A Dilemma for the Historian Who Gets Personal: Reconstructing Classroom Lessons (Part 2)
I was nervous that journalist Martin Mayer was coming to watch me teach (SeePart 1, “A Journalist Describes a History Lesson”). I had read his book The Schools when it came out in 1961. I had just returned from a year at Yale University on a John Hay Whitney Fellowship, an opportunity then given only to high school teachers. The director of the Fellowship had given Mayer my name. I was 26, in my fourth year of teaching at Glenville and I had never been observed by a journalist.
How can I remember this one lesson out of thousands that I have taught in high school history classes? One reason is that he had his version published and simply reading it in print nearly fifty years later jogged my memory so that I could even recall some students’ names. A second reason that this summary lesson on the causes of the Civil War stayed in mind for years was the way that I had brought together conflicting historical interpretations and recall how they had resonated strongly with students.
Mayer’s crisp description of the community and students was accurate. When he caught some students correcting my mispronunciation of the “The Mar-see-yay