I was with 1st graders yesterday morning comparing their families and what made them special, then I talked with 4th graders about the Erie Canal right before lunch. For the afternoon, I dropped in a high school US History II class, just to get in the mix and see what’s happening. That’s one of the benefits to my role as a Social Studies Supervisor, I get to see teaching and learning across the entire K-12 spectrum.
The 10th graders were at the start of the Early Cold War/Culture of the 1950s unit and just finished the Red Scare Dot game as introduction to McCarthyism. After the teacher lead them through a quick summary of HUAC and Joseph McCarthy a student raised her hand and asked, “Why did this happen?” At first, both the teacher and I were speechless, “Why?” questions are rare among high-performing students – “Will we need to know this for the test?” is much more common. She continued, “Why did people listen to him?, why was he the guy who became famous for this?”
This curiosity deserved more than a simple compliment, I wanted to celebrate it with a balloon drop, confetti cannon and ticker-tape parade.
Answering it though, was a little more difficult. Both the teacher and I spoke about the Soviets getting the bomb and Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs in the climate of fear at the time. I left the classroom disappointed that we didn’t do a better job with this question. Of course when I got to sit in my office afterward and flip through my notes I found dozens of names, dates, events and factoids that surrounded McCarthy’s first speech in Wheeling in February 1950 and its reception in the months that followed.
Challenged with standards coverage and limited by instrucal time, we can’t share all we know with students, but we can make good choices about what to share and how to share it.
This “Why?” question can be answered by context – But how should we present it?
The solution came to me when I remembered the moment that I first learned that the Hard Hat Riot of lower Manhattan construction workers attacking anti-war protestors happened just four days after the Kent State shootings and less than a week before two students were killed by police at Jackson State. Putting these events in a calendar and adding any others I stumbled along in the process brought May 1970 to light in a way nothing else did. The Kent State shooting followed President Nixon’s announcement that American forces were fighting in Cambodia, and this admission came only ten days after he addressed the nation about “Progress Toward Peace in Vietnam”. May of 1970 also saw the eight nuclear tests by the United States (2), France (1) and the Soviet Union (4).
This is what that looks like.
That model could also be used to address the student’s question about Joe McCarthy. It doesn’t answer it completely of course, but it puts McCarthy’s national public premier in chronological context. This seems so simple, straightforward and clear, it’s amazing we didn’t think of it before.
