Humanities: The Story of Us
Every lesson (or topic) I teach begins with one question: “Who cares?” If I find myself unable to answer these questions, I start looking for someone who does. Middle schoolers care very deeply about things. They care about what someone thinks of their new clothes, haircut, or shoes. They care about video games, movies, and chatting with friends on Discord. They even care about who the president is and what is happening in the news. So, I am teaching people who care, but how do I encourage them to care about what I am teaching? “Who cares?”
The answer, I believe, is that we all care, but it is challenging to motivate ourselves to express that care. Dates are hard to remember, there are so many names, and it all happened so long ago. With these challenges, it can often be easy to feel that students don’t care, and it doesn’t matter anyway, right?
As teachers, we are called to invite students into a great conversation. How do we get them to start talking? We appeal to their emotions. Great orators and writers for generations have used pathos to engage the hearts and minds of their readers and listeners. Teachers are performers, actors, orators, writers, and rhetoricians. We, nor our students, will care if we only master monotonous meanderings through Medieval history. Rather, we need to be masters of our subject, pulling students’ imaginations into the adventures of history.
We become masters of our subjects by finding themes in everything we teach or research. The facts and dates are interesting, but we fall in love with the story. And we train our affections to fall in love with the good, true, and beautiful, and to be wise to the bad, false, and ugly. I like to point out the cowardly Roman emperors to the students. These men fear bullies and allow them to destroy human lives. We should be wise to cowards who boast of their “power.” On the other hand, I like to talk about the clever and crafty abilities of the barbarians. There are often amazing stories of beautiful grace, which is always the main theme of every lesson.
When we know the story, when we are masters of our topic, we can bring it to life for our students. I once watched a performance of the Iliad. It took place in a small room with maybe fifty people. The space was intimate, and the content was old, antiquated, and bored. Onto the stage (or aisle between the chair dashed along the wall), walks a man. The lights come up and illuminate a chalk board. The man is wearing the dress of a professor, but he is disheveled. The audience comes to find out that he is despairing of the Trojan war, but I think he was also pained about how to teach us, his students, about the war.
With tears in his eyes, he steps forward; he starts to name names. “But of course, you wouldn’t know any of them. These men were my friends, our brother, sons, fathers, they had names, they were people. People always forget the wars are fought by our sons, especially when they look at history and writing.” I paraphrase here, but the point is I was hooked. I wanted to know more. I cared about the people for whom this teacher was weeping and wailing. This character was a master of his subject. He let the history cling to his heart and affect his emotions, so he can in turn impress upon his students the power of learning about the story of us.
Written by Philip Lehman, 6th and 7th grade Humanities teacher