Classroom conversations
As school gets back in session, teachers could face some difficult questions
When Christina Torres’ eighthgraders at Punahou School in Honolulu walk through the door for the first day of school Wednesday, she knows they’ll have questions about last weekend’s deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., more than 5,000 miles away.
An English teacher at Punahou, a K-12 private school, Torres plans to start the discussions by asking a few questions of her own: Where did students hear about the rally? What do they know about it? How do they feel about the violence that took place?
It’ll be difficult, but she doesn’t want to “run away from the conversation,” she said. “I think a lot of teachers are scared parents are going to get mad, but if we frame the conversation in a really loving way with our students ... at least we move in the right direction.”
Like teachers nationwide, Torres will try to figure out how to walk the tightrope that keeps her students informed about white supremacists and neo-Nazis without freaking her students out.
Punahou is where President Obama attended high school, and like much of Hawaii, it is ethnically diverse. Torres wants her students to be able to discuss the Charlottesville violence in a way that gets them to think about it critically and honestly.
Like many teachers, she plans to use materials created and shared by colleagues; teachers post materials to Twitter under the hashtag #charlottesvillecurriculum, created by journalist Melinda Anderson.
Groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and Facing History and Ourselves distribute materials that help teachers dig deeper into the history of racism.
Facing History, a non-profit group that works with teachers to help them connect difficult periods in our history to what is happening today, is sending notes this week to more than 100,000 teachers “on the front lines with young people to help them understand that they can be part of a positive change for a better future.”
The group warns teachers that they’ll be called upon to manage difficult conversations about “the evil, base bigotry at play” in the Charlottesville conflict. Facing History advises teachers to ask students what “echoes from history” they noticed in news coverage — and whether they have had direct experience with hate speech.
The group suggests, among other questions:
Why language and symbols can evoke such passion and pain?
What do students feel responsible for learning to understand the hatred and violence that occurred in Charlottesville?
How do experience and memory of the past affect people’s choices and beliefs in the present?
“We need to help (students) navigate how you respond to these actions in non-violent ways,” said Marc Skvirsky, the group’s vice president and chief program officer. “We need to help students think through all of the varieties of different ways you can respond.”
Teachers have a difficult job ahead of them, Skvirsky and others said. “Students really need to understand ... not only the power of the symbols ( but) the power of words and language, how painful that can be for individuals and groups within our communities.”
Students must understand the deep emotions that objects such as Confederate monuments generate and how the fate of those monuments is decided.
A statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, slated for removal from Charlottesville’s Lee Park, spurred last weekend’s protests.
Charlottesville’s City Council voted last June to rename the park — it’s now Emancipation Park.
Joy Hakim, author of the 11volume A History of US, said that for very young children, teachers should keep in mind that many topics are too intense. Mostly, she said, young students need to be assured that the adults around them are in control.
“When kids come into first grade, a lot of them really believe that rabbits can talk,” she said. “They’re not like us. They’re rational in a different way.”
Around fourth or fifth grade, students begin asking more chal- lenging, rational questions about current events — and they deserve forthright answers. Even then, it’s best to hold back on too many gory details.
“What we teach our kids is different from what we learn as adults, and we don’t want to turn all of our kids into cynics,” Hakim said. “Learning history is a process of growth.”
She recalled testing a draft of one of her books with a mixedrace class in Virginia Beach, not far from Charlottesville. She got an unexpectedly horrified response from African-American students and ended up editing out “some of the viciousness and the horror of slavery” in the final draft. “I feel like that can wait for later,” she said.
At the same time, Hakim noted, most students can handle the idea that no one is entirely good or bad. Historians, for instance, are just now piecing together a fuller picture of Oney Judge, a slave owned by none other than George and Martha Washington.
“Life is complex,” Hakim said. “People are complex. I think children can understand that good people do bad things.”
In 1796, Martha Washington informed Judge that she would be given as a wedding gift to Elizabeth Custis and Thomas Law, their oldest granddaughter and her fiancé.
That spring, while Washington served as president, Judge escaped from Philadelphia to New Hampshire.
After she was discovered accidentally in Portsmouth, N.H., by a family friend, Judge negotiated the terms of her return to Philadelphia, demanding that she be guaranteed freedom after the couple died.
George Washington angrily refused, and Judge remained in New Hampshire, living the rest of her life as a fugitive.
Hakim includes Judge’s story in the newest edition of A History of US — its youngest readers are in third grade.
“How do we teach our children?” she asked. “Carefully.”
“We need to help (students) navigate how you respond to these actions in non-violent ways.”
Marc Skvirsky, vice president of Facing History