A statement of purpose?

First, the background

For 26 years I’ve worked as a high school social studies teacher at Hillsborough High School, in Hillsborough, New Jersey. For a long time I’ve thought about trying to keep a blog about an individual school year or about education in general, but the busy launch to the school year has always thrown me off and by the time I thought about starting, I felt I’d squandered a complete picture. The idea isn’t “a year in the life,” necessarily, but context matters, so my thought THIS time, is to start before the year begins, establish a habit of writing every day and do a better job tracking my progress in that manner.

Although I’m in the last decade of my career, most likely, I’ve never satisfied with what I’ve accomplished in the classroom. Whether it’s because not every student was fully motivated, or because some of them didn’t realize their potential, or just individual goals never came to fruition — there’s always something to improve on. To borrow a phrase from Dr. Stuart Palonsky, when you’re performing 900 shows a year, there are bound to be duds. I’m not a glass half empty guy, so much as a “Where is the glass?” guy. That’s a joke, but not too far from reality. Suffice it to say, I’m a perfectionist and my goal is the more perfect classroom.

For a number of years now I’ve mostly taught two classes: Advanced Placement United States Government and Politics and U.S. History I Honors. The latter course is really the first half of AP U.S. History (APUSH), but we’re not allowed to call it that as per the College Board. At first I thought this was because it gave students who take US history over the course of two years an advantage on their transcripts, but no, it’s because the College Board refuses to recognize a course that is taken outside the year a student would take the exam. If we changed to block scheduling and I taught exactly the same course in the fall, we could call is APUSH I. Nonetheless, I consider myself an APUSH teacher, in addition to being an AP GoPo teacher.

Activities

In addition to those two courses I have a variety of other responsibilities at the high school. I’m co-advisor to Model United Nations, Model Congress, Mock Trial, and Amnesty International. Instead of hosting a homeroom, I run the morning announcements with student volunteers. I am the stage equipment manager, which essentially means I handle lighting and audio in our auditorium for both high school and outside groups. I am also very active in our union, the Hillsborough Education Association, serving as the group’s parliamentarian, a building representative, and chair of the Elections Committee, in addition to serving on the Somerset County Education Association, chairing the Constitution and Bylaws Committee, and serving on two state committees.

904 Shows?

As part of my advisorship to Model UN and Model Congress (collectively referred to as HHS Debate), I run four annual concerts at the high school — a talent show, a battle of the bands, an unplugged acoustic concert, and an alumni show for charity. This is, of course, principally an opportunity for me to indulge my passion for performing music… oh, and give students who otherwise might not have an outlet an appreciative audience.

Some goals

I’m definitely a goal-driven person, but I probably could do a better job of following can-do motivational speakers in being more methodical about achieving my various ambitions. I’ve forgotten more goals than most people have made, I suspect. That’s one of the main reason I’m doing this blog, to hold myself accountable. Here are some of my goals this year, reserving the right to expand and change on the fly. I’m starting with these ten:

1. Develop a Black History semester elective at HHS.
2. Continue to refine the USIH capstone project, which is a visual essay on the 14th Amendment and an event or theme from the time period after 1877. This project was inspired by my participation in an NEH program at the University of South Carolina at Beaufort two years ago and has evolved into something remarkable.
3. Develop a thematic project for the first half of US1H revolving around resistance and agency. If the district, as rumored, does away with midterms, this could serve a similar purpose.
4. Implement more local history in USIH, ideally something related to my work at the NEH program I attended at Historic Hudson Valley in July. In a perfect world I would have a number of the students doing research on slavery in New Jersey as part of the aforementioned thematic project. One idea that I love is the placement of markers in town that signify a memorial to specific enslaved people whose stories have been largely buried. Sub-goal: significantly revamp the content on slavery in USIH, using materials from this program.
5. Continue to refine the AP GoPo curriculum, working in materials from the new textbook publisher, Albert.io, and other resources… but ultimately relying mostly on materials that I produce based on my students’ needs because other than test prep questions, I rarely find pre-packaged materials that work for me.
6. Revise the AP GoPo public policy project to be more ambitious and longer term with the goals of replacing the final exam and giving students an opportunity to do relevant research and problem solution… just not in that cheesy “the kids speak out” manner that so often inhabits these projects.
7. Organize my first international trip since 2013 (technically unrelated to school for legal reasons), to Costa Rica in mid-July.
8. Finish my lesson plans on the election of 1824 that I began developing in August at the Massachusetts Historical Society as part of my Swensrud Fellowship.
9. Raise a bunch of money so that (a) HHS Debate can do its first trip outside of North America since 2008, and (b) we can give do some positive good in the world again, and provide some character education along the way.
10. Regularly write this blog to encourage myself to follow through on my ideas, to document what I do over the course of the year, and to share my ideas with a growing audience (I hope) of like-minded teachers. Or teachers who don’t agree…

So that’s it. Piece of cake!

P.S. I also am trying to make sure that the USIH class has better gender representation, and I want to do work on implementing the new LGBTQ+ curriculum requirement… but that’s going to be a huge challenge in USIH.