A New Kind of Avenues History

By Renee Cai

Avenues: The World School.

Being the World School, World Course has to be one of the most imperative classes at Avenues -- as well as one of the most defining. Traditionally, the topics found in this class have a subject of their own. History is a subject. Geography is a subject. U.S Government, even. Avenues’ approach is to weave those subjects together, and integrate them into one, cohesive whole: teaching the domestic and international, the people and the government, peace and war -- and, of course, the past and present; current events and history. Despite this said integration, though, Avenues has never put a full emphasis on history in the middle grades World Course curriculum.

But this year, two eighth grade teachers new to Avenues decided to design a full-year curriculum with one focus: history.

The Highliner interviewed Ms. Sokol, one of the two teachers, regarding this syllabus change. The first question posed was most simply: “Why do you think we should be learning history?”

“When you know your history, you can be so much more powerful when you talk about current events,” she said. “Knowing more history can make you more aware of the world, and also aware of yourself. When I say aware of yourself, I mean that each and every one of us plays an important role in the world based on our race, our class, our gender -- and if you know the history behind that, you can be so much more aware of yourself on the role that you play in the world, and also in your own life.”

Mr. Shy, Head of Upper Division, took a different approach. “We live in a really complicated world,” he told us. “Some of the reasons it’s complicated right now are because of all these things that happened before. If you can understand things that happened before, your understanding of the complexity of the world you live in is richer and deeper.” The same question was also posed to Blaise Egeth, a ninth grader. She replied: “I think it is definitely important to learn about why things are the way that they are, as well as to get an insight into the world and understand what series of events have led up to where we are right now.”

We also asked Blaise if she felt behind going into ninth grade without a foundation of history in middle school. “I didn’t really feel behind, as I feel like even now in high school we are not completely learning history,” she said. “But I really do feel like they could have taught us more because every once in a while there are little gaps in what we’re learning, because we have no knowledge of it from middle school.”

To gather more insight on this matter, a survey was sent out to the middle and upper grades. 71% of 6th and 7th graders said that they would want to learn history in their World Course class. The results for whether they thought learning history was beneficial were similar- the amount of students saying yes a little over double the amount saying they were unsure.

When asked if they liked learning history in their World Course class, 75% of eighth graders said yes, with 8.3% saying no -- quite similar to the results above. However, when asked if they thought learning history was beneficial, the results were more definite. 91.7% said yes, they thought learning history was beneficial, and 8.3% were unsure. No student said that learning history was not beneficial.

To find the explanations -- the opinions -- behind these answers, we interviewed eighth grader Mya Cahana, asking her the same questions as above. She told us: “I think [learning history] is extremely important, especially since in the past we’ve focused more on geography and current events rather than history. Learning history helps us better understand what happens in the present and why we are the way we are.” She added, “We should’ve started learning it as early as possible. I think because of how late we are learning it, people don’t understand the 7

importance of history.”

It seems that most eighth graders agree with Mya’s last line. When asked if they thought Avenues should be teaching history earlier than eighth grade, 78.3% said yes. Results for 9th and 10th grade were fairly similar.

In most cases, teachers are handed the previous year’s curriculum when in the process of designing their own. We asked Ms. Sokol, one of the teachers mentioned above, about whether or not she had been handed this, and if so, what her thoughts regarding it were. “It was a wonderful curriculum and something that’s great for eighth graders,” she told us, “but Mr. Richter and I realized that you guys have never had American history before -- we felt like it was more important to build a American history curriculum for eighth graders.”

Finally, we asked Mr. Shy what his vision was for the World Course middle grades curriculum in the next few years or so. He said: “The thing I alway say is that a successful World Course leads to students who, when faced with something complicated, immediately think ‘I bet there are a lot of different perspectives on this. I should try to understand the context, and the history behind it so that I can understand it better.’” He paused, looking down at the polished table in front of him. Then, slowly but confidently, he ended, “If you filter the world -- if you think about the world through a certain lens of complexity, that different people have different perspectives, that there’s a long history behind these things -- then the World Course would have been successful.”

Above, sixth grade students analyze maps for the Design Blue World Course project, which has become a staple of the sixth grade World Course experience.