question for teachers about bill of rights

[LWolf]

23. I try to avoid teaching words and dates to memorize.

I don't think it's possible to teach history without teaching cause and effect. That's what I teach...the writing of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and the factors and factions at the Constitutional Convention.

There are plenty of recent examples. I don't "teach" those examples. Neither do I discourage discussion of them, if they come up.

I teach minors. That requires me to stay politically neutral in the classroom.

I encourage them to explore and to research their questions, and debate their conclusions. They are allowed to express their interpretations in the classroom, and they are required to use evidence to back up those interpretations when they do so.

I remember my high school teachers stepping out of that neutral box; we were older, about to become adults, and we were allowed to challenge them if we disagreed, as long as we did so constructively, with evidence. In the current authoritarian climate, with teachers being burned daily at the metaphorical stake by the press, by the community, and by way too many parents, it's too easy to destroy a career.

My professors never had to worry; we were adults, and were expected to come to class with the ability to analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and debate the information we were given. And, again, we were free to challenge any position taken by a professor, as long as we did so with intellectual integrity.

I don't teach high school or college. I teach middle school. The students are younger, and at the age parents begin to fear losing control. In the modern world, open questioning of an authority figure isn't allowed by many of our parents. The majority of my parents teach their kids to be passive, and to never question anything they're told. Those parents go on the attack if they think their "family value" of unquestioning obedience or acceptance of what they are told is being undermined. Every time their student is given a weighty question to wrestle with, someone will be on the phone complaining.

There are some on the other side of the coin as well; parents who encourage their students to be obstructive and oppositional, under the umbrella of "questioning." Their way of "sticking it" to those hated teachers.

Maybe things are different today because of the disdain for, and distrust of, teachers in general that has become part of the national psyche since the Reagan administration.

The bottom line, though, is that parents expect that their children will not be taught from a biased position. They have a right to expect that. So we remain neutral.