ORFORD — Like most history and civics teachers, Kirsten Surprenant talks with her classes at Rivendell Academy about current events.
For most of her teaching career, which began at Orford High School in 1994, it was relatively easy to pick out the two or three big stories of the moment and have a thoughtful discussion. Those were the days.
“The past few years it’s been nonstop,” Surprenant said Thursday.
She pointed to last fall, when news of a conversation between President Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine, came to light. Trump asked Zelensky for a favor, to investigate his future opponent, former vice president and current Democratic nominee for president Joe Biden. The phone call led to hearings, which led to a Dec. 17 vote in the House to impeach Trump, which was followed with heady speed by the State of the Union address and a trial in the Senate, after which senators voted almost entirely along party lines to acquit the president of the two charges against him. There was presidential primary campaigning in there, too.
That’s a lot of teachable moments, and when those moments are so plentiful, when they pile one on top of another, they become less teachable, even as the need to put them into context is as great as ever.
“You can’t be passive about it,” said Bill Murphy, who’s taught history at Hanover High School since 1961. Current events don’t get much bigger than the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but the sheer number of events now seems overwhelming.
That’s not attributable only to major events (the coronavirus pandemic, climate change, the presidential election and the partisan rancor surrounding it, Black Lives Matter protests, the #MeToo movement, and on and on), but to the speed of news. Important stories get pushed out of the light by the latest dark developments.
The most recent weekly conversation between New York Times opinion columnists Gail Collins and Bret Stephens was headlined “There Is Too Much Happening: How Can We Make Sense of It All?” When people in the news business, who are accustomed to rolling with the punches, feel that there’s too much news to digest, consider the civics teacher who has maybe half an hour, at most five times a week, to discuss the news with students whose prior knowledge can be hit or miss.
Speaking on Tuesday, Murphy was planning to talk about current events with a class the next day. He teaches two classes of ninth-graders and covers civics and world history. They are supposed to come to class with a question related to current events.
“They’ll come in on Trump and the coronavirus,” he said, topics that push aside the wildfires in California and other Western states, and the hurricane menacing the Gulf Coast, thus relegating climate change, the problem that will affect them the most, to a future date, if then.
“I would like more of an interaction with the news and what is important to them,” Murphy said.
The discussion itself, which took place via Zoom and which Murphy described the following afternoon, was all too brief.
“I think the kids took it seriously, No. 1, so that’s good,” he said. Most of their questions were about the president and his COVID-19 diagnosis the week before, but students also brought up the fires and the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
One student asked which two states had recently had debates between U.S. Senate candidates, what were the issues and who won. (Answers: South Carolina and Arizona; all kinds of things; and the Democrats, pretty much.)
Part of the chaos of the news cycle, Murphy said, is attributable to the president, who has a gift for steering news coverage, particularly TV news.
“He is the master,” said Murphy, who lives in Lyme and ran against Trump in the New Hampshire Republican primary this year, mainly as a way to show his students how to get involved. (Murphy, who was one of 17 candidates on the GOP ballot, got 447 votes across the state, including 81 in Grafton County. Trump won the primary with 129,734 votes.)
Kids in his classes can get extra credit for holding a sign on the Ledyard Bridge for a candidate or issue or by writing a letter to the newspaper or to their member of Congress.
“I don’t have a lot good to say about Trump,” Murphy said, “but he is one of the greats at manipulating the media.”
Surprenant, who is teaching ninth-grade American history and a “national issues” class for juniors and seniors, pointed to a span of a few recent days that seemed overwhelming. On Sunday, Sept. 27, the New York Times released the first of its stories about Trump’s tax returns. That Tuesday was the first debate between Trump and Biden, and on that Friday, the president was diagnosed with COVID-19.
“Any one of those stories, there’s a week’s worth” of class discussion, Surprenant said.
For her purposes, a headline or a single news story is like the visible part of the iceberg, and her class is meant to look below the waterline to describe the mechanics of government, historical precedents, context and other background that enables students to make sense of what they’re reading and what comes next. She roots discussion in source documents or videos of events.
She also puts a premium on “good civil discourse,” she said. “They have to learn how to interact with peers who have a variety of views.”
The current partisan atmosphere doesn’t make it easier, she said, nor does social media. “I don’t remember it as much in the early part of my teaching career,” she said.
Much has changed in those 25 years, and it will keep changing. Just give it a minute.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
