“Teaching History in the Spirit of Friends”
First things that come to mind when you think about Friends Seminary?
A community. Friends has always felt like a place that is warm, supportive and lively intellectually.
What do you remember from your first day at Friends?
Joyce McCray rallying the faculty together, with her personality, warmth and dynamism. Of course, I was somewhat nervous on my first day, but I found Friends to be a very collegial place to teach, and so many students were kind, warm and friendly.
Who were some of your colleagues from the history department when you started working at Friends?
Jean Johnson, Karen Jernigan, Paul Poet, and two former students who later joined the department, Josh Silver ’93 and Raoul Meyer '88. It was a small department, combined with the English department initially, led by Ann Sullivan.
Did you have a mentor or anyone from within the Friends community who helped you find your way as a teacher?
Ann Sullivan taught eleventh grade American Literature, and I taught eleventh grade American History, so we worked together on curriculum and on many special projects for juniors. Jean Johnson and I worked on developing a World History curriculum, and we taught a Poverty in the U.S. course together. Ron Singer and I worked on many projects together, including "Days of Concern" committees and diversity committees. I learned from all three of them and from many other colleagues, including some teachers whom I worked with in the Friends Seminary Teachers Association.
What was Friends like in the 1980s?
Joyce McCray focused on bringing the School and the faculty together. Friends was very collegial and had a culture that was non-competitive. Students were interesting, lively, active, and collaborative. Many students were committed to social justice.
Is there anything that stands out about the curriculum at that time?
I became the History Department chair after a few years. I emphasized learning by doing instead of solely through academic learning. I taught an international Relations course where we studied Latin American History and prepared to represent a Latin American country in the Harvard Model United Nations. I also taught a law course where we studied constitutional law focusing on civil liberties, civil rights cases and, with the help of some alumni and parents who were lawyers, prepared for participation in the New York State Bar Association's Mock Trial competition. I taught “Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior,” which uses a study of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and other examples of massive violations of human rights like South Africa under apartheid and the genocide in Rwanda, to get students to focus on what kind of choices they would make in their own lives in crisis situations. For AP History and US History, I tried to teach a balanced and complex view focusing on the ideals of America, including how our society violated those ideals with the dispossession of Native Americans, the centrality of slavery to our early history, and the denial of equality to so many. Also, and this was very important to me, I taught how movements of people throughout our history worked to bring our country closer to fulfilling the ideals in our founding documents.
Who are some of your former students you remember fondly?
There are way too many to list, but here are two memorable incidents with students which I think illustrate the values of Friends Seminary.
At the Harvard Model UN, awards were given out, and some students competed very aggressively for them. I'm happy to say that Friends students were usually more focused on learning about world problems from the perspective of the country they were representing and working with other students to solve the assigned problems. One year one of our students on the Commission on the Status of Women wanted the whole committee to be given the award since they had worked so well together. When she presented her resolution to her committee for discussion, some of the students from other schools reacted so emotionally in their speeches to the "loss" of awards that the Harvard committee chairs asked our student to withdraw her resolution. I was proud of her stand for the values of our school.
With the Mock Trial competition, there were years where Friends did really well. One year we were in the semi-finals. At the end of the trial the judge was explaining the verdict he was about to render, using very violently competitive language, praising one of the other school's lawyers with something like “you were really out for blood.” After announcing that our team had lost by half a point, the judge came up to our team and said he was very sorry that we lost by such a small margin. One of our students responded, “That’s ok, we’re a Quaker school and we do not believe in competition.” I thought that was a great comeback.
Once in Meeting Phil Schwartz said he would tell his squash players to see competition as a “partnership to raise each other’s level of play” — two sides working together to raise the levels of both teams. I tried to apply Phil's idea to helping my students participate in the Mock Trial and Model UN.
Commentaires