I’m thankful for my 10th grade history teacher because:
“I have to teach the book.” He said. “You have to read it and I have to give a test on it to make sure you know what’s in it.”
“Okay,” we said. “This is what school is.”
He also said “but I don’t have any rules that say I can’t teach you more than one book.”
“But this isn’t English class,” we complained.
“No it’s not,” he replied as he handed out photocopies of a different book I do not have the name of. I would learn later that he paid for the photocopies himself, because he could not afford to buy a set of books for us, and the school wouldn’t help. We had to turn in the photocopies at the end of the lesson. He’d done this for years, and the packets of paper were sets of folders containing well read photocopies and some pages were crumbly and he’d replace whole packets or pages in a single packet at a time. He had a whole cabinet full of these folders, broke down by chapter, out of a different book. Some of the packets included photocopies from more than one book, some news articles, a couple academic papers. We were not always required to read those, but we were promised extra credit if we did.
“Write me an essay,” he’d say.
“Ugh,” we groaned. “What about?”
“The differences between what’s in the packet and what’s in your books.”
And we would. He’d accept full essays and he’d accept a simple list of differences, but that was always an assignment. Point out the differences.
“Which fact do you believe?” He would ask us.
“The packet,” we’d answer.
“Because they don’t want us to have them,” we’d answer.
“Good,” he’s smile. “With this chapter, I’m not going to give you a packet. I want you to make your own packet based on the information in this chapter in your government supplied textbook.”
But we learned how to do some simple research, and we were told that Wikipedia could be edited by anyone, but everyone that edited had to present sources. We had to come up with twenty pages worth of extra information on the chapter in our textbook. The textbook’s chapter was something like ten pages long. We had to do our essay/lists on what was left out/added/changed. It was a good two week long project.
“Why am I making you do this?”
“Because it’s busy work,” someone answered.
He frowned. “Because one day you’ll be presented something as fact and you’ll have to decide if it is fact or not.”
“How do we know the difference?”
“Maybe one day one of you will grow up and be able to give a simple answer to that question because I don’t have that answer.”
“You just didn’t want to do the work to make a packet yourself, huh?”
He smiled. “That is an advantage to having minions.”
And then he laughed like an evil vampire and we watched a movie.
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