On Tangents
This week, we explore the Barker Tangent, the beauty of the sailor cap logo, a 90s favorite I missed the first time around, and some other things.
Hello, welcome friends. I hope you are well. Thank you for giving this endeavor a chance. I hope you find it enjoyable, or at the worst, not a waste of your time. Now that I‘ve set the table, let’s get down to business.
The Barker Tangent
To contextualize for you, the reader, allow me to lay out some facts. This school year marks my 19th year of teaching high school history, and my 18th year of teaching AP United States History. My teaching style has evolved over the years, as it should, as I learned better ways of doing things, more efficient ways of doing things, and dealt with changes outside of my control. One of the major changes during that time is that I now lecture a lot less than I used to in my earliest days.
There are many reasons for this change. One of the simplest ones is that lecturing is not, necessarily, efficient. That doesn’t make it bad. It just means that when you have to move quickly because you’re facing unmoving deadlines, you have a lot of content, but you also have to teach skills, so choices have to be made, even if you don’t enjoy them.
So when the AP United States History redesign came down the pike in the 2014-15 school year, and my district got a new textbook the next school year, I had to redefine what I wanted to do with lectures. So I sat down and wrote out notes for each chapter to work from because I wanted to make sure I knew what the textbook covered (and what it didn’t cover.)
A couple of years into this, I decided to just give my students a copy of my lecture notes. I made the decision that the notes, themselves, are the play-by-play, and I am the color analyst. I have to use my expertise and experience to help enhance what it says in the textbook and give the fullest view of the history we are discussing possible.
But there’s another very good reason for giving the students the lecture notes. I go off on tangents. A lot. The Barker Tangent is a very real thing, though nowhere near a unique thing. Part of the danger comes from the fact that I try to analogize history a lot. While analogies are imperfect, it does allow students to get somewhere closer to understanding the concept. This is a common storytelling trope, after all. Star Trek explained so much of its science in The Original Series with vastly oversimplified analogies, which worked, even if it also opened the door for some ribbing in other forms of pop culture.
But the major problem is this. I go off on tangents. I am a Mike Leach press conference. A student says something and I see a line and run with it, sometimes for several minutes. Some of these are just simple walks down memory lane, which is easier to do when you teach in the same high school you attended. Some of these are life lessons, things I wish I had learned when I was in high school (which I am sure someone was probably trying to teach me during high school). Some of these are just me telling a quick funny story I know. Some of these are just food recommendations. (A lot of these are food recommendations.) But the reality is that I don’t walk a straight path in lectures. (This was illustrated by two students for the design for our class shirt about a decade ago.)
I can’t do it easily because it’s not how my brain works. Even the notes themselves are a desperate attempt by the better angels of my teaching nature to try and tell myself to do what I know I should be doing. We have to get this done. You have allowed this much time for it. You’ve done the reading, but the reading alone isn’t enough for most of you (for a few of you, it’s plenty). I have to do my job here.
But content is only part of the teacher’s job. It’s a significant part, it’s a major part, but it is not the only part. If you want to build relationships with students, you have to show that you’re human. You absolutely have to walk that line between being a responsible authority figure and being a person with whom a student could make a meaningful connection. This doesn’t always happen. You can’t force connection. That is actually one of the hardest things about this part of being a teacher, in my experience. Even if a lot of students like you, there will always be some who don’t. You just have to be fair about everything. Like any skill, walking that line becomes easier with practice and feedback, but I really do think that there’s a balance between these things that you have to constantly walk, like adjusting one’s self on the tightrope with each step. There’s no right way to do this, no two teachers will do this the same way. It has to come organically from one’s own personality (mine apparently seems to be a combination of gentle snark, willingness to embrace my personal awkwardness, and knowing enough things that you can make a lot of jokes), even if it takes time and focus to get better at it.
I think in reflecting upon this, lecture tangents my way of talking to students broadly without making any single one of them feel too self-conscious about being spoken to directly about something. I’m happy to talk to a student who comes to me with a problem, concern, or question. I am happy to point them in the right direction when those issues are beyond the scope of my expertise or licensing. But sometimes it’s hard to know what thing that someone says to you in a larger setting will have a significant impact on you.
So yes, I am probably famous for my tangents. If you ask my former students, they probably have a story for this and you might not hear the same one twice. But the tangent can sometimes remind you that the scenic route is worth it. Not every time, but sometimes.
Sailor Caps and Disney Animators
Did you know that Michigan has an “old-time” logo from the 1950s affectionately known as “Wolverbear”
"Wolverbear” is the closest Michigan has come to a “cute” mascot in the school’s history, even if the wolverine looks more like a bear (hence, Wolverbear.) In fact, he kind of looks like he has a cousin, at Baylor.
If you’re a college sports fan, you may have noticed that a bunch of colleges have similar logos from the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps you have wondered why this is? Well, it’s the work of a former Disney illustrator named Arthur Evans, who went around the country and designed logos for a bunch of schools on behalf of a company called Angelus Pacific. According to the company’s about us page, he is responsible for “USC Tough Tommy Trojan, Purdue Boilermaker, Auburn Comic Tiger, Florida State Comic Seminole, University of Florida gator, University of Mississippi Colonel, Mississippi State Bulldog, University of Oklahoma Cowboy, Oregon State Beaver.” (We have questions about the OU cowboy. We presume they meant Pistol Pete at OSU.) He also reused a lot of them. (Looking at you “Auburn Comic Tiger”.) This blog post (which has since disappeared from its main site, but thank you Wayback Machine) will walk you through the rest of the history.
Anyway, Michigan hockey should include Wolverbear as a shoulder patch next year.
Courage: Couldn’t Come at a Worse Time
Though I have a well-known obsession with 1990s alt-rock as a whole, I have a small obsession with learning about 1990s songs that I missed when I was in high school or in college. It’s a reminder that no matter how much you think you know, there’s always other things out there to show you there’s amazing stuff to find, so you should keep looking, especially when it is easier than ever to find this stuff. So, to kick off my look back at 1990s music, I start with “Courage (For Hugh MacLennan)” by the Tragically Hip from their 1992 album Fully Completely.
There’s a lot of layers here. First of all, you have The Tragically Hip, one of Canada’s most beloved bands. The Hugh MacLennan of the title is the Canadian author of several novels including 1958’s The Watch That Ends The Night. It is considered by several academics to be his best novel and was widely known and read in Canada. Included in that novel is this passage:
“But that night as I drove back to Montreal, I at least discovered this: that there is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and that the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.”
Gord Downie read The Watch That Ends the Night during the Road Apples tour in 1991 and was struck by the themes of the novel, and as Genius explains: “At one point in the story the protagonist, George Stewart, explains his failure to propose to the love of his life when he had the chance: ‘No prospects, too much pride. The depression. But mostly, not enough courage.’”
So I love both the larger themes of the lyrics of the song, but it’s also just a really great rock and roll song.
Here Be Randomness
I’m not going to force the randomness on you during any given newsletter. This will be the catch-all spot in my newsletter. It’s where other people put dog photos, recipes, photos of dogs following recipes. These are all great and I appreciate people including them in their newsletter. But I don’t have pets and I don’t cook a whole lot, so it’ll just be something else here. But…
Oh, I will mention some randomness here. Back when I was in college, I used to write a newsletter during my lunchbreaks at my summer job making mortgage forms and send them in email form to my friends, whether they wanted them or not. It was called Thought for the Day and it actually became the basis for my Blogger blog when I started that in 2002. I always closed those TFTD emails with “Things that have happened since Peter Gabriel released his most recent album.” At that point in 1998-1999, Gabriel’s most recent album was 1992’s Us and it had been a running joke between my college roommate and myself that we were excited for his next album, whenever that came. It was the early days of the commercial web, so we didn’t know that Gabriel was hard at work on a bunch of other cool projects, like the soundtrack for the Millennium Dome show in London, or some cool interactive CD-ROM stuff. All that mattered was it had been a comparably long time since the last album relative to other artists at the time. It was only fitting that I kept closing TFTD the blog edition with the same premise until September 2002 when Up was released. We closed up on September 19, 2002 by listing all of the things we had listed previously. (I have the TFTD password archived, it’s there still.) So we could start that tradition again, but Peter Gabriel released an album for Record Store Day this year of his songs which have been featured on soundtracks, so it’s sometimes best to let the past stay past.
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