What I Learned in 11th Grade American History

I had this crazy nightmare last night about how I had to go back to high school to retake one specific class from my junior year because the teacher messed up my grade and it wasn’t valid or something. So despite my having a bachelor’s degree, I didn’t have a high school diploma—which was like the end of the world in my dream. Psychoanalysis about the dream and why I’m having it as a mostly-successful degree-wielding professional aside, it really made me revisit some concerns I have with the US school system and the teachers that are instructing my and future generations. And really got me thinking about what I learned in the course.

The course was 11th grade American History. The teacher shall remain nameless—not to protect the innocent guilty, but because my mind decided that she doesn’t deserve the respect to have her name remembered and I have no idea what it was. I sat through the year in the rudimentary-level history course, with quite possibly the worst teacher in my educational career. Bored out of my mind. Learning things that we don’t always want our children to learn, yet some that have proven to be quite helpful “in the real world.”

What the course taught me

1. People in power are not always intelligent
2. Prior shows of competency result in no future evaluation
3. Doing nothing has no consequences
4. People will (try to) exploit you if you’re the best
5. I only need to know how to game the system to pass
6. The system doesn’t care what you know as long as you pass
7. We had a President Buchanan at some point in the 1800s (but nothing about his contribution to our country during that time).

People in power are not always intelligent

Somewhere out there in the memory of the Internet is a quote that goes something like to teach a course, you only need to read the textbook before the students do. I can’t find the source, but my hope is that when I read this it was part of a larger article that promoted reliable, proven teaching methods and pedagogy and how that can translate to many different subjects. Because if you are a good teacher, you can sometimes get by with that. I mention it because I often wondered if this teacher even read our textbook or knew what she was teaching. (And she definitely had no great understanding of effective teaching methods or valuable evaluation.)

Case and point: according to her, our 15th president was some guy named “Buck-nan.” She didn’t say this just once, but many times throughout the unit. In fact, I’m not sure she ever called good ole’ James Buchanan by his actual name. I have vague memories of other non-factual statements, but that is the one that has always stood out.

Valuable or bullshit? Valuable. It’s true. People in power really can be idiots. You have to learn to soldier on and do what you can to eventually be in a position of power over them, or never have to deal with them again. While rearranging my schedule to get out of her class didn’t work—the counselor was gleeful when she found that I could just go into another section taught by Ms. Idiot—ultimately I only had to spend a year under her. I’m sure at some point in my career I’ll be stuck under an idiot manager for longer than that.

Prior shows of competency result in no future evaluation

As we moved into the second semester, she decided that the class didn’t know how to take notes. Her solution: write out her lecture notes on the chalkboard and require us to copy them down verbatim, which she later collected and graded based on whether we followed her instructions. My execution: take notes like I always did, including shrthnd, abbrv.s, leaving out common knowledge points, etc, and work on another class’ homework when I got bored. The evaluation of my assignment: never happened. No feedback on my blatant disregard for her instructions, no markdown, I’m not even sure she looked at my notes. I learned that since she thought I was competent, she didn’t think that she needed to reinforce learning goals with me.

Valuable or bullshit? Bullshit. No one knows everything, and just because they can excel at, say, multiple choice tests, doesn’t mean they can write an essay worth anything. And just because they can deliver once doesn’t mean they understand the new subject matter. Constant evaluation and followup is integral to learning. Constant evaluation is also part of a professional career. What, you think because you delivered one project correctly your boss is never going to evaluate you again? Or because you flipped burgers really well one day, when you don’t do anything on your next shift no one’s going to notice? Yeah, that’s not how the world works. And that’s not how the classroom should work, either.

Doing nothing has no consequences

This is an extension of the previous point. One day she assigned a worksheet to take home and complete (or some words to define or some similar sort of thing). I didn’t do it. So, I came to the next class, she collected the work, and I simply said “I didn’t do it” Her response? That’s ok, I’ll give you the points because you would have gotten 100% anyway.

Valuable or bullshit? Bullshit. This is one that I learned the hard way more than once. As I’m sure many other people have. But, it’s also not the only time it’s been reinforced. It’s all about follow-through. I’ve heard “if you don’t [do/stop doing] XXXXXXX, then we [won't do XXXX/'ll go home right now]” so many times that it’s become cliché, and can’t think of a single time I’ve seen follow-through on the threat. It may be implicit, but assignments are the same way: if you don’t do the assignment, you won’t get credit. At least, that’s how I always thought evaluation worked. That’s how a job works: if you don’t do the work, you won’t get paid (or continue to have that job).

People will (try to) exploit you if you’re the best

I’ll preface this with saying that I love trivia, and am good at trivia type games, not necessarily that I knew everything there was to know in the class. We’d play pseudo-Jeopardy in class some days. Eventually I was banned from playing because I always got the answers right and it “was unfair to the other students.” (At least I wasn’t asked to throw the game or something.) Then someone organized a competition between our class and the other history teacher’s class during the same period. I heard the comment we’re guaranteed to win, because we have Rae more than once, from the teacher and classmates. Evidently because I was on the team, they didn’t need to pull their weight. Guess what? I was absent on the competition day. My class lost, because everyone expected me to do all the work.

Valuable or bullshit? Valuable. Any time there is collaboration, there’s an opportunity for some members of the team to slack off and let the others take up their slack. There’s the opportunity for them to benefit by riding on someone’s coattails. It’s how things are done, and I’m not necessarily going to argue that it’s a bad thing. But it’s up to you if you’re going to let them or not. And if you’re the person trying to do the exploting, well, you’re putting an awful lot on the assumption that the other person is going to put up with it.

I only need to know how to game the system to pass

In Missouri, during grade 11 you take the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) test for social sciences, a standardized test that is supposed to measure knowledge of the subject. Funding can be based off of a district’s performance in these tests, and so they’re considered important. As a result, my teacher taught the test for a good month prior. Part of that was to teach specific units based on what was likely to be on it, and part of it was to spend class time constructing simple short-answer essays that had to be three sentences long and contain a certain structure. Everything that month was about gaming the test to ensure as many students as possible passed. It didn’t matter if they retained the information afterward.

Valuable or bullshit? Mixed reaction. Gaming the system can get you pretty far. Especially if you’re learning how to figure out how to game it, it might be valuable. But in the long run, I say bullshit because if the information is important, it’s going to hurt you down the road.

The system doesn’t care what you know as long as you pass

This lesson wasn’ learned from any specific incident, but the overall experience. As with the above point and the MAP tests, the entire purpose of the class was to make sure students pass. They pass the standardized testing, and hopefully graduate (and on time) to keep the school’s own report card passing (and funding up). It doesn’t matter that I wasn’t challenged, or that I somehow managed to have a 114% grade in the class at some point (talk about grade inflation). This was further highlighted by the fact that according to my transcript, I should have been in an honors course (taught by a different teacher who also taught non-honors. Ms. Idiot didn’t teach any honors). But, since I was new to the district, and they had nothing invested in me, they couldn’t make room for me in a higher-level course. They just needed me to pass.

Valuable or bullshit? Valuable. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s true more often than not. While yes, in the right environment success and outstanding performance is rewarded, but more often than not, the job just needs to get done. Take my field for instance: in Web development, sure you can hire someone that will do a standards-compliant, scalable site for you, or you can spend as little as possible and get something serviceable. The latter gets the job done. And based on what I see out there, that’s sufficient enough for a lot of businesses, whether right or wrong. In the long run, it’ll cost them more, but they don’t care about that. It’s all about immediate results.

My corollary: just because this may be true that doesn’t mean that actually knowing something doesn’t help in the long run. Simply passing wouldn’t have gotten me into AP Government the next year (at a different school). Simply passing wouldn’t have gotten me into a top-20 liberal arts college. Simply passing wouldn’t have secured me the position I currently have when I came up for my 3-month hire-or-fire review. But you have to care because you can get by simply passing, but you don’t go up unless you know what you’re talking about and know what you’re doing. And in the real world, the system doesn’t always necessarily care if you fail, even if it doesn’t care if you excel.

We had a president…

I just threw this one in because really, I will never forget that we had a president named Buchanan thanks to Ms. Idiot’s inability to pronounce his name. But like most everything from that class, I haven’t actually retained any knowledge about him. In fact, it’s only thanks to checking Wikipedia while writing this that I know he’s the 15th president, and that Pierce preceded him and Lincoln succeded him.

The Result

Don’t get me wrong. Some of these “lessons” I learned from this class were not new. They reinforced things I’d been learning throughout my entire schooling. Some were later corrected—some more gently than others. But, many of those lessons were reversed because of quality schooling. What about my peers that didn’t have the luxury of teachers that genuinely cared that I did well because I actually knew the material and had high expectations of me? Many of them are probably still assuming that it all holds true. That’s not a good sign for our future as a society.

What excitingly horrible things have you learned in the classroom (be it primary, secondary, or higher education) that had nothing to do with the subject at hand?

Just a fun side note: none of this takes the medal for “most bullshit, incorrect statement by a history teacher that I know of.” My youngest sister’s third grade teacher marked her down on an assignment because my sister, at 8 years old, had the temerity to point out that Ben Franklin was not a president when they did a worksheet presidents and currency. I don’t think that she, my sister, and mother ever reached a resolution on that matter. For all I know, to this day that teacher still thinks we had President Franklin, just because he’s on the $100 bill.