shadow

by Paul Horton

“Mr. Whorton, we cannot understand a wurd you sayin! You talk waaay tooo fas and you use words that are too big! You talk about places we never heard of! We don’t know nothin about Palestine and Isral. Most of us ain’t been pas Austin! We tired of you go’in on and on! You need to learn how to teach us!”

   I had spent the last four class days reading news stories and showing taped video clips of the events unfolding at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps outside Beirut. As the reality of what had happened in these camps had become clearer, I made a very impassioned decision to suspend the 8th grade U.S. History curriculum to focus on what some might call a “teachable moment.” The gravity of the situation compelled me to get my students to understand enough to act, to call and write letters to their elected representatives. But I was pushing too hard to get them to understand with a crash course on the contexts surrounding the events leading up to the massacre of thousands of defenseless Palestinian refugees. Annette had tired of my impassioned preaching from behind the classroom lectern. The maps of Palestine in 1918, 1948, 1967, and 1973 ran together in my students’ minds, the condensed retelling of the complex history of the Arab-Israeli conflict overwhelmed their ability to make out what the hell I was talking about.  

    I will never forget Annette S’s frustration as she moved her head from side to side. She was a lot bigger than me, and bigger than any adult at the recently integrated Elgin Junior High in the early 80s. I was intimidated. Annette was the king-of-the-hill. If I failed her, I failed all of the kids. She showed a great deal of courage in saying what all the other kids were thinking. She “told me” and I had to listen, absorb, and respond. The reality of what she had to say hit me right in the solar plexus and learning how to teach could only begin by relearning how to breathe in a classroom. In this case breathing meant learning how to take the time to listen and to begin to discard the arrogant posture I had created for myself as a young teacher walking down some sort of weird missionary road.

    I was a very self-righteously smug second year 8th grade history teacher. I wore the recently graduated “radical teacher” uniform that was popular at the time: Birkenstocks, faded jeans, a dark suit-vest, a baggy 100% white cotton shirt, and circular, thin gold wire rimmed frames. I wore my hair wavy and long. I spent my evenings reading Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Telos, and The New German Critique. The small town business elite that sat on the school board tolerated the likes of me and other UT pinkos because they could not get anybody else to teach in their small town at the salary they were offering. 

    My naive radical visions and dreams slowly began to break apart on the shoals of insular rural poverty. I thought I could be the teacher on the South Carolina sea island Pat Conroy wrote about in The Water is Wide:  the teacher who never gave up on his kids, the guy who could motivate every kid to overcome every obstacle. If “Conrak” could do it, then so could I. 

    But the Annettes in my classes were reading five and six years below grade level. I was trying to teach my kids about injustices worlds away to raise consciousness, to get my kids to connect the rural struggles of the post Jim Crow South to the similar struggles of Palestinians forced to live “ on the other side of the tracks,” but my kids needed me to teach them how to read, something they did not train me to do in history or educational psychology classes.

    I was pathetically prepared for the task. I was pumped full of idealism, having spent the l four previous years learning about the majestic struggles oppressed peoples to liberate themselves. I identified with the older TAs who would describe the glory days when “the Brown Berets” let a bag of rats collected in the projects loose in a courtroom….” I had read my Fanon and Malcolm. 

    None of this had prepared me for Annette’s question. I began teaching in Elgin because that was the way it was at that point. Kids who wanted to teach in Austin had to pick up a couple of years experience in one of the small towns in the area. I wanted to teach high school, but the jobs were in junior highs.

    Elgin, Texas was a thirty-mile commute from Austin. I had to buy a reliable car to teach and, because 17% was the going rate once Reagan’s cronies induced his lovely recession, I paid dearly to teach. Elgin at that time was a sleepy one Dairy Queen town far from being absorbed into what would become Austin’s suburban sprawl. The town was three towns: the prosperous area of Anglo professionals, businessmen, and farmers and ranchers moved-to-town, descendents of the Swede and Czech settlers who came the area in the 1850s. As in most small Texas towns in central and South Texas, the “other side of the tracks existed as two separate communities, black and Tejano. The town’s schools had only recently desegregated and learning to go to school in one community was on everybody’s mind. Federal funds were at risk, including the tens of thousands of dollars that came in to fund the education of the families of migrant farmers who returned to Texas from picking cucumbers and apples in Michigan in late October each year. Tolerating pinko teachers like me was one way to insure that the institutional racism that plagued most rural school districts run by good ol’ boys was being dealt with.

    No one in Annette’s family had gone to college. Perhaps twenty percent of the Tejano and African American kids were college bound at that time, and most of those kids would go to community colleges. A far greater percentage of the Anglo kids would go on to college; the cream of the crop went to UT or A&M.

    I desperately wanted more for these kids; I wanted them to learn about the world, to aspire to great things, to make a difference in the world. I had to teach them that there was a world out there that was worth knowing about, I had to teach them that they could act nobly, that everybody was connected in a struggle to overcome injustice and poverty. Kids in Elgin, Texas were not so different from kids in the West Bank. My Tejano kids came from families with proud histories that they had forgotten. Their families were around before the Anglos came. Their land titles were swindled and outright stolen. My African American kids knew Jim Crow. The town was still a caste town except on Friday nights. Elgin was the West Bank. Elgin was Jerusalem. 

    But I failed Annette and her friends. I could not get them to see the world beyond rural Central Texas. I was too stupid, too young, too idealistic, and, above all, too self-righteous. My heart was in the right place, but my heart was not the problem. I did not know how to teach. Annette was spot-on.

    The sense of outrage about the American public’s ignorance about anti-American “blowback” in the Middle East fueled my first lesson as a student teacher at Austin High. I was trying to help my students understand the differences between Sunni and Shi’a Islam. The “Satan” portrait of the Ayatollah Khomeini sporting jaundiced eyes and triangular features had recently graced the cover of a national news magazine and I was determined to help students understand the social, historical, and political contexts that fed the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. Unfortunately for my students, a lesson that was supposed to take one day ended up taking five and, although I designed a mini-unit that had included group activities, I ended up lecturing more as I fell behind, a teacher’s curse.  The content was great, but I lost most of the kids. I was too concerned with the accuracy of the content and not aware of how the kids were responding. This is a common mistake for young teachers who tend to focus most of their attention on content, not having to developed a teacher’s sixth sense or “feel” for where each kid is at a given moment.

    I did the same thing when I tried to cram seventy-five years of Middle Eastern history down the throats of my students in Elgin. The kids had no background and I was teaching eighth graders as though I was teaching a graduate seminar. The sense of vein-popping urgency I conveyed in trying to get my kids to act in the aftermath of a genocidal action must have been downright scary for most of them.

    Now a veteran of forty-two years of teaching, I reflect on answering Annette’s question every year. What separates me from that time are the hundreds of mistakes and lessons learned, many of them only partially learned.

    The one thing that is true about teaching is that it is a great experiment. As cliché’ as it sounds, nothing is learned without failure. Sleepless nights of self-loathing and self-criticism followed by ideas about new approaches that surface in the morning shower or on the way to work while listening to the radio is the “right stuff” of teaching that strives to be more effective.

    If I could talk to Annette now, I would tell her that her honesty made me a better teacher. I remember that my predecessor at Elgin Junior High had relied almost exclusively on the contract method of teaching. When I arrived, I found a contract and tests for every chapter in our state adapted textbook. My reaction was revulsion because I wanted to engage my students; I wanted more vibrant interactions between kids. I idealistically and arrogantly wanted to create Dewey’s organic-democratic classroom where an embryonic conception of pluralist communication could be patterned into something resembling participatory citizenship. 

    But what I wanted and what I projected were two separate things. Once I started talking and explaining, I could not turn it off. For some students this becomes a game, “we can get him talking so we don’t have to do a thing!”

    Since those sweaty and smelly –even the fans did not work– August days in a rural Texas classroom, I have grown away from the idea that teacher-centered learning works for most students. There are brilliant lecturers in the world who can mesmerize different audiences every day, but even the most talented and charismatic comedian gets stale in a day or two before a group of hypercritical fourteen year olds. In the student world, novelty is lost with the second use of the same phrase or in five minutes, whichever comes first. 

    My “praxis” has since evolved toward the recognition that students will construct their own meanings and understandings about the world. We can provide them with the Legos, the Lincoln Logs, or a particular set of building blocks, but they rarely want directions. They want to make their own mistakes and they want to find their own solutions. Self-righteous teacher indignation or self-assured correction will turn off most students as quickly as the well-intended and perfectly balanced lecture. This is not to say that passion and “mini-lectures” do not have a place in classrooms. Rather, teachers must set the stage and keep the conversation as honest and as accurate as possible. Any whiff of political correctness, left or right, will separate the inner ear from any source of reception and processing.

    I have come to believe that best teaching practice focuses on formulating the best questions, learning to tolerate the most awkward silences, allowing students to choose their research subjects, allowing students opportunities for cooperative learning that is accountable, and constructing activities that will focus discussions on multiple comparative perspectives.

    This brings us back to Annette’s question.  The second dimension of the immediate context of Annette’s question is complicated by the ongoing and pervasive resistance to constructing a responsible discourse about the Middle East and the Palestinian question in the United States. Things have not changed much in the twenty-nine years since I failed to teach Annette and her friends about the unspeakable human tragedy that took place at Sabra and Shatila where the “angels of history,” to use Benjamin’s phrase, temporarily exploded the myth of a righteous Israeli civilization borne into the present on the universal recognition of the worth of every human life lost to the absolute evil of the Nazis and their collaborators. How many students know about Sabra and Shatila today?

    Teachers and scholars who have sought to create a balanced history of the Middle East in much the same vein of the “Revisionist” Israeli historians have been labeled fanatic or anti-Semitic. A scholar who recently tried to use maps of Palestine in public school classrooms was been labeled “too controversial” to continue. Two leading political scientists who recently published a carefully worded study of The Israel Lobby were attacked relentlessly in the press, and derided as “anti-Semitic” at almost every turn. When I carefully summarized the thesis of this book to my World History class this year (2011) I was accused of making “anti-Semitic remarks” in my classroom by the same parent who objected to child drawings (eyewitness) of the Sabra and Shatila massacres being displayed at a public exhibition of senior research projects (May 2010).

    How do we do a better job? We have to make the time. Most of us are forced to cover way too much ground in the survey courses that are required. Many of us have to insure that we meet mandated learning objectives that force us to teach to a test. Most high school courses are thus textbook driven and most teachers have little “area studies” coursework. Indeed, most teachers teach themselves to teach world history. Middle Eastern history is typically a sideshow in Western Civilization and European History classes that many students take. With the shift to World History or Global Studies in most schools, teachers should be able to “find the time” to teach the Middle East, but textbooks skim over the rise of Arab nationalism and the mandate periods in favor of intense focus on the redrawing of the map of Europe and the Russian Revolution and its consequences. Textbooks also tend to gloss over the pivotal 1947-48 period to avoid any hint of controversy, and post-mandate nationalism tends to be handled with a few pithy comments about how Nasser defied American power. After that, Arab and Southwest Asian leaders are divided into a “good guys vs. bad guys” drama worthy of a John Wayne movie. 

    The perspective presented in both American history and World history texts tends to see the Middle East through Cold War and American Foreign Policy lenses. The good guys are “noble savages” and the bad guys are terrorists who deserve to die. The cowboys tend to be the Israelis who seek to bring law and order to a savage land. Saddam was a “noble savage” and Rumsfeld’s buddy, who only took the Ayatollah’s place as “Satan,” or worse, “Hitler,” when he threatened oil supplies in Kuwait. He did not want to stay on the reservation, so we deployed the Gatling guns and drones. The Palestinians have never wanted to stay on the reservation. And through the lens of most American media, there are few, if any, “noble savages” among them. Little wonder that I’ve heard it said that one could wake up in Baghdad a few years ago without an alarm clock because that is when Al-Jazeera was shelled everyday. If it is not on Fox, it is not fit for the American people. We are not going to read it in textbooks either. Dozens of perspectives about Israeli policy concerning one and two state solutions can be found every day in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Tel Aviv, but the discourse in the United States better be close to what Likud wants.  

    When I thought about “how to make time” for an activity that required the kids to get well beyond their textbook this year, I thought about how I had screwed up with Annette and her friends twenty-nine years ago. The first rule of thumb I went by was that the more passionate I felt about a given topic, the more I had to remove myself from the learning process. I really wanted the kids to understand what had happened at Sabra and Shatila, but I decided to place that event within a comparative unit on post WWII genocide and war crimes. The sub-unit on Sabra and Shatila would get nowhere in my classes if adults had reason to step in and sabotage the learning process. The comparative approach was also a good way to get at the problem of war crimes, torture, and human rights. 

    I distributed an assignment sheet (Handout A) that broke preparation for a war crimes prosecution into several steps. The first step required self-selected groups of students to choose a war crime episode to prosecute. Students could choose Cambodia, Sabra and Shatila, Srebrenica, Rwanda, and Darfur. Most students had some knowledge of Rwanda and Darfur and had heard of Cambodia, but few had any prior knowledge about Srebrenica, and two students out of sixty-five total students had heard of Sabra and Shatila. 

   The second step required students to research the Geneva Conventions and Protocols on genocide, the treatment of refugees, and the treatment of noncombatants during war. Students were then asked to research the event and determine which individual(s) to indict for gross violation of human rights laws. Since we would use the International Criminal Court Pretrial Protocols, I also went over the charge given to lawyers who worked for the impaneled ICC judges. Because I wanted to include the entire portion of the class that was not presenting a case as participants in a “Grand Jury” format, I decided not to replicate the ICC Pretrial judicial structure. Students would have several days to construct their prosecutions based on eyewitness testimony, forensics, and documents. Prosecutors were encouraged to use You-Tube clips only if they buttressed the cases that they were constructing.

    Not surprisingly, the students had no trouble finding excellent sources on the internet for each event they researched. In the case of Shabra and Shatila, they found the entire text of the Israeli government sanctioned Kahan Report that held Ariel Sharon accountable for the massacre of several hundred Palestinian refugees. Other sources, including the Red Cross, estimate that the total killed numbered in the thousands (2300). My students also found a website, (now defunct), constructed with the intention of indicting Sharon for war crimes at the time he became Prime Minister of Israel. The website compiled eyewitness accounts from survivors, and a link to a documentary film that featured the American Special Envoy to the Middle East essentially saying that Sharon had no room for plausible deniability because he knew what the Lebanese Phalange troops were doing in the camps and did nothing to stop it, despite the Ambassador’s direct pleas to Sharon. Students also accessed film clips of family members pleading to television crews to do something to stop the killing. They described what was happening to defenseless friends and family in minute detail.  

     My students found another good scholarly source accessed through JSTOR that summed up and analyzed primary accounts of the massacres is Leila Shahid, “The Sabra and Shatila Massacres: Eyewitness Reports,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol.32 (Autumn 2002), 36-58. Students were also encouraged to balance all of this evidence with accounts from within the Israeli press from all political angles and to distinguish stories written at the time of the events at Sabra and Shatila and in the American Press in the month and years following the tragedy.

 Each student group had thirty minutes to make its case before the Grand Jury. Jurists were encouraged to ask questions during the presentations and required to keep evidence sheets (Handout B). Jurists were instructed that the threshold for returning a criminal indictment fell short of the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard applied in trials. After each group presented its case that, in most presentations, consisted of a reading of the criminal protocols, a statement of the indictment, and a description of the evidence supplemented by film clips, the Prosecution would retire from the room. Once students got “a feel for the process,” they would deliberate on whether the evidence supported the indictment(s). More often than not the Grand Jury would call the Prosecution Team back in to answer specific questions about evidence. Most deliberations wound up dropping some indictments, but returning others.

    I was amazed by how responsible most of the students were. I heard some whining on the first research day how difficult it was to choose someone to indict or about having to sift through too much evidence. But the deeper the kids dug, the more invested they became. These issues became real for my students as they took possession of them. Their moral imaginations expanded as they began to see that evil is not something that could not be contained in graphic square inserts in textbooks.

    I basically got out of their way. I would step in only to correct mistakes very gently, but I was not judgmental. We all bought into respecting the process of deliberation. I have no doubt that our student prosecutors found it very gratifying that two of the people they indicted in class were indicted by the ICC in the summer of 2008.

    The unit took seven days from start to finish. I took one day to set it up, and I gave the kids three class days including a weekend to complete their research. The presentations and deliberations required three days. For most teachers seven days is an eternity, but I found that the results of this simulation were well worth the effort.

    If I fell short with the unit, I did not take enough time to debrief it because we ran into the end of the year. I did distribute an assessment sheets (Handouts C and D) that sought to get students to think about comparing all of the episodes we prosecuted. In retrospect, I should have asked the question, what did the people that you indicted do after they committed their crimes? How did the International Community respond to those suspected as war criminals?  Again, I would not have put the light directly on Sharon, but the conversation would have found its way to him.

    What I’ve tried to do here is suggest an approach to teaching Palestine that does not put the teacher at the center of the learning process, but that encourages students to learn about given events from different perspectives. Teachers are inventive. The necessary ingredient that will allow us to puncture the historical amnesia that hangs over our collective understanding of contemporary Middle Eastern history is commitment and time. We have to dig our heels in to block out time to construct units that allow our students to construct their own historical understandings that are not mediated by half-baked textbooks. The possibilities only require some imagination. Document based questions that incorporate “revisionist” Israeli history and include accounts of atrocities committed by both sides would be a good place to start. 

    I can only hope that we can do a better job of teaching our students to dig deeper into the past, especially when our understanding of contemporary Middle Eastern history demands that we, teachers and students alike, be better informed global citizens.  Collateral damage continues to take too many lives and the historical pressure-cooker that will lead to future blowback will continue to accumulate steam. We must do a better job for all of the Annettes we have yet to reach.

    What Samantha Power calls the “Problem from Hell” will not go away. When genocides begin to happen, human beings must do whatever they can to halt them. If the bus is burning, we have to help victims and put out the fire first and then worry about how we will teach the past later. I did not let Annette and her friends down in focusing in on an unspeakable crime, I just did a lousy job of appealing to her immediate sense of right and wrong and of helping her connect Lebanon in 1982 to her family’s Jim Crow experience in rural East Central Texas.

Handout A

International Criminal Court (ICC) Grand Jury

Each of you will be assigned to a prosecutorial team that will investigate a post WWII war crime.  The job of your team will be to research a crime that has been brought to the court as a criminal complaint.  You will:

  1. Collect evidence (eyewitness testimony, photographs, film clips, forensic evidence, archaeological evidence)
  • Research possible violations of the Geneva Conventions on the Treatment of Civilians during wartime (Article Four) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
  • Determine if any individual can be successfully prosecuted for a war crime
  • Collect evidence that supports a charge brought against an individual(s)
  • Present your case to the ICC Grand Jury seeking the return of an indictment and a warrant for the arrest of (3)

You will be assigned to a team of four or five prosecutors for the following complaints of war crimes or “crimes against humanity.”

Cambodia (70s)

Sabra and Shatila Refugee Camps (Beirut 1982)

Rwanda (1994)

Srebrenica (1995)

Darfur (ongoing)

You will have an entire class period to present your case to the Grand Jury.  Cases will be heard in the order presented above beginning on June 4th.

Handout B

International Criminal Court

Grand Jury Deliberation Sheet

Case:

Charges:

Evidence:

Questions for Prosecutor:

Questions for Deliberation:

Decisions on each count and rational for your vote on each count:

Handout C

War Crimes Unit Evaluation

1)What did you learn from this unit that was worth learning?

2)How could the unit work better next time? Be specific.

3)What patterns do you see in the war crimes that were examined?

4)How could we recognize and act to prevent major war crimes?

5)What would make the International Criminal Court more effective? Should the United States allow its citizens to be tried in the ICC? (The U.S. did not sign the Treaty creating the Court).

Handout D

Questionaire for Sabra and Shatila Massacres Prosecution Team

1)Had you heard of the Sabra and Shatila Massacre before you began your research on this project?

2)How did you go about conducting your research?

3)At what point in your research did you decide who to prosecute and why?

4)Explain your thought processes regarding the structuring of your presentation. Which evidence was the strongest? Why?

5)Did the Grand Jury have an easy time understanding the historical context of the massacres?

6)Have your opinions about issues in the Middle East been impacted by what you have learned as a result of your research?

Paul Horton is History Instructor at University High School, The University of Chicago Laboratory School.

Featured image by Mohamed Abo Freih, used with Creative Commons license.

Author

Anthony Cody

Comments

  1. roberta    

    My pussy gets red like this when I’m horny http://prephe.ro/Phqn

Leave a Reply