5.1.1 Teachers: A Guide to the World

Before we begin our lecture on the "forgotten half," I want to give you an informal quiz. This is a five item, multiple choice quiz:

Question 1: Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. The question is "how long was it from the time he last saw land in the old world until he first saw land in the new world?"
A) 1 month
B) 3 months
C) 6 months
D) 3 years

Question 2: Is what we know about the Vikings of North America all...
A) rumours
B) proven, but by questionable evidence
C) extensively documented

Question 3: What numerals were on the first clock face when it was invented in Medieval Europe?
A) Arabic numerals
B) Roman numerals
C) alphabet
D) symbols
E) no face

Question 4: Where was moveable type invented?
A) China
B) India
C) Germany
D) Russia
E) Scotland

Question 5: A century before Columbus sailed the ocean blue the Chinese were doing a lot of sailing and exploring. How long were the Chinese treasure ships?
A) 25 feet
B) 50 feet
C) 100 feet
D) 200 feet
E) 400 feet

Why aren't we ever taught any of this in school? This is not new stuff.!

About those clocks -- they had no face because the time was told by bells, calling the pious monks to prayer. The early models only went "bong" on the hour, later ones rang on the half and then the quarter hour. Question 4 theanswer is China.

The Chinese made movable type in the 11th Century. The only problem was they didn't get it quite right; instead of having one letter on the end of each type block they had a whole phoneme. Instead of an alphabet of blocks they hada whole language -- 2000 different blocks. It was such a pain in the neck to pick from 2000 type sticks that after 50 years they gave up and went back to carving the plates by hand. They were that close to creating the monumental invention that later transformed Western civilization!

The Chinese treasure ships were 425 feet long and they were wider than Columbus's ship was long.

The Vikings left behind considerably informative and humours records of their travels. I have included a sample of some stories here.


A collection of Viking Trivia:
Frietus Erikson, who was Leif Erikson's sister and once the leader of an expedition to North America, discovered Iceland. Her crew did not have the best navigation skills and one day when they were on their way home from Northern Europe when they got lost and discovered Iceland by accident. The Viking discovery of America was very
similar -- they got lost on the way to Greenland and ran into the coast of Newfoundland in Canada. In fact, the guy who first got there was so bored with the whole thing that he turned around and went back, and didn't even bother to go ashore.

During Frietus Erikson's expedition they ran into trouble with the Indians. They had no strategy for dealing with them, and beyond naming them "scralings" they hadn't really considered how to interact with. One day the "scralings" attacked. The Vikings turned and ran even though Freitous called them back to fight. Pretty soon she had to start running too, but she couldn't run very fast because she was pregnant. But then she came across a dead Viking on the path. Freitous grabbed his sword, ripped open her tunic exposing her breasts, slapped her breasts with the side of the sword and took out after the Indians. That sight so discombobulated the Indians that they turned and ran, and she saved the colony.


Okay, did you pass the quiz (two out of six or better)?
My score would have been a zero.

There is a serious purpose in this quiz -- there is a lot of very important information that lurks behind some of thosequestions. When we study Columbus in school, we never give any credit to the Vikings who had been there first. I think we downplay the Vikings because it kind of undermines the Columbus myth and we don't want to detract from that because that is such an important part of our heritage. It isn't much of a story to tell kids that the early explorers weren't even interested in going ashore. In terms of the discovery of America I think that sometimes we short-change
students by not giving them some of the real stories, which are often more interesting than the myths.

Why do we make history so dull? If you think something is dull you don't learn much from it, but if you think something is exciting there are lots of lessons to be learned. I like the question about the medieval clocks because you know we make assumptions about clocks, that all clocks have faces for example, and it is fun to have those
assumptions up-ended. Who knows what might have happened in terms of Chinese civilization had they been able to communicate with moveable type. With the printing press the world was transformed in a way that it will never be the same again, and this type of advancement could have taken place in China first. What would have been the
framework for our modern world if this had happened? I think it is good for us all, students and teachers, to understand how advanced the Chinese civilization was.

China is the longest spanning civilization in the world. It has a continuity 5,000 years. We don't have a clue in terms of what that means in the States. Early American history is 400 to 500 hundred years old. That means that 500 year is really ancient for U.S. history, while for China it is just the length of the last great dynasty, the Ming dynasty. It would really be neat for us to get some of the perspectives that the study of China would give us.

But even beyond that, for us to realize that Columbus's ships were dinky compared to what the Chinese were building a century earlier is a challege to our Euro-centric perspective. It doesn't sit well with people who want Europe to be the biggest and the best.

My point in all that is that as teachers we need to be broader people than we tend to be. The idea that a teacher should narrowly master a body of knowledge and need not know nothing else is bologna. The teacher should be a guide to the world for all their students. I think there are moments when you can intervene in peoples' lives and make
a real difference. Those are the moments that we as teachers should be living for. Teaching is about giving people the context of learning, and helping them understand how to deal with that context. This is what education is all about, and without these skills, students will continually emerge from high school unprepared to deal with life in the 21st century.

What is teaching all about as stated in this passage?
Mrs. Foxwell teaches United States History to eleventh graders who have heard the same lessons repeated year after year thus far. How can she make her lessons interesting to a class of thirty who could already recite the textbook by now?