Teaching and Historical Integrity

One of the highlights of my week is planning my lesson for the Leistungskurse-- I have free rein to whatever the heck I want for one Unterrichtsstunde each week, as long as it's educational and related to the US. I also placed certain requirements on myself: I do NOT want to try to trivialize, embellish, or blatantly ignore unfortunate moments in the US's history. No Texas-ized or Arizona-ized versions of history for me, thanks.

I recently finished a 3-week unit on the civil rights movement. Even though I do think that calling February "Black History Month" is a problematic, especially when you don't talk about Black (or Chicano, or Latino/a, or Asian-American) history for the rest of the year, it did fit in perfectly with the bigger unit that I've been doing on contemporary civil rights (Westboro Baptist Church, the Dream Act). They've heard of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr., of course, but I think this was the first time that they focused on specific events or topics.

At the same time, I sometimes wonder if I'm going too far in the other direction; I hope the students don't think I'm being Debbie Downer and ruining their romanticized idea of the US (although this may not be a bad thing). However, I think it's a good thing for the students to see an American being critical of the US's history and being honest about ongoing societal injustice. I've gotten unsolicited positive feedback from one of the teachers, so I guess that means that they enjoy my topics. (I'm still working on the content delivery part of my lessons; I have a hard time shutting up.)

I'm often jealous of the ETAs who get to do cultural lessons, sing songs, and make hand turkeys for Thanksgiving, but I heart planning these lessons. :)


And, as always, here's a random story: one of the teachers keeps telling me that I need to stop by her Leistungskurs. (I had asked her if she'd rather have me in the 8th grade class or in the LK; she wanted me in the 8th grade class.) I had a free hour earlier this week, so I decided to drop in for an hour. As I was sitting in class, I thought to myself, You know, all of the teachers have distinct voices and accents, but this teacher has a really adorable accent. And then I wondered, Why am I thinking about her voice in the middle of class? ... It's because I've never heard her speak English! I pointed that out to her at the end of class, and she laughed and said, "I guess we should do that more often." I still can't believe that I've only spoken German with her for six months!