The Pietist Schoolman

It happened only a week ago, but for the life of me, I can’t remember just why I ended up interrupting a lecture on fascism to share with my Modern Europe students these details from my childhood:

One day in 3rd grade French class, the story goes, Mme. Conway let me take over class. I walked up to the front of the room, pulled down the map of Europe, and proceeded to give a spontaneous lecture on the history of the Napoleonic Wars. Then the next year, in Mme. Anderson’s class, I did the same thing, but with the European theaters of World War II. At least, I think that was the sequence; I might have mixed them up. In any event… The lesson in both cases was clear to a grade school child, but not to two would-be world-conquerors: don’t invade Russia with winter approaching!

Now, why would a 9-10 year old even have known anything about Napoleon or Hitler? It’s a little less mystifying if you know further that, according to family legend, the first book I read on my own was an illustrated history of the U.S. Civil War. Or that my parents got me a subscription to Cobblestone, a children’s historical magazine. Oh, I couldn’t wait to visit Old Sturbridge Village after that issue arrived!

Or that (and here we rejoin my incomprehensibly self-revelatory soliloquy to my bemused students) when I was six or seven, I organized my stuffed animals and held a presidential election. Improbably, the winner was my teddy bear Percy, representing the Free Soil Party and garnering much more support than Martin Van Buren did on that ticket in 1848. See, my parents had found me a college textbook on American politics at Target, and I (I’m six or seven at this point, remember) developed a soft spot for obscure third parties in American political history. Especially those that opposed the extension of slavery.

The upshot of all this was that I told my students that I had known that I loved history all of my literate life, and that I first had the sense that I’d want to teach history when I was in 3rd grade. I didn’t bother telling them that I spent the following summer visiting museums and monuments in Washington, DC. Apparently, the point was already made — and so astonishing that several of these students were still buzzing about it an hour later when they showed up to our Medieval Europe class.

My colleague Kevin overheard, and told them much the same thing: that he’d known he wanted to teach history since 3rd grade. “Doesn’t everybody?”, he asked, in an e-mail to our department wondering when we discerned that calling. Apparently, the back of Kevin’s 3rd grade photo states that career goal.

Now, I should admit that I started college fully intending to be study international relations and practice law, though that didn’t survive (a) taking economics classes and (b) going to a film series on the Middle Ages. And the fact that I chose to attend one of the only two American colleges founded in the 17th century, living and studying on a campus that abuts the world’s largest living history museum, probably was a clue that I would never reach law school.

And several of my colleagues started college with very different ambitions. One was a computer science major; another studied math. But they, like Kevin and me, had also had longstanding curiosity about and passion for the historic past. (Or imagined ones… At least a couple of us were also fascinated by Greek mythology and even wrote Homeric mini-epics at a young age: mine about Hercules; his about Perseus.) It just took a while for that childhood passion to blossom into an adult vocation.

What about you? Have you always enjoyed history? Or did you come to it later in life? If you teach… when did you know you wanted to spend your life doing it?