A bit of a rambling memory piece today…
When I started teaching high school in 1990, fresh out of teacher certification after college, I inherited a Humanities class. Its creator was a full-career teacher of 35 years who had nurtured the course, collecting some twenty or more rounds of slides from his travels of artwork, architecture, sculpture, and historical sites around the world. But it was almost all Western Civilization. The textbook was a massive tomb, full of great pictures and information but overwhelming.
I loved the idea of teaching the course, absolutely loved it! I love art and human expression in all its forms, history, culture, the study of people. But I knew shit all about a lot of it. I mean I knew about the Renaissance Period, some of the art and personalities, but I couldn’t tell you the political history. I couldn’t properly explain why we called it the Renaissance. Not until I had to teach it. I had never taken a Humanities course nor taught one before. That first semester, I would learn something the night before and teach it the next day. It was seat-of-my-pants stuff! Very stressful at times.
But I wasn’t into lecturing and book work. We did some, but I preferred hands on activities, lively discussions, discovery learning.
I started venturing into styles of curriculum of my own. I tried my best to bring in Asian history, African history, Central and South American history. It was still quite lacking, but I tried. We did a comparative religion unit one time with the students teaching about various religions, often from their own experience. All of us learned a lot from the Muslim students in the class, for example.
I decided we’d look at a historical period for a few weeks and then break to look at a field of humanities as a theme, like really focusing on architecture in a unit with another on art history and different genres of art, including modern art.
One assignment was to create “found art” or art from found objects. Students were to name their pieces thoughtfully, provokingly, and then we turned the classroom into an art museum, everyone touring the room to look at the art. Then we discussed what stood out, what thoughts we had, how every day objects could take on new meaning when removed from their context or when looked at strictly for their design or given some other meaning with a name.
We separated art as human expression and as a business.
I started each school year on the first day by writing the word: Humanities on the board, underlining human, asking what it means to be human. For their first journal entry, I had them answer the question: Has humankind evolved? In the 300,000 years we’ve lived, has our species evolved and if so, how? How do you predict humans will evolve in the future? Or will they?
My favorite thematic unit was philosophy. I put poster paper up around the room, each with an ethical or philosophical question, like what would you do if you found a wallet with several hundred dollars cash in it? What would you do in a grocery store if you the clerk fails to charge you for a large item? If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to see it fall, does it make a sound? etc. Students moved around the room, writing their anonymous answers. We had discussions about some of the questions and different philosophies and philosophers. It blew their minds sometimes!
rom Great Dialogues of Plato (Warmington and Rouse, eds.) New York, Signet Classics- 1999
Another favorite lesson involved enacting Plato’s Parable of the Cave for a closer understanding of the parable.
I’ve thought a lot about the Parable of the Cave over the last six years, how well the allegory applies to our times. I hope to do another post, explaining and reflecting on the allegory.
The best part of the class was the accompanying field trip program, which I opened up to the entire school and expanded to up to ten trips each year. I took students to see plays at ACT in San Francisco, to SFMOMA and the DeYoung and East Asian Art Museum. I took them to look at architecture in the City. And we went to the opera. It was amazing. They had no idea it was a “high brow” art. “Carmen is the bomb!” Said one student. We walked to the BART station and took BART into San Francisco, an adventure itself, especially when public transportation included city bus rides to Golden Gate Park!
And I only lost a student once. Maybe twice. A case of headphones and music and missing the BART train. It was nerve-wrecking, especially because a lot of these kids had never been over the Bay Bridge before, but they made their way back to us.
I still contend that I learned more from my students than they did from me. To be perfectly honest, I had burn out days too, when all I could manage was a lesson that lasted half the class or, yes, I showed the students a movie for three days. Teaching is the hardest job I’ve ever had. More on that later, how during my first full year of teaching I was assigned five different preps (or classes to prepare for) in five different classrooms in three different departments, overseeing two accompanying after school programs, including putting on the school plays and musicals. My first year was a survival year. But I cared deeply about my students, about learning—and still do, and became and always will be a student of the humanities. It was worth it!