Teachers’ Zest Makes History a Thing of Joy for Students : Education: Youngsters reflect teachers’ enthusiasm when current events are used to put past events into focus.

At Vista High School, 11th-graders studying U.S. history debate why Eastern Europeans show great excitement over gaining the right to free elections when so many Americans--especially young Americans--are apathetic about voting.

Seventh-graders at Bell Junior High in Paradise Hills have been prodded by social studies teacher Rita Dolan to clip newspaper articles on the cascade of political changes in Europe and the Soviet Union and to explain why or why not the events are important to them.

Muirlands Junior High teachers in the ninth-grade GLOPED course (for global, political and economic development) have developed their own curriculum to satisfy the natural curiosity of their La Jolla students after seeing television scenes of students from Hungary to Romania demonstrating for freedom.

While recent national reports have quoted educators bemoaning the lack of interest and knowledge among their students regarding Eastern Europe, at least some San Diego County teachers have brought the lessons of new democratic fervor to their classrooms and found that their students like to think critically about current events.

With no textbooks to cover the subject, these teachers use newspapers, television news programs, maps and their own readings to keep their classes geopolitically literate.

“It’s certainly true that a lot of kids don’t know a lot of things,” said Dolan, who teaches seventh-grade social studies and eighth-grade U.S. history at Bell Junior High. “But that’s why I am here, to give the kids the background. When I do that, the kids do act intelligently and can discuss everything from international friendship to how a nation evolves into a police state.”

The teachers who are making the efforts to acquaint their students with the history and culture of Eastern Europe emphasize the subject “is a natural” for them.

“When the kids see two adults genuinely excited about the discipline they teach, they pick up on that quickly and get turned on,” said David Mika, who team-teaches the Muirlands GLOPED course with Kirk Ankeney.

The course traditionally has centered around current affairs--Ankeney tapes the front page of the newspaper to the bulletin board each day--with a solid dose of historical background added for context. The fall-winter semester saw units on Japan, Latin America and China, as well as Europe.

“We were taking one country at a time in Eastern Europe, but the flow of events was such that we had students doing oral reports on just keeping us abreast of all the information,” Mika said. Both Mika and Ankeney provide materials to explain the historical patterns behind the current events, although the course, in general, emphasizes contemporary 20th Century history since World War I. “It’s time-consuming, it’s hard work, and you have to make sure that you are covering curriculum objectives,” Mika said. “But the kids will jump on the material if the spark is there from the teacher.”

Students from other courses have begun asking Mika and Ankeney about what is happening abroad based on what they see on bulletin boards in the GLOPED class.

“I think that most kids are genuinely interested in this stuff,” despite what many people say about glazed expressions and lack of achievement among junior- and senior-high students regarding world history and events, Ankeney said. “A kid brought in a chip off the Berlin Wall that he bought the day after it went on sale at the May Co. and was really proud of what it signified.”

Warrene Dawson’s ninth-grade Muirlands class, which annually participates in the countywide Junior Model United Nations competition, has been assigned to represent West Germany and the Soviet Union in April.

In Vista, instructor George Roswell has found that events in Eastern Europe can relate directly to the historical events he covers in his advanced-placement European history course for sophomores.

For example, Roswell compares the present-day news to the 1831 Congress of Vienna, when European governments attempted to establish secure political arrangements after the Napoleonic Wars. He also ties current events to the European turmoil of 1848, when unsuccessful revolutionary events--many linked to nationalistic fervor--shook the continent and stirred nascent Marxist ideology.

“The links are too obvious to miss,” Roswell said. “We talk about why those in 1848 failed, and that gives me a good chance to introduce the concept of (political) stabilization in the modern era. Then I can point out (U.S. Secretary of State James) Baker going to talk to officials in East Germany over how to stabilize the situation.”

Seniors in Roswell’s international baccalaureate class study single-party states and nationalism as part of the course.

“They now see that nationalism, for example, occurs in places other than Northern Ireland or in the Middle East,” Roswell said.

Roswell uses both newspapers and television. Despite oft-heard criticism of television’s effects on student achievement, Roswell believes that the dramatic broadcasts have helped in this case.

“The pictures have helped students make the connection . . . to grasp what is happening, and then it’s up to me to get them to see that it has happened before, in different contexts, and to begin to think about why.”

With his U.S. history class, Roswell has posed the dilemma of why fewer and fewer Americans vote in elections--an issue currently being discussed in the U.S. Congress--at a time when Eastern Europeans and Soviets eagerly await free elections.

“As a think piece, they write about how we can get the excitement back in the U.S. about voting,” Roswell said. “Students ask why we feel it makes no difference to vote here and whether we need a revolution, in some sense, of our own.”

Dolan, who cycles back and forth between current events and history during a given week, was able to galvanize class participation in Bell’s annual history fair earlier this winter. During the fair, many students used themes based on the opening of the Berlin Wall. Dolan also has students write letters to political representatives about topical issues.

“One of my biggest crusades as a teacher is that you can’t learn history unless you also understand that 20 minutes ago was history, and that 20 years ago was history, just as 20,000 years ago is history,” Dolan said.

But the efforts of these teachers and others is still small, given the total spectrum of social studies instruction, said David Vigilante, social sciences coordinator at the San Diego County Office of Education.

Vigilante said that many teachers closely follow established curriculum guides for history and social studies closely, feeling they do not have the time to deviate to cover current events.

George Rion teaches advanced placement U.S. history at Point Loma High School, a course designed to prepare students for a special test in the spring to gain college credit for their study.

“I suspect there might be quite a bit of interest in Eastern Europe among the students, but I don’t set aside one day a week for current events like I used to, because you just have to establish priorities, and the course is meant to prepare kids for the . . . test,” Rion said.

In addition, Vigilante believes that most teachers need help, such as current events guides or other materials, to link current events to historical trends.

“I was at UCLA last month doing some research and I was appalled at how world history books present postwar Europe as basically a conflict between the two superpowers and nothing else,” Vigilante said.

“I think that many teachers are not able to get enough background to give students the history behind the current events.”

Vigilante recently attended a symposium at the University of Wisconsin on how to begin revising texts and providing materials to buttress postwar lessons. But both he and other social studies specialists caution that the need for more instruction in contemporary European themes has to be balanced with demands both for greater attention to other world regions and to basic skills subjects in English and math.

Vigilante did see some hope in the new three-year social studies curriculum being implemented gradually in California school districts under new state Department of Education frameworks. It suggests that world history be taught in the seventh grade and again in the 10th grade.

Along the same lines, foreign language teachers in San Diego County are being urged to lobby for more courses in European languages, especially French and German, because of current events and the pending economic unification of Western Europe.

“Europe will be America’s largest customer, and in talking economic numbers, in talking trade figures, teachers have to be aware of these things to make a (dent) in the poor state of foreign language teaching,” said Jeffrey Vowles, a teacher of Spanish and French at Palomar College. “Ideally, history classes should involve some language and language classes should hear about social studies as well.”