One educator stated, “I’m not going to do any in-depth analysis of coconut trees.”
Stephen Colbert, a late-night broadcaster, joked last week that American students in the future will study the first part of July 2024 for the entire semester.
Teachers of history tell us he wasn’t entirely off.
Betsy Newmark, a high school teacher in Raleigh, North Carolina, for more than 20 years, said, “It seems like it’s been a decade within a month.”
Newmark is one of many teachers throughout the nation who is eager to return to the classroom and brief their pupils on the flurry of events that are worth a textbook this month.
A July 13 assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump came alarmingly close to happening during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. President Joe Biden, who succeeded Trump, dropped his reelection bid eight days later, making the time an incumbent president has made this decision in almost 50 years. As soon as he was elected, Biden backed Kamala Harris, his vice president, who would be the first woman of color to hold the position.
Teens are paying attention, if only to the memes, as teachers are excitedly preparing fresh content. A Vermont history teacher claimed that her pupils had been texting her regularly. Another person from California mentioned that she keeps a notepad by her bed to jot down lesson ideas that occur to her in the middle of the night.
A social studies teacher in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Benjamin Schulz stated, “I’m not going to do any in-depth analysis of coconut trees.” (Schulz referred to a video that went viral on social media a few weeks ago, in which the VP remembers her mother’s statement.)
Teachers aren’t sure how to handle the overland of front-page news as they prepare to return to campus for the fall semester. Many are news junkies and eager to engage in debates with their students. Some believe the rise in prominence of political memes on social media will encourage greater student engagement in the classroom.
Some people are cautious. Their determination to keep their personal opinions to themselves has increased in light of the possibility of a heated presidential election. Local and regional limitations will decide whether they have the time and the resources to discuss the current events; this dynamic reflects larger discussions in American schools on the benefits of flexible curricula and standardized testing.
Back in Raleigh, Newmark had to become associated with a pop singer, Charli XCX, after the Harris campaign adopted a social media fad that featured the artist’s album cover’s color theme and typeface. According to Newmark, a significant portion of her student’s intake comes from internet posts, which referred to “memeification of politics.”
Her high school years are coming to her memory because of the overload of recent news making headlines. Newmark and her friends followed the Watergate crisis, one of the biggest stories in American history that led to former President Richard Nixon’s resignation closely in the 1970s.
Nixon announced her resignation the day before she left college at the nation’s capital’s private George Washington University. With a deep passion for politics, Newmark desired to be at the epicenter of the action.
She stated, “One of the things I love about teaching is I want kids to understand the founders’ vision when they created government.” “I want them to see what it should be and how it isn’t.”
According to Carol Green Dennis, who began teaching government studies at her San Jose high school in August 2015, a lot has changed in the last ten years.
She stated a decade ago, “The government ran a lot more like the textbook said it did.”
However, her students are eager for context, and it is exciting to make meaning of uncommon and unusual situations.
She stated, “What is the greater story? If we’re there to help provide them with the tools to look further, they absolutely will.”
