Sixth Tips for Teachers Meeting: Spring 08

In the final Tips for Teachers meeting of the Spring 08 semester, we watched excerpts from the film, The History Boys, adapted from the play of the same name by Arnold Bennett. The story takes place in a grammar school in Yorkshire in 1983, and mainly focuses on two teachers with different pedagogies; Hector, who is an older man and English Literature teacher, who believes in knowledge for its own sake, and an abundance of culture and creativity (the students often burst into song, recite poetry, or lines from a film when in his class); and Irwin, a very young new History teacher, who says that truth does not matter, but recommends that saying something different for the sake of making one’s exam paper stand out, is what is important.

The film follows the progress of a group of boys who are studying for the Oxbridge (Oxford and Cambridge) entrance exams, under these two different teachers. Many of us commented on how outspoken and passionate the boys were, and how it is rare to see this amongst New Jersey students today. Often, it was agreed, we see students who are glib and do not pursue knowledge in such amazing depth as was the case for the boys in this film. It was suggested that possibly the very fact that the group of boys in the film had such longevity with each other, having been in the same class for many years, might have contributed to this trend in them, yet even so it was remarkable how nice they were to each other, and how they tolerated each other’s weaknesses and admired each other’s strengths.

A factor, too, was that this film took place in the 1980’s, and we speculated that perhaps students read more then than many do now, and how modern-day technology might have short circuited the depth of knowledge (a topic we have dwelt on in previous Tips for Teachers meetings). Some of us talked about how we ask our students if they read for pleasure, and sadly only a few do, and one WP teacher said she thought this was simply because students do not know how to choose. However, one remarked that students do approach librarians to ask for recommendations.

Returning specifically to the film, we asked about how similar or different were the teaching styles of Irwin and Hector. In one interesting scene, Irwin had taken the students to see a war memorial, and looking at the list of names, he said it was not so much “lest we forget” as it was “lest we remember”. In other words, he was implying that once we built a war memorial, we could then forget the dead. Hector, though, had asked one of the students to recite some words from Hardy, about a fallen young soldier, Hodge, fighting on a field, and whose bones were ground up and spread as fertilizer, yet who still had the dignity of a name and thus a means to be remembered. It was almost as if, we commented, that Irwin saw things as they were, and gave them a sharp angle of interpretation, whereas Hector saw truth through art, as in reciting a poem to understand the event.

These radically different approaches to teaching and learning confused the boys to the extent that when Irwin was asked by the headmaster, to team-teach with Hector, the class started off, despite the fact that the two teachers and the boys were sitting in a circle, in complete silence. When asked why nobody spoke, one student had, as a WP instructor remarked, impressive powers of metacognition, as he said, “Do you want us to be smart or thoughtful?” This illustrated the interesting question as to how much do students just give teachers what they want, in order to get a good grade, rather than embark in true learning?

As one member of our meeting said, Irwin wanted the boys to ignore the truth, but wouldn’t this mean that there should be a shared understanding of what’s expected as true, to know how to effectively create something that is different? And another WP teacher said that is it not the case that truth is not necessarily factual, but more that it is conventional wisdom?

In the class that Hector and Irwin team-taught, the subject of discussion that ultimately arose was that of the Holocaust. Hector asked how tourists could go to concentration camps and eat sandwiches and take photos of each other smiling, and this reminded some of us of Schlosser’s piece about building a McDonald’s one third of a mile away from the concentration camp of Dachau. One WP instructor asked if students need to know about the Holocaust now, as he doubted whether future employers would find it of relevance. Another WP member said that this sort of event was important to know as it would reflect upon values, and a true meshing of values between employer and employee was important in the workplace, to which the first WP said he thought this was of less importance. This brings up the crucial question as to how to decide what is significant to teach our students.

We concluded by lamenting that so much of high school teaching is teaching towards tests, and we asked about why couldn’t we infuse a love of learning for its own sake, as Hector did. However, many of us also said that we encourage students to take risks and say something different in their papers, which mirrors Irwin’s approach only to the extent, I think, that we still believe in authenticity whereas Irwin did not see this as important. But, asked one WP teacher, do students ever wonder why they need to be original?