Originally written in 2016. This post reflects my early teaching experience and the philosophy that later shaped my research and writing on education, culture, and student experience.
Until recently, I taught seventh graders about the world. Early in the school year, my students would usually ask the standard when are we ever going to use this? I don’t hate the question; I didn’t really get history growing up either. The history teachers I had growing up didn’t really teach history in a way that brought it alive for me. I remember spending a lot of time aimlessly reading a textbook, memorizing names of states, and drawing in class while the teacher wrote names of dead presidents on the board. History classes were a nope for me.
But the stories from history aren’t dry. They’re the thing that makes history exciting. History came alive for me when my dad told me bedtime stories about his own childhood, or about the gurus, or about his own childhood, or about how Hari Singh Nalwa expanded the Sikh empire, or about the things he learned from his father and uncle. The stories hooked me (because, to be fair, this stuff was not ~yawn~ “history”). This was the stuff of novels, and action movies, and dramas, and war games.
The stuff of these stories was the same stuff made me love the Shadow series, and action hero movies, and World of Warcraft.
And then somehow I became a history teacher.
And I decided I was going to teach with a focus on the stories, the themes, and the feelings . Because that’s what sticks. For most students, it won’t be the dates, or names of regions, or lists with names of dead guys. It’ll be adventures and concepts and interpersonal dramas. When history emphasizes these, for most kids, suddenly, it becomes very exciting.
And so, for more than any other reason, I teach history because I love stories.
The entire Social Studies umbrella, history classes included, are essentially about the interwoven mess of human experiences: the stories of our people. I may be a somewhat nontraditional history teacher in that I don’t self-identify as a history buff, and didn’t grow up with a noteworthy penchant for trivia from any particular era in history. I grew up with the standard Maryland Social Studies curriculum (tossed with a little bit of Indian and Sikh history outside of school).
In truth, what brought history alive for me was reading Orson Scott Card’s military strategy fiction: reading and imagining stories (albeit fictional ones) of political and military strategy in a romanticized way served as a catalyst for my realizing that the real-life version of history could be just as intriguing and dramatic. After reading Card’s books I started to kind of see the individual stories of people in real life rising and falling (and with them, their nations) as interconnected (large-scale stories/histories about the political impact of decisions feel relatable when thought about as the experiences of actual people). And then it became exciting.
It may also be because I was born on the opposite side of the world from where I live and teach now, and so I’ve heard distinct, separate histories. At home, I heard the stories and histories of my ancestors. Then, I became an American. And in school, I learned an entirely new history, with its own stories and perspectives. And after becoming immersed and soaked in it, I realized there are an infinite number of stories about an infinite number of peoples and their experiences (and even an infinite number of versions of those stories to be told and heard). Which, for a lover of storytelling, is wildly appealing.
Many of the same reasons I teach history relate to why students need to learn about history and social studies: to make sense of the world around them.
History is taught in almost the same way that Philosophy is taught: with a focus on questioning and on developing skills.
Specifically, they need to develop Historical Thinking Skills to develop a framework for thinking, which means students need to be able to:
In many ways, the study of history teaches students to become independent thinkers. So it’s important that we do it well.
Author’s note (added later): This teaching philosophy later shaped my research on South Asian American students’ experiences in U.S. schools – Research & Writing.
Author’s note #2: In hindsight, it’s probably not surprising that my fixation on stories did not stay in the classroom. Nearly a decade later, that same obsession has shaped my first novel, The River’s Daughter, which (though its a romance with magical realism) explores history and ancestral memory.
