How to Learn by Tracy

How to Learn by Tracy - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

In my US History II class, I learned about everything from the beginnings to the first World War to the potential legacies of the current president of the United States. Despite the fact that my teacher was able to educate nearly 50 years of US History in one school year, the most important thing I took away from the class was not anything relating to the Presidency of FDR or the political implications of the Vietnam War. It was the core lesson not superficially found from the lectures about the League of Nations or videos of Watergate. The most important thing I learned from his class was not what was taught, but how.
When the school year started, the first thing we did to start the course was read an excerpt of George Saunders “The Braindead Megaphone”. From this single text, the teacher prefaced what the theme of the year would be. A class lecture on the skepticism of modern day news preluded a course the introduced multiple viewpoints of history, not just the words written in the textbooks. Throughout the school year, he taught the course not just using the required textbook the state mandated, but also utilizing his preferred resources from higher level textbooks to articles on the internet. I watched documentaries from CNN and movies from the time period, giving us a peek into history while also relieving us from the stress of reading article after article. He introduced political cartoons whenever they appeared in history and encouraged us to draw our own relating to the current news. We shattered any stereotypes related to honors history classes, having fun while absorbing the details of our past.
Some of the most memorable exercises were the multiple class debates. Some were of the past, such as the justification of the Japan bombing, where others were on current events, such as the bathroom bill in South Carolina. Instead of letting us choose our sides, he would randomly distribute sides to each student. This would challenge us to see things outside our perspective and understand the opposing side. As my classmates sat across each other, we were humbled on how research showed how our beliefs were not bulletproof and subject to fault. This ingrained the notion that we should not be concerned with only our beliefs, but with how others see the world differently as well.
This history class taught me how to look at the past with an open mind. Instead of drilling a single viewpoint into all of us, my teacher allowed us to create our own beliefs about the past. Like all history classes, the purpose of learning about the past is to understand the present and look into the future. By introducing multiple viewpoints about the past, it tangentially taught us to view the current events with many perspectives. From documentaries to primary documents, my teacher taught us that we cannot rely on simply one account to create our own opinion. As said from "The Braindead Megaphone", we must “keep reminding ourselves that representations of the world are never the world itself”. Never take the world by another’s words; always find the truth together.