a position to allow the two to support each other? For example, when mapping census data, am I doing enough so that they’re studying the data they’ve mapped, not fuming at the software?

While this approach will help familiarize students with an upper-level collegiate course, it will do nothing to get them ready for a lecture-hall course with a mid-term and a final. I think the writing we do for the scripts underscores the necessity of being able to communicate about the past effectively, and while perhaps my feedback and their own reflection will allow them to evaluate their work, it’s definitely not the same as an in-class exam.

Trying to get in the habit of writing about class regularly. The rules are:

1. Forty-five minutes
2. At least 500 words
3. Minimal editing, i.e., forgive yourself.

Why this story?

After my opening unit in English Three, a unit that builds around the old New York Times Lives column, I do a five week unit on short stories. I’ll write some more, another day, about what we’re doing with the short stories, both in class and for the big assignment But I want to try and explain how I got to the eight stories I picked this year and talk about what that process feels like.

One: because it’s what’s there. If I had a great anthology, I’d probably use it. As various AI programs become more and more prevalent, I’m tempted to start using various best of collections, like this or this because I wouldn’t have to worry (as much) about whether there are countless essays and breakdowns of the work already out there. This would give me some freedom — hey y’all, here are the eight we’re reading, you pick a couple of others you like — and would allow a conversation about the making of anthologies — how does all of this hang together, if at all? It’d be exciting to encounter stories for the second or third time alongside the kids.

I’d note that I’d love to use the beast that Ann Charters edited — The Story and Its Writer — but at $96 a pop, that’s $6k for big paperbacks that would last maybe two years if the kids had to carry them around. Maybe if there was a Permabound edition (do they bind books this big), I could think about it, but that thing would probably weigh four pounds.

Two, I pick stories that I appreciate, stories with the power to move me, even when I’m battling with teenagers who didn’t immediately like the story.

Three, for the most part, I pick stories that are recent enough not to have a massive amount of internet crap available about them. (There’s one notable exception — Where are you going, where have you been — and that’s because the kids can’t believe that fiction can creep them out the way that this one always seems to. I have to plead with them not to muck about on the internet with this one.)

Four, I end up picking stories that The New Yorker has published because they provide audio versions of the author reading them or, sometimes even better, of another author reading the story, and then commenting on it.

Five, I pick stories where the authors are women. My next two units build on male authors — Walt Whitman, Ta-Nahesi Coates, and F. Scott Fitzgerald — so this is important. (I’ll publish the complete list for the year later this week; for now, though, see point ten.)

Six, I pick stories that meet one loose definition of art: there’s enough in them that each time you read, something new reveals itself. ( I understand the argument that this might be true of anything, but you want something more than, hey, that’s cool, what’s next bald man.) I just read The Art of the Wasted Day by Patrica Hampl, and there, near the end of the book, she talks about how she deconstructed a poem in three different ways over her life. Only a poem that deep could sustain such focus.

Seven, I pick stories that pair with another story to help set up something we’re going to talk about in class, some great inquiry that I think a pairing will allow. For those playing along at home, see how you’d pair the stories below.

Eight, I pick stories where nearly all of the authors are alive so I can fantasize about writing to them and asking them to comment on the story their work was paired with.

Nine, as I have to become Xerox boy, collation boy, and bulkpack boy, I don’t pick particularly long stories as I have sit in front of the copier printing these out and then binding them into a coursepack. I’ve realized that kids reading fiction on their Chromebooks is a waste of time; I’m also heading into curmudgeon world where I want to make as much of the class as possible a technology free zone until they begin writing. It’s worth the four hours in front of the copier.

Ten, I try, I try, I try to have enough of a range of short stories that every kid has a possibility of seeing themselves within at least one piece.

2023 Stories. Tomorrow I’ll write about the specifics of each story.

Barthelme, Donald, “The School.”  

Enriquez, Mariana. “‘My Sad Dead.’” The New Yorker, 6 Feb. 2023. www.newyorker.com, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/my-sad-dead.

Erdrich, Louise. “‘The Years of My Birth.’” The New Yorker, 2 Jan. 2011. www.newyorker.com, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/01/10/the-years-of-my-birth.

Jones, Edward P. “The First Day.” Lost in the City – 20th Anniversary Edition: Stories, 20th ed. edition, Amistad, 2012, pp. 27–32.

Jen, Gish. “‘No More Maybe.’” The New Yorker, 12 Mar. 2018. www.newyorker.com, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/no-more-maybe.

LeGuin, Ursula K. . “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” The Wind’s Twelve Quarters: Stories, Limited edition, Harper Perennial, 2022, pp. 277–86.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where Are You Going Where Have You Been?” High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966-2006, Reprint edition, Ecco, 2007, pp.249-66.

O’Neill, Joseph, “Rainbows.” The New Yorker, 28 Sep. 2020. 

Saunders, George. “‘Love Letter.’” The New Yorker, 30 Mar. 2020. www.newyorker.com, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/06/love-letter-george-saunders.

Wilkinson, Crystal. “‘Endangered Species: Case 47401.’” Literary  Hub, Apr. 2021, https://lithub.com/endangered-species-case-47401/.

Forty-five minutes, five hundred words, minimal editing