Okay, Here's a First Newsletter

So it’s been a bit since an executive order pissed me off enough to post about teaching some history for all my adult friends who got a less than useful history education. Since there’s zero chance that I could do it in person, I figured a newsletter (and a potential podcast supplement) would be a good place to start. I drafted a very formal “first newsletter” with some fundamentals, an outline of potential newsletters that would get us close to the Civil War, got about 90% of a newsletter written….

Then decided that the podcast would be pretty cool. I made a template, got about… 70% through a podcast, drafted out an arc of pods, and…

Here we are.

So rather than try and write some perfect newsletters, I’m going to just write a newsletter about teaching history in March, 2025. The “real” newsletters will come - especially if folks subscribe and engage and tell me they’d love to read another one.

And by folks, I mean literally anyone. If three people subscribe, I’ll again as soon as I can. You know it goes.

All that out of the way, let’s talk about how teaching US history has been since the New Year’s 2025. Let’s see what kind of bad analogy I can come up with for this, since, like, that’s the title of the newsletter and all.

You know how sometimes there’s an awkward friend or an ex or a surprise birthday victim or a parent in the room, and you’re doing everything you possibly can to telegraph a message to the other folks in the room and you can just TELL that they’re not getting it? And then the only person in the room who DOES get it is the one who you’re trying to keep the secret or gossip from? Then you finally just give up and spell it out and stop caring if “that person” hears because fuck it we’re actually adults here, right? Let’s just say it plain and deal with the consequences. Unless it’s a surprise birthday party because come on man, don’t spoil stuff?

That’s how things have been since January.

We kicked off the year with the Gilded Age, that awkward period between the Civil War and World War I that I /literally/ have never been taught in a formal class. If for some bizarre reason this /was/ taught to me my junior year of high school, I am Gandalf staring at tunnels in Moria. No memory of this place, zero.

The thing about the Gilded Age is that it has specifically been referenced by the current administration as the best, richest time in US history. We need to, you know, get BACK to it. AGAIN. One of the last, arguably THE last, presidents of the Gilded Age was William McKinley, who is the guiding light for our 21st Century Grover Cleveland (the previous owner of “nonconsecutive presidential terms” during trivia night). His assassination paved the way for Teddy Roosevelt to do some Progressive stuff to reverse Gilded Age (and longer term) problems in American governance of the economy. Given the current let’s-cut-everything-and-sell-it-for-parts slash and burn administration run by the wealthy for the wealthy, the Gilded Age is deeply relevant.

I sure wish I could have more directly “shown” that instead of just “telling” my kids that it was. The most impactful lesson during that unit was a stations reading of excerpts from “The Good Old Days — They Were Terrible!” by Otto Bettmann. Would you prefer arsenic milk or sawdust cheese? Beer and sardines for the babies! Pickles for the boys! An unfortunate teacher who thought she’d punish some kids by locking them in the schoolhouse, only to get stoned to death once she let them out. One of the groups responded to the reading on crime with, and I quote: “The police didn’t do much about justice, but they sure beat a bunch of people.” I didn’t think a reading on late 19th century crime in the US would turn students into ACAB kids, and I /swear/ I was not trying to indoctrinate them. They did that on their own.

The one thing I couldn’t say out loud was that if DOGE destroys the CDC, FDA, Social Security admin, Medicare/Medicaid, NIH, NSF, NASA, SNAP, USAID, FEMA, TAKE YOUR PICK, we wind up right back in the” good old days” when the food supply was crap, buildings just burnt because it’s a Tuesday no there’s not a fire escape or a toilet stop dreaming, and wealthy businessmen just casually purchasing laws like it’s rich people Wal-Mart.

Hopefully not the stoning teachers thing. Please no. Also maybe don’t lock boys in school as a punishment? This feels like one of those situations where you call some process “the Wild West” and have to make sure people understand that’s not a compliment.

We talked about political machines, the formation of the National Guard to stop stuff like the Great Railroad Strike, the shocking lack of evidence to convict folks after the Haymarket bombing, monopolistic practices and tariffs screwing 90% of Americans backwards and forwards, unending racism and nativism, and every now and then a tiny bright spot of folks who tried to deal with problems.

Before the Supreme Court told them no sorry that’s unconstitutional.

Then we got to the Progressives! Clean Food and Drug Act! Tenement Act! Direct Election of Senators! Women’s Suffrage! Prohibition as a good thing for creating spaces for women and African-Americans to express themselves? Did it solve everything? Of course not. But it showed how a more active government was the only way to curb some nationwide problems. The invisible hand of the market gives two shits about protecting people. The Law of Contracts rules - if someone wants to work an unreasonable number of hours for less pay than the other folks, then that is between two MEN. The government’s job is to protect property rights, not steal from the rich to give to the poor. They’re poor because they’re not gud enough, obviously. Somebody who read Darwin said so.

The Roaring 20s followed, as geniuses like Mellon, Coolidge, and Hoover took a technological boom period and drove it straight into the worst crash and depression in our history. It just took nine years! Hoover boasted in his campaign that poverty was about to be eradicated. When I glibly stated that Warren Harding had the good fortune to die of a heart attack while in office, my students just stared at me in horror. “He died while his reputation was intact,” I replied. I think only the rosiest of 2016 voters could cite Harding as “the last businessman to be president” as a good thing with a straight face.

Mind you, that whole lesson all I could say was that the federal role in the economy is a nuanced thing that doesn’t necessarily have a right answer. And a big part of me agrees with that assessment when you just set out the history on a whiteboard. But I wish I could have just said “and the current administration thinks that all of the Progressive Era and New Deal’s necessary meddling was a mistake and will now undo them, what do you think’s gonna happen?”

So we transition from the New Deal to World War II and talk about how the administrative capacity built by the New Deal made it a lot easier to mobilize for the biggest war we’ve ever fought. Taxpayer money spent on infrastructure, conservation, and even artsy stuff always needs to be judged based on the economy’s return on investment — the government isn’t meant to make the money back, that’s not the point. Spending taxpayer money on military stuff is just another version of the same process, at the end of the day. Companies take that money, pay people to do work, and those people go home and buy groceries, pay rent or home loans, all of which contributes to the broader economy. It’s great to be critical of government spending that doesn’t produce a net good, but even then you’re not always going to get lucky and fund lizard research that turns into magical weight loss producing drugs. Sometimes we just know more about lizards. shrug

In the past week, we’ve taught the Cold War. I was a Cold War kid, and my students had the same kind of head laugh as I did when I told them about nuclear duck and cover drills. They get the way that us 80s kids knew it was a waste of time — we’d been jumping over airplane shadows everyday at recess enough to know that an Air Force base a couple miles up the road guaranteed we weren’t going to make it through a nuclear attack. My students always ask about live shooter lockdown drills, bleakly pointing out that they’re either going to get shot or they won’t, what’s hiding away from the door going to accomplish exactly? I just discuss the merits of Mutually Assured Destruction as a peacekeeping tool and then we move on to the next thing.

Well, I was out with a stomach bug for a couple of days and had to leave my kids an assignment on the Red Scare of the 50s and 60s. I was so bummed - any time you get to start a class with conspiracy theories and witch hunts, those are the best! Being the week before Spring Break, I wasn’t super shocked about the fact that submissions didn’t hit anything close to 80% of students. I was a tiny bit dismayed about a class where only 7 kids submitted out of 30. I did actually nag them about it the day before I came back, and made a point to annoy kids further by lobbing a bit of “I’m not mad I’m disappointed” before we got into conspiracies and McCarthy and HUAC and all that stuff.

What’s annoying right now is that my students could already know how all of this is super relevant if I were allowed to just say it. Given that there’s a state law saying teachers can’t express an opinion on a “controversial current event,” it’s hard for me to risk saying direct things - I even apologized in the fall (sarcastically, of course) after I casually elicited agreement about how the Alien and Sedition Acts were not exactly the most acceptable American thing ever when suddenly the Alien Act of 1798 came up in the campaign.

Tuesday and Wednesday I was really pretty over it. I told my kids that there was literally a federal website where they could report on me if I taught certain ideas. That there was an executive order that might charge a teacher with a felony if they don’t out a trans kid. For practicing medicine without a license. (Sidenote: What do they think I’m doing when I assist in the school’s surgical center every time we do sex change surgeries at school? Weirdly there’s no executive order investigating and criminalizing that? Odd.) Reading and watching lectures on the Red Scare is entirely, completely, totally relevant. So I was a little disappointed. History doesn’t repeat itself or rhyme — too many factors are different to say that it’s exactly the same and following exact rules or is inevitable.

But seeing really similar situations from our history help build a frame or some context for folks to judge whether or not they’re cool with it when something comes up or is happening around them. I left a simplified version of the three branches of government and checks and balances on the board for almost three weeks. I obviously used it for discussions on the New Deal and even the shift from the Progressives to the less government guys in the 20s. What’s the fundamental line when the federal government crosses your definition of “limited government” or especially executive power as a country that exists thanks to a shitty monarch. I didn’t think it was controversial to say the US has always avoided installing a new monarch because NO TYRANTS NO KINGS. But I couldn’t say “the current administration is trying to eliminate congressionally mandated spending which breaks the triangle” just straight up. We did throw in an FDR executive order that created a New Deal agency to compare it with the ones that were passed by Congress.

I won’t apologize for the fact that some kids reacted to the guild-trip-dad’s-disappointed speech by being a bit appalled at the idea that I could be reported for teaching “DEI.” All of my classrooms are minority white. There are a lot of green card owners in the room. One of my seniors from a previous class should become a US citizen this summer. Staring at the room and refusing to saying “diversity” for the rest of class given the context was hilarious. You have to laugh. It’s ridiculous.

So that’s been the past nine or ten weeks of class. I’m always making the nods and eyes at the person who’s not supposed to hear things. I would love to be braver and just say the stuff that needs to be said. That’s literally what I said to myself before school on Wednesday. It’s fundamentally dishonest and in my whatever opinion actively harmful for students when we aren’t honest about having opinions. I’m a history teacher, you think I don’t have opinions?? Please describe to me a situation when anyone has a political discussion in this country (and it’s all politics please stop pretending otherwise) and one of the people involved plays the role of someone who has zero opinions that they can verbalize.

Yes, I understand how modern political conversations go - it’s always a debate, always a battle, everyone is always trying to win. It’s toxic. But how will anyone learn to have a better discussion if kids don’t see it modeled by someone with experience? I don’t teach essays to kids without showing them examples - good and bad. Yes, we can try to referee conversations between kids. We should. But at the same time, I should also be able to show how to express an opinion based on evidence and walk through my reasoning, without pushing it as the right opinion. That we don’t trust teachers to do that is a bit sad, but it’s also pretty accurate based on the adults running this country.

So there it is. I’m sure there’s some janky stuff on the newsletter site or whatever — it might be hilarious to read the onboarding email I wrote when this newsletter was going to be called something else. I promise there will be newsletters that aren’t giant manifestos about the 3rd nine weeks of school! But if anyone wants to hear more about any of the stuff I mentioned above, if you’re alarmed by my heavy handedness in a newsletter about how hard I try not to have a hand at all, please reach out! Let’s talk. Let me listen. Despite crossing 2,500 words in an hour or so, I assure you there are a million more details about class and what’s happening and my thought processes, but above all, I just want my kids to get some history and some insight into the ways that people made decisions and the impacts of those decisions. It’s been so connected, and my brain loves connections.

I just wish I could use it in class.

Imperfect newsletter, mission accomplished!