Middle Schoolers Step into History, Culture, and Economics
What do Babe Ruth and dancing the Charleston have to do with understanding the history of United States involvement in World War II? At first glance, not much.
But as one of the war’s most famous protagonists (Winston Churchill) said: “The farther backward you look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
Which is why Middle School history teacher Evan MacDonald (US’94, C’06) has students in his “Neutral No Longer” class delving deeply into the far-reaching political, economic, and cultural transformations that swept Europe and the Americas in the years after the end of World War I—and, ultimately, contributed to the start of WWII.
In Europe, Germany was reeling from defeat and the payment of reparations, with spiraling inflation and rising nationalism. “Meanwhile, what was happening across the pond?” in the U.S., MacDonald asked the eighth-grade students in this required history course.
A whole lot, as their answers indicate:
“Isolationism.” “Radio and baseball games.” “Prohibition.” “Toilets.” (“You mean, ‘indoor plumbing,’” their teacher suggested.) “People had more money.” “Women could vote.”
Recreating those feel-good times, the class hosted a Roaring Twenties dance for the Middle School last weekend. After a few class periods of intensive dance lessons (courtesy of Upper School theatre arts teacher Liesl Ehmke (C’89) and her husband Paul Paradis), the eighth graders were ready to showcase their rock steps, kicks, and twirls at the event.
A few days after the dance, back in MacDonald’s classroom, the class discussed the uneven economic cycles of wartime and boom years,
“Could something like this happen again in the U.S.?” asked one student.
It was the perfect opportunity for their teacher to share other examples of economic ebbs and flows—such as the dot-com crash and the more recent real estate crisis, as well as introduce their next topics: the Wall Street crash of 1929, followed by the Great Depression, which contributed to the fall of the Weimar Republic and the meteoric rise of Adolf Hitler in distant Germany.
So, with a deft combination of stepping back into the past—sometimes literally, as with the dance—and making links to the present, our eighth graders are deepening their understanding of the events and cycles that shape and influence history. (Plus, their knowledge of the Charleston will come in handy when they eventually take part in Upper School’s most popular dance—the Junior-Senior, which is an all-swing, big-band event!)