Or I could call this post: How to make history exciting for college kids.
I don't know when I started calling them "kids." Maybe when I'd spent enough time in front of a classroom feeling the generational gap between myself and eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds widen like an old man's waist. You'd think that six, eight years wouldn't be long enough for a complete disconnection. I'm in my twenties, I'm young, I like to think I'd rather...hip. Okay, that made me sound old.
The thing is, I exited high school on the cusp of the world we live in now. I didn't have a cell phone until my freshman year of college, when my father finally succumbed to my begging as well as my (excellent) reasoning that he'd worry less about me away at school if I had a phone on me at all times. The students I'll be teaching this summer, they got cell phones when they hit high school (if not before, sadly). I didn't buy a laptop until my second year of grad school, just four years ago. Before then, I made do with a desktop that would seem clunky now. Believe it or not, I had a dial-up connection at my downtown apartment in Athens in 2007. My little generation, those of us that are in our mid and late twenties now, we saw the future coming. But it was expensive and cumbersome. We did and still prefer buying regular books. We were taught that the library held all our answers, not the internet. Our attention spans are a bit longer. We had to GO gather information for book reports and research papers. Etc.
Over the last couple of months, I've been brainstorming how to make my course--The History of the American South--streamlined in such a way that makes it palatable for my students but also chocked full of surprise and easily accessible depth. Here are a few tactics I've come up with:
-I'm starting off the semester by juxtaposing "the boring" history with a more modern take on it all. The first day of class, I will present my students with my "ultimate southern history music playlist"--something I concocted and posted on here last summer. It spans the whole twentieth century, highlighting popular songs that, either on purpose or accidentally, shed light on the southern experience or how the South is perceived in broader culture. We'll watch youtube clips if we have to that day. I want these kids to know that the ideas about where they come from, whether their own or someone else's, color their world and invade their mind every day. What is heritage, exactly? What is the southern mind? Is it mint juleps and seersucker (which some of these Georgia undergrads own for their frat party wardrobes), or is it chicken-fried steak, boiled cabbage, and bare feet? Obviously it's both. I'll hit them with this trendier approach, looking at songs like Neil Young's "Alabama" and Outkast's "Rosa Parks," and then two days later ask them to sink their eye-teeth into a heavy article by historian Mart Stewart about life in colonial Savannah (published in 1991). They've got to learn to mix the two mediums more. That's what we all need more of again--less New York Times on demand in blurbs, more time sitting down with pages on a table.
-I'm going to show them the movie "O Brother Where Art Thou?" and ask them to explain it to me.
-I'm going to take them on a mini-field trip around Athens, a scavenger hunt of sorts, and demand they identify the historic places in their own town that hold deeper meaning. Athens is small, but it's old. The mansions in Cobbham, the buildings on Main Campus, the strips downtown that used to house primarily black-owned businesses...it's all there in close quarters for them to re-look at.
If I have one goal for the summer, it's to trim the fat off the history they think they know (in other words, forget spending a whole day talking about the battle of Gettysburg, instead we'll talk about how the Civil War is represented in modern culture and whether public history has gotten it right) and get them away from their ipads for a few minutes at a time.
PS (And I'm sure this will warrant a dedicated blog post once I have time to fully process it.) Don't even get me started on Mike Huckabee's new "history" website for kids (http://learnourhistory.com/). The first "lesson"? "The Reagan Revolution" DVD for $9.99. Worst moment? When a black man wearing a t-shirt with the word "disco" on it tries to mug a kiddie time traveler--because, you know, it's 1977 and the country has got to pot solely because of disco-dancing, knife-wielding youths.
May I vomit? This man must be stopped.
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