Lies My Teacher Told Me, Chapter 10

This chapter of Loewen discusses what we know as the recent past. For my generation, we think of the current war on terror, the attack on September 11, and now the current government shutdown. For past generations, this was the war in Vietnam, the attack on Pearl  Harbor, the stock market crash in 1929. As these things are happening, they don't register to us as a moment in history because they aren't- they're NOW. I think that understanding how NOW effects the future will help a lot in teaching these recent moments in history. It will be important as an educator to approach teaching the recent past in much of the same way we teach that which has long ago been forgotten. Loewen describes the African approach to the make-up of society as having the living, the living-dead, and the dead. When we teach about the living-dead, we are talking about people who have recently passed or events that have recently transpired which still have members of the living around to remember. It is said that humans die twice- on the day of their death, and then again some time later when somebody says their name for the last time. In history, we are going to be in charge of teaching many events that still have people alive to remember. Loewen argues that textbooks today ignore answering "why". When we teach about events that happened a long time ago, we question and analyze and tear to pieces the facts surrounding every inch of history-until we get to the present. In the present, we are timid. We  honor the dead but we don't question. We don't judge, and we leave out a lot when teaching our children in order to be sensitive and respect those who died. But why is this any different than studying World War I? Industrialization? Any part of the past? I think that it is important to teach about the recent past in the same, analytical way.

This link takes you to an interactive timeline of the events surrounding September 11. This could be a good tool for helping students understand what happened that day to our nation. Teaching 9/11

I believe that students deserve to understand why we give a moment of silence on September 11 rather than just doing it before we move on with our day. To prevent repetition of the past, we must understand what took society down pathways of war and destruction. I think that it is actually hugely beneficial to be taught by somebody who was there. In middle school, we used to get guest speakers who were survivors of Nazi Germany, and this was awesome because it made everything that happened during World War II real as opposed to just another story. Once students can make a connection with a real person who remembers what it was like to be there on a day that was worthy of text book publication, that moment in history becomes larger than life to them as well. Some may argue bias, but I think that when students get to hear my story about waking up and walking to school with my friend Dennis, listening to him tell me about the awesome plane crash he saw on the television that morning, and then our realization once we got to school that something awful had happened- that it wasn't some cool stunt for morning news-watchers to enjoy- once students hear how my father was scheduled to fly into Boston on the morning of the attacks and only didn't go once the government shut down the airports, once students hear how something that they think doesn't matter anymore effected every part of my life and the lives of every American citizen, once they hear that I eventually came to date a US Marine who deployed to Afghanistan twice during the War on Terror- history comes to life, and the living-dead are honored.

The Big Question- how do we help students if we are the ones in the role of authority if something like 9/11 were to happen again during a school day? How do you approach something before it even falls into the memory hole?