I will be the first to admit that I’m a very emotional person: anger, sadness, delight, despair, outrage. I got ’em all. So that’s how I taught, I guess.

It wasn’t enough for my history kids to “know the material.” I wanted them to feel sadness (Wounded Knee), delight (the detail in “Phiz’s” drawings for Dickens’s works), despair (Auschwitz-Birkenau), outrage (The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire). So my classes always carried the freight of my personality.

My personality was a product of and a tribute to my Dad, who grew up in the Depression Ozarks,  who grew up to become the most amazing storyteller I’ve ever known, and my Mom, of Irish descent, fiercely spiritual and fine-tuned to injustice. She never forgave Germany for the Holocaust (overlooking the fact that some of her ancestry was from Baden-Wurttemberg) and she constantly modeled respect for others, which led to the five-year-old me carrying a gallon wine-jug full of cold water to the braceros working the fields alongside our house.

They were marvelous teachers. I had stern but also marvelous teachers in my two-room country school, Branch Elementary, in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley. My big sister was a teacher. College further corrupted me because it threw even more amazing teachers at me: at Missouri, Charles B. Dew on the History of the American South, David Bienvenu, the History of Socialist Thought, Winfield J. Burggraaff, Latin American History, David Thelen, American Populism and Progressivism; at Poly, Dan Krieger, European History (his lectures were so vivid that I’d forget to take notes) and Robert Burton, East Asian History.

I was doomed.

It took awhile, but I became a teacher—a history teacher, and what could be more useless than that?—for thirty years.

I accumulated some favorite lessons along the way: re-enacting the Estates-General in 1789 and JFK’s ExComm during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962; teaching Art History as  fundamental to understanding European History; teaching Relativity Theory by momentarily disappearing from the classroom and returning younger than they were; using battlefield archaeology to hit them to the bone about the inhumanity of the First World War, introducing them to a high-school classmate they’d never know because he was killed on Arizona on December 7 or helping them to understand the alienation of the 1920s by reading Hemingway (“Cat in the Rain” or “In Another Country”) to them aloud. I loved reading to them.

There is no place for nonsense like this in Modern Pedagogy, which, based on my admittedly faulty understanding, consists of enclosing students in a Skinner Box and then beating the box repeatedly with a baseball bat.

That’s what they want us to do, those Educational Theorists, who, to paraphrase George C. Scott’s speech in Patton, (Scott was a dropout from my Alma Mater, the University of Missouri), probably know less about teaching than they do about fornication.

Here is some of what we endured as teachers during my time in education, which is why the part I miss about education is closing the door once the bell rings and the shock, which never quite goes away, of realizing that you are responsible for thirty-two teenagers. That was a happy moment, that realization. So I miss the children. There is nothing else I miss about education.

No Child Left Behind.  Back in its day, we were told, solemnly and without flinching, by a district administrator that it was the goal for every child in the district to pass the state exams within ten years.

Every child.

No exceptions.

I raised my hand–because I have a big mouth–and allowed, in front of 150 people, that this kind of idealism was a mite less than realistic. There was a shocked silence. A stern correction of my disbelief followed that should have eased my mind and put me in my place.

It didn’t. It began to occur to me that the people who make up the ranks of what might be called Educational Leadership are, in fact, insane, every bit as nuts as the World War II commanders who recruited kamikaze pilots.

The single most offensive line I have ever heard from a District Superintendent: “I am a data-driven kind of guy.” (So my lesson, the one that demanded that my students make up a livable family budget during the Great Depression, was heresy. It wasn’t data-driven.) He didn’t last long, but he  was replaced by another data-driven guy, one who would have joyfully flown the kamikaze plane himself: 100% of those kids are going to pass those damned standardized tests.

Integrated Teaching. We had a special inservice (“Inservice” is a special educational term for a day when you and your peers are locked in an airless room and psychologically abused for eight hours, with young eager teachers, like the kapos at Auschwitz, monitoring your progress) on interdisciplinary teaching—in theory, a dandy idea. It made wonderful sense for them to be reading Scott Fitzgerald in English and learning about bootlegging in history, for example. But the charming conceit of this idea was corrupted into the requirement that we be in absolute lockstep with each other, that we had to teach Gatsby and bootlegging on the exact same day, and that day had to be February 16, and not being at that point on that day could only mean one thing: You were a terrible teacher and possibly a pervert and a communist.

Outcome-based Education. This one was a whopper, and it had the longest shelf life.  Basically it meant that a student could not progress until she had passed the unit test. So she would be given the unit test over and over and over and over and over until she passed. This led to one of the few times I got not only frustrated but genuinely nasty with a student in the classroom.

“What would you like for your fortieth birthday?” I asked him.

“Huh?” he asked.

“Because you’re still going to be here.”

Wag the Dog.  The state testing got so overwhelming and pernicious that it was decided that the History Department would spend at least four inservices (see above: stress airlessness and psychological abuse) picking our way through a massive bank of state-generated multiple-choice questions (What kind of person writes multiple-choice history questions for a living? In what State Prison must they be doing time, and for how many homicides?), choosing the ones we liked and assembling them into unit tests, quarter tests and semester finals.

It was excruciating. My Grandmother Gregory was a delegate to the 1924 Democratic Convention at Madison Square Garden. It was a sweltering summer. It took the Democrats 105 ballots and five weeks to nominate John W. Davis, who would not only be trounced by Calvin Coolidge but whose only other notable contribution to American History would be arguing against Brown v. Board in front of the Supreme Court. So this was like the 1924 Democratic Convention.

Once we’d assembled our batteries of test questions, here was the strategy:

At the beginning of the unit (say, “America in the 1920s,”) we give the the test:

24. The Scopes Trial in Tennessee in July 1925 was focused on

A. The constitutionality of the death penalty

B. Due process for immigrants suspected of radicalism

C. Teaching the theory of evolution in schools

D. Klan activities in the 1920s South

Then we would give them the answers to the test.

Then we’d teach the unit.

Then we’d give them the exact same test.

When their scores improved from the first to the second test, we had made our point, pedagogically speaking. Learning had taken place.

I was flabbergasted.

So I continued to tell my students stories, to make them, whenever I could, live the history and feel the history.  I wasn’t the only one, either—many of my friends, some who still teach at places like AGHS, which is a wonderful school  because of them, were doing the same, like Reformation Christians in Henry VIII’s England with their English Bibles tucked behind a brick in the fireplace mantle.

Even in Catholic schools—and one of the things I always valued about Catholic education was its thoughtful disconnect from trendy pedagogy and its ethical underpinning (Jesus is such a fine role model), so poorly modeled by the church hierarchy—teachers are being bombarded by the latest in educational theory.

By the way, the Germans announced their presence in Poland with Stuka dive-bombers. The latest in educational theory appears in acronyms.

The answer is C.

Now, tell me how your great-great-grandmother felt when your great-great-grandfather lost his job in 1931.  Show me your grandfather’s photograph from Vietnam in 1967. Tell me about where you came from and why you are here. Tell me about the people you most admire. Tell me why you admire them. Tell me how evil presents itself and tell me about the tricks that charlatans use to lead whole nations astray.

Tell me about the kind of person you want to be someday.

You are sixteen years old. This is what you should know about history. This is what you need to learn. Tell me.