Steven Singer is an experienced English Language Arts teacher in Pennsylvania. In this post, he shows how he created a lesson about Ukraine and linked it to Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.”
He writes:
How does one teach about war?
With pictures or words?
With speeches or documentation?
With prayers or curses?
With laughter or tears?
I began my class like I always do – with a question.
“Has anyone heard about what’s happening in Ukraine?” I asked.
A few hands, but they had only heard the words. They didn’t know what was happening.
So I showed my 8th graders a short video that summarized events so far. I drew a map of Europe and Asia on the board. I outlined Ukraine, Russia and the European union. I explained about the Soviet Union and its collapse. I explained about NATO and the struggle for power and prestige.
When I was done, there was a moment of silence. They were all staring up at me. It was one of those rare moments of stillness, a pregnant pause before the questions started raining down.
A patter at first, then a storm.
They asked about what they were hearing at home. They searched for corroboration, explanation and/or other viewpoints.
One child asked if this was NATO’s fault. If it was President Biden’s doing.
I
And yet another asked about nuclear proliferation and whether this war meant the end of the world.
I couldn’t answer all of their questions, though I tried. When there was something I couldn’t say or didn’t know, I pointed them in a direction where they might find some answers.
But it led to some interesting discussion.
Then I asked them if they had talked about any of this in their other classes – perhaps in social studies. They all said no, that a few teachers had promised to get to it after finishing the 13 colonies or another piece of mandated curriculum.
I was surprised but not shocked. I know the tyranny of the curriculum.
I was only able to talk about this, myself, because of the scope and sequence of Language Arts. You see, it was poetry time and I was about to introduce my students to Alfred Lord Tennyson and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
Continue reading to learn about the lesson.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I remember in Junior High Social Studies we had bi-weekly Current Events days where kids brought in newspaper clippings (remember newspapers?) of their own choosing to report and discuss in class.
In my last year of teaching, one of the classes I taught was high-school debate, and in that class was the daughter of one of my colleagues. At one point, I had the kids all write down a couple topics that they wanted to debate. Then I collected the topics and read them to the class. One of the approximately 60 topics was transgender bathrooms (a topic very much in the news at the time). My fellow teacher, a fundamentalist Christian, went to my principal and told her that I should be fired for this, simply for reading the topic aloud from that list. I guess that in debate class we were supposed to stick to debating such essential, substantive matters as whether the prom theme should be “Your Dreams Can Come True” or “Reach for the Stars” or which was the better Spirit Day event, “Crazy Hat Day” or “Crazy T-shirt Day.”
And now, Republican-dominated legislatures around the country are passing laws forbidding teachers from treating any topic in class that might make any kid feel uncomfortable. Oh, someone asked in Mr. Singer’s class whether there was going to be a nuclear war, and my little Billy got worried about that. Bad Mr. Singer.
If you want good teaching, stop the micromanagement. Let real teachers like Steve Singer teach.
Thank you, Steve, for keeping it real and for demonstrating in your class, so vividly, why we read this “old stuff,” why it matters. And thank you for having the courage actually to teach like this in a time when so many are fearful of the micromanagers and the state Thought Police.
Bravo!
Oh, and thank you, Diane, for sharing this. Made my day to know that there are people like Steve Singer out there in front of kids teaching so well. Of course, I knew that, but it’s nice to have such a vivid reminder.
One has to know the curriculum to know how to circumvent it!
Haaa!!! Yes!!!!
At one point in my career, I deliberately avoided knowing the curriculum as defined by the state because I did not trust the state to have the competence to decide what should be taught. Subsequent trends and ideas have led me to the understanding that I was not unwise.
Amen. I was informed in no uncertain terms that I was to stick to the day-by-day state curriculum outlines and to use only the provided textbook. Haaaaa!!! Fat chance!!! Both were embarrassingly bad.
That strategy also makes sense! I suspect you knew the curriculum quite well, hence the not using it.
bingo
Teach them all about the West’s hypocrisy…the root of this evil.
Teach them to think critically and decide for themselves.
Why not teach them about the horrors of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Putin?
I recommend this comprehensive history of communism: “The Black Book of Communism.”
Pesky,
You do hate the western world, especially the US. Are you living in the US? Why?
Peskyvera,
I notice you have an email server in Zurich.
Are you in Zurich?
If she is, maybe she’s lucky enough not to be receiving her pay, right now, in rubles. LOL.
Right, Bob, because everyone who disagrees with you is a Russian agent.
Hi, Dienne!
Dienne:
Oh, and please explain to us some more, Dienne, about how if we want to be real leftists, we should support Donald Trump and Putin. So interesting in a “this is like watching a car wreck” sort of way.
“Bob, because everyone who disagrees with you is a Russian agent.”
OMG everyone who refuses to say anything critical about Putin’s attacks on women and children IS a Russian agent. Period. The way that Tucker Carlson is a Russian agent whether he believes he is or not.
dienne77 and Peskyvera will NOT say one negative word about Putin. It doesn’t matter how many children in Ukraine die, they still have yet to write a single critical word about Putin.
And it surprises me that anyone here believes this folks are not Russian agents — and I use the definition of “agent” that includes those who are like Tucker Carlson and defend their pro-Putin view just is based on “facts”.
Everyone who refuses to say anything critical of Putin at this point is a Tucker Carlson-type of Russian asset or just a paid Russian troll.
There are two of those folks on right now. Bob, surely you can’t believe anyone could defend the attacks on families if they weren’t a troll!
Diane, scammers who deploy spam, robocalls, and bots use fake addresses from other states and countries. Asking if Pesky (perfect) is in Zurich is okay, but it might be more appropriate to ask it if it is human. Putin’s 21st century propaganda is everywhere on the web.
peskyvera: Thanks for your twisted sense of senselessness and hyper inanity. Russia has invaded Ukraine and is indiscriminately bombing Ukrainian towns and cities to ashes and dust. Russia is committing crimes against humanity on a daily basis, not the West, not the USA. Please, get a brain.
Psk: Hypocritical actions are a human thing, are they not? It is the intensity of hypocracy [sic] we need to address as citizens who see our own failings and seek to repent and to ask our leaders to repent of their errant ways.
You are fond of pointing out the problems with the United States, and most of the people who post here are willing to admit the lack of perfection. Thus open societies find themselves in a position of constant ideological defense in the face of fascist cynicism. Recall Hitler in the 1930s suggesting the culpability of racist America as a justification for some of the most insane crimes against humanity. He was right, of course, America had its demons, but none of the demons of my neighbor is a justification of my own moral decisions.
Exactly. Thank you.
“Teachers cannot magic information into children’s heads. We encourage them to think.”
So true. Teaching is about opening minds as well as helping to open doors. It is OK for students to voice their opinions and even disagree with each other, even when the teacher does not provide an opinion. It is how we can help develop discerning citizens and consumers. Life is not all black and white. There are lots of shades of grey. Well done, Mr. Singer.
YES!!!
It’s heartening to return here this morning to find a great teacher like Steven using currently prescient questions to provide context for great literary works and then, using the great literary works to ask more questions about the world in which we live. That is how I too teach. We do not tell students what to think; we teach them to think.
But, importantly, we give them information, knowledge, to think with. That’s key.
Yes.
And, I cannot emphasize this enough, procedural knowledge–how to do something, whether it be how to plane a piece of wood or how to format a Works Cited Page or how to do a particular kind of thinking, is itself knowledge that needs, in many cases, to be taught because it doesn’t come naturally. It doesn’t come naturally to use the hypothetico-deductive method or to do a properties analysis or how to use means-ends testing or any of a thousand other methods for thinking. Consider, for example, coming up with a new product or design. There are techniques that can be used to do that–convergence (bringing together the formerly or usually separate), divergency via specialization or subtraction of features/stylization, borrowing from a totally different field, theme and variations (lots of techniques here), changing the medium or channel, crowdsourcing, successive recombination and differential survival (evolutionary method), and so on. I have seen far, far, far too often teachers imagining that they are “teaching critical thinking” when the kid walks away from that “teaching” with no new, useful procedural knowledge that he or she has acquired. There’s a kind of common sloppiness or laziness or stupidity in some pedagogy and curricula that seems to imagine that if you just say to a kid, think, he or she will have the wherewithal to do so without guidance, and the more specific and concrete the guidance, typically, the more successful the kid can be, and nothing succeeds like success. I can teach almost anyone to do line drawing in perspective using the Durer screen method, for example. That’s a good example, for people tend to think that this is simply a matter of innate, mystical talent that a person has or doesn’t have, but in fact, it can be taught to almost anyone IF ONE IMPARTS THE NECESSARY PROCEDURAL KNOWLEDGE.
Yes, in order to learn to think, you have to do it, to make a habit of it. But a lot of practical thinking isn’t a matter of building muscle. It requires actual procedural knowledge that has to be taught.
We need a lot more teaching of concrete, useful procedural knowledge for critical thinking. Here are step-by-step procedures for creating a metaphor. Anyone can do it, says the Bob Ross of writing poetry, by following these steps. And once you do that a few times, you will really understand, you will grok, how the little machine of a metaphor works and where it breaks down.
In other words, just giving kids opportunities to think isn’t enough. You have to give them world knowledge to think about and procedures for doing that thinking in a powerful, useful way.
Yay for Steve Singer and his students.
Great lesson.
I remember lessons like that in math classes down through the years. when the Berlin Wall came down, When the planes flew into the towers. When the brothers and old students began to go to Iraq. When the Arab Spring began to spread. All those years I would just stop class for a bit and remind the children that there were some things worth stopping math instruction for. Damn the Curriculum! Full speed ahead!
Today the kids are reading about Ukraine after their quiz. Just read and ask. Who knows the answers?
Roy hit it! The biggest problem is identified in Steve Singer’s sentence “I know the tyranny of the curriculum.” In a Social Studies class, be a teacher and work it in to your course. It must be done. There is no perfect curriculum in history classes. Ask a group of Social Studies teachers what must be taught in history or any other subject and you will never be able to cover it all in 13 years of K-12 let alone a single school year. But what is happening before your eyes at the moment always has historical precedent. History is relevant. Let the kids experience it.
And the most important lesson is that they will never experience all of it, for it is large. How often we give someone who was an eyewitness to some history credit for understanding it better than one who merely writes about it. But that is a false logic. The eyewitness cannot see the big picture any more than the person who reads about it. It can, however, inspire the eyewitness to read and think about it.
We have just been discussing World War II. I know, it is a bit late in the year, but we had a lot of flooding this year. One of the things we talked about was the affect of war on civilians in the age of the bomber. Students were interested to know how wars affect civilians.
In the Thirty Years War (1608-1638?), civilians were traumatized by the repeated attacks that targeted them purposefully. English Puritans were radicalized by reports of protestant civilian casualties in a war that devastated Europe’s central region. The war can be seen to some extent as one of the causes of the Puritan revolution and the nasty civil war that followed.
Almost all of the wars that have been fought since The Second World War have carried off the souls of more civilians than soldiers. What effect will this have? Apparently this is true in Ukraine today. Where will it all lead?
Yes. Yes. Yes. THIS needs to be widely known. Modern war kills babies and grandmas. The question must always be, how many babies is this worth? I would hope that the answer would be, none. No objective justifies this, not when the U.S. did it in The Second Iraq War. Not when Russia is doing it now in Ukraine.
Oh, and guess what? In the U.S. I can say this without being arrested and sent to prison for 15 years as in Russia right now.
I wonder how long a Russian citizen could criticize the policy of Russia in Syria before receiving one of Putin’s Atomic magic potions.
Bob: Who today is becoming a new hostile because of what Putin is doing in Russia? Putin’s myopic sense of himself and his Russia, like the Hapsburg myopia in 1610, will sow the seeds for a harvest that is bitter for years after Putin is a distant memory. Such is the stuff of tragedy.
Nailed it, Roy. The former head of British intelligence once commented that Bush Jr.’s War in Iraq simply spread fertilizer on the little seeds of terrorism.
We water, we weed, we make sure
the soil is fertile.But it is up
to the child to grow and in which
direction to strive.
Teachers can’t magic information
into children’s heads. It is up
to the child to think. We may
make them “feel”, but we can’t
make them think.
That’s why scare mongers are so
ignorant and absurd when their
“affirmations” are based on
mind-reading or predicting the
future.
If we show ’em THIS, then
they’ll think THAT…
If we somehow fill their heads
with “know-that” they will
then know how.
“Why do you look at the speck
of sawdust in your brother’s eye
and pay no attention to the plank
in your own eye?”
I always enjoy your insights and somewhat poetic responses.
“…your wise men don’t know how it feels to be thick as a brick.”
Or this take, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxMVcrvtqqs
This guy begins by saying that “this is a conversation” in which “I do the talking.” The rest of what he has to say is on the same level. Lies. BS. Russia has invaded Ukraine, a sovereign member of the U.N., to oust a democratically elected leader, in violation of the international law of aggression. It is killing babies and grandmas and using prohibited weapons to do this, all war crimes. End stop.
This guy isn’t even good at what he does, lol. He simply asserts x and then shouts (literally shouts), “BUT PEOPLE IGNORE THIS FACT!” Again and again. LMAO. Here’s his MO:
“Shape-shifting reptilian extraterrestrials from Alpha Draconis have a space port under the Vatican,” writes Looney Newsy. BUT PEOPLE JUST IGNORE THIS FACT!
Hilarious. But how does one account for this? I think that in this guy’s case, it’s a combination of stupidity and ideological blindness.
cx: stupidity, naïveté, and ideological blindness
I will give him this, decentralization of power is good thing. You know, exactly the opposite of what is the case in Russia today under Tsar Vlad and his kleptocrats.
Agreed, so long as “power checks power” as Montesquieu suggested. How often we see decentralized power becoming a prelude to adventuresome tyrants. I am thinking of the fragmentation of the German states being an invitation to various European powers.
Unfortunately, great wealth in certain places has upset the balance of internal as well as international power. I fear we are due a funeral for Montesquieu.
good points, Roy. And as far as anarcho-syndicalism goes, I would settle for collective bargaining, labor seats on corporate boards, a living minimum wage tied to local COLA, and beefed-up Employee Stock Ownership Plans. Call me a crazy radical.
cx: with local COLAs
And, ofc, universal single-payer healthcare, including vision and dental
Grandmothers and babies are being killed by an invader, and this guy wants to turn this into a rant about IMF austerity measures. Breathtakingly confused.
I like Russell Brand, but you don’t so much, so be it. Now’s not the time to question US foreign policy, do that when Putin is contained, so be it. But again, for a blog devoted to the corruption of profit in education, I see the same patterns in the medical world and foreign policy, corruption by money. Anyway, what is the solution to Putin? A no fly zone? Polish fighter jets? Good thing Trump doesn’t have his finger to blow up the world, but Putin does, and how can he be diffused if he cares about himself more than the world?
You and I agree about this, Ted–about the corruption by money. And I am appalled by our own history. We have much to atone for.
One of the leading presidential candidates in 2024–he’s already fired his first salvo in that race–will be a guy who oversaw the largest healthcare fraud in US history (if we decline to call the whole system one big RICO, which it is).
I also have to give Mr. Brand this: he totally rocks the white man’s Jesus look.
Rick Scott? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/us/politics/senate-republicans-midterms-scott-mcconnell.html Back to the days of serfdom.
And he walked away Scott-free.
Perhaps picking up two or three historical anecdotes or narratives about current Ukrainian territory, which was formerly a part of USSR is a good start. I don’t think many K-12 students are ready to comprehend this whole developments due to the complexity of foreign policy and war dating back to more than 30 years ago.
Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill published a good article on Putin’s war and US/NATO’s involvement in Kosovo. You don’t have to follow Aaron Mate or Matt Taibbi, but I think this one is fair and balanced.
https://theintercept.com/2022/03/07/ukraine-russia-nato-kosovo-war-crimes/
I listened to Holodomor on Stuff You Missed History Class podcast yesterday. It’s a Ukrainian holocaust of famine and Russian suppression that cost over 4 million people in the early 1930s. You can get some good sources by googling it. University of Alberta has an excellent Ukrainian studies.
Link here: https://education.holodomor.ca/holodomor-memorial-day-2017/
https://education.holodomor.ca/teaching-materials/
Ken, I read the article in The Intercept and thought it was a sophisticated form of whataboutism. “Of course, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is awful, but what about all the dreadful things the US and NATO have done.” Watching a war happening close up is horrifying. The fact that most of the world is wearing blue and yellow pins, lighting up important monuments in blue and yellow, and sending lots of thoughts and prayers—will not save the Ukrainians. Putin is systematically reducing the cities of Ukraine to rubble. The question before us is what should be done to stop the carnage? Is there any way that doesn’t involve starting a world war? Putin has already threatened to use nukes.
At this juncture, I wonder why it’s valuable to go into a recitation of the violence and deaths caused by the U.S. and NATO. We are familiar with the litany; none of this is news. But is it intended to warn that we are no better than Putin and thus have no grounds on which to help Ukraine survive? That’s the way I read it.
I think his main point is US/NATO’s past history of war aggression makes it difficult–much more difficult as the record piles up — for them to stand on moral ground when facing war by other country, including Putin’s invasion. He may have a point in saying that Russians who are sending a message against Putin by protesting his war at the risk of arrest and detention are more compelling than western politicians and media pundits.
I don’t feel comfortable mainstream media and politicians calling in unison for no-fly zone or labeling all Russians the enemy of democracy. That’s like revisiting the moment of 9/11 and Iraq War.
Sending troops to a combat zone is really dangerous because it means we will have a World War III. President Biden just made it clear on Twitter that we must prevent that to happen. I think vice president Kamala Harris and diplomats are now in Poland for any diplomatic options to put the evil man into corner.
So the logic of his post is that if you are not on high moral ground, you should not take sides? We were not on high moral ground when the Second Workd War started. Why did we intervene in Europe to defeat Hitler?
Well said, Diane! This whataboutism is also complicity in the murder of Ukrainian civilians that is going on right now.
It doesn’t contradict the fact that Putin is a pure evil, dictator, and what he is doing against Ukraine and Russians in his country is totally unjustifiable. I think the key question is “Can the US have enough moral ground today to send a coherent message against war as they used to do — let’s say, +30 years ago?”
My answer to the question is yes, if it is at the time of 1st Gulf War or Kosovo. But, today, my answer is, “I don’t really know.” Many countries have witnessed US wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, and countless drone strikes in the middle east in the last 20 years, and that has shaped their understanding of America in the 21st century.
In my view, US is struggling to gain an approval from other countries today. 35 countries voted abstention on UN Resolution on Russian invasion. Many of those have a history of diplomatic conflict or economic sanctions with the west. It’s obvious these countries are not agreeing with the western interest on foreign policy, and the more we see these countries in the future, the harder it will become to gain international understanding. That’s my concern.
Didn’t Matt Taibbi make it clear recently that Putin is wrong?
I thought Matt Taibbi demonstrated why he is not a Russian troll by being able to criticize Putin’s actions.
Too bad many posters here seem unable to do what Matt Taibbi did – they seem to have taken a vow of silence never to criticize Putin, which is suspect.
Yes, he did that by investigating into Putin’s track record in his recent substack article. Still, there are lots of people are skeptical of him, possibly because they just don’t like that he trashed down Democrats and mainstream media’s coverage of Russiagate. They don’t really know he’s the one who called Trump as Insane Clown President.
This war also has a religious element. The Russian Orthodox Church, closely allied with Putin, officially professes belief in autocracy/monarchy, a Greater Russian Empire with its capital in Moscow, theocracy (the church and state as a single entity), and nontolerance of other faiths. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has gone in precisely the opposite direction and explicitly supports democracy, secular rule, and ecumenical tolerance. This split in the Eastern Orthodox Church is fairly recent, and it is as dramatic as is the split between the Catholics and Protestants or the Sunnis and Shiites. The Urkainian shift in religion is tantamount to Luther’s nailing the 95 Theses to the church door, and to some extent–perhaps to a great extent–this is a WAR OF RELIGION. Very recently, the Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’ Kirill (or Cyril) gave a sermon in which he argued that the invasion of Ukraine was necessary because Ukraine accepts the abomination of LGBTQ rights.
Patriarch Kirill, Putin’s strong ally:
“We have entered into a struggle that has not a physical, but a metaphysical significance. . . . For eight years there have been attempts to destroy what exists in Donbas [Eastern Ukraine]. And in Donbas there is a rejection, a fundamental rejection of the so-called values that are offered today by those who claim world power. . . . Pride parades are designed to demonstrate that sin is one variation of human behavior. That’s why in order to join the club of those countries, you have to have a gay pride parade. . . . If humanity accepts that sin is not a violation of God’s law, if humanity accepts that sin is a variation of human behavior, the human civilization will end there.”
I was poking around and ran into this article about the Patriarch’s run-in with the feminist punk group, “Pussy Riot”.
“Russian punk band were doing devil’s work, says leader of Orthodox church”
Love those women.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/25/pussy-riot-devils-work-kirill
YES!!!!
Those Pussy Riot women are incredibly brave.
Of course, all these Pussy Riot women went to prison. That’s how it will be in the United States under DeSantis or Scott, with a Repugnican House, Senate, and Extreme Court.
After the sickening terrorist attack (and incompetent police response) in Beslan, Putin and his Party’s parliament majority basically did away with regional democratic elections except as rubber stamps for Putin appointees. They made this into law, creating the “Vertical State.” Putin’s version differs somewhat from the typical fascist state (think Hitler, Mussolini) in that there is a lot of power vested in a sprawling, unaccountable bureaucracy that is absolutely dependent upon and subservient to Putin and his pals but typically functions (or rather, barely functions) autonomously. So, that bureaucracy bought military tires from China, spent billions “upgrading” its military (that is, siphoned off billions for the purchase of dachas and yachts), amd didn’t bother to exercise the vehicles., which is necessary to keep the tires from degrading. So, now, Russia’s vaunted military has tires on its military vehicles literally bursting. Ineptitude and corruption, with clueless (uninformed) leadership. Making Russia great again. LOL.
MRGA?
LOL!!! Yes!!! Perfect, Diane!
In other words, this is a Holy War toward establishing a Greater Russian Orthodox state.
An emphatically nondemocratic, totalitarian Greater Russian Orthodox state
Compare Patriarch Kirill’s sermon to this from Ukrainian theologian Cyril Hovorun, Professor of Ecclesiology, International Relations and Ecumenism:
https://nemtsovfund.org/en/2018/10/archimandrit-cyril-govorun-s-freedom-speech-at-boris-nemtsov-forum-2018/
he Russian Orthodox Church not doesn’t just profess belief in autocracy/monarchy, a Greater Russian Empire with its capital in Moscow, theocracy (the church and state as a single entity), and utter nontolerance of other faiths. It has made dogma of this stuff, and it teaches it from the pulpit. Nationalism, fascism, intolerance, militarism. The pillars of the faith. So, the connection between Putin and that church and Trump and the evangelicals is no accident. they are aligned ideologically.
Some commenters here have consistently described themselves as actual leftists while aligning themselves with the fascist, racist, sexist, homophobic Putin and Trump. That’s like being a member of the Association of Field Mice for the Proliferation of Feral Cats.
For homework, read Rick Scott’s “Rescue America” plan again. It’s basically a recipe for making the United States into Russia today.
I guess Whataboutism is the new form of “Two Wrongs Make It All Okay”.
We received these links to support our classes in case anyone wants to talk about what’s going on in Ukraine:
https://www.teachstarter.com/us/blog/talking-to-kids-about-ukraine-teachers-students
https://www.teachervision.com/blog/morning-announcements/how-to-talk-with-your-students-about-the-war-in-ukraine
https://theconversation.com/teachers-can-offer-a-safe-space-for-students-to-talk-about-the-war-in-ukraine-and-help-them-take-action-178406