Listening to a favorite student present her paper on Virginia’s Woolf’s Orlando and its role in twentieth-century European literature, as I sat high up in the back of the high school auditorium, I felt as proud as I have ever felt in my teaching career. She addressed her audience with an understanding of their initial incomprehension, describing Orlando’s unlikely sex-change and the swashbuckling of the sixteenth century in wry and witty terms. Her audience of teenagers, dressed from Gucci to dirty Guess, listened as raptly as I to her ten-minute presentation. Applause followed as she concluded with the flourish: “and that, ladies and gentlemen, is Virginia Woolf!” The Westchester (New York) Colloquium for European History at New Rochelle High School had begun.
It hadn’t been easy. In the careful, nurturing hands of Ira S. Glick, supervisor in New Rochelle, New York for Social Studies, the idea developed: why not bring Westchester’s students together in a circumstance where all would be winners, none would be losers; a gathering where research would be shared for the benefit and pleasure of all.
I loved his idea, although I was aware that it can be disorientating, even threatening, for teachers to come together to compare notes, evaluate each other, and compare students’ growth. I was certain that if the emphasis could be placed upon students sharing with students, with teachers merely providing the medium by which to do so, the idea would work.
It was decided that the key to making this idea work would be cooperation, not competition; the leitmotiv a trill of students’ voices sounding the themes of modern European history as outlined in the Advanced Placement European His tory course description, these voices comingled in a harmony of scholarship to become a students’ version of an AHA convention. An added benefit, we realized, would be an early preparation and review for the AP Examination, the seven themes of the curriculum being emphasized in our format so that reluctant districts would have a built-in rationale for attending.
Letters were written in early October to every Westchester school district which had—or planned to have—an AP program in European history. The response was almost immediate; within two weeks twelve districts had responded positively (eight eventually came rep resenting nine AP classes accompanied by seven teachers). A date was set for the Wednesday before mid-winter break, carefully chosen for three sound reasons. First, February 12, 1986 would give schools time to prepare papers and several months in which to solve the logistical problems of transportation, substitute teachers, and possible needs for funding. Second, to avoid the mid-winter doldrums that arrive during the winter solstice in the frigid Northeast. Third, if the idea collapsed or if those supporters of the policies of William III fell to fisticuffs with the partisans of Louis XIV instead of presenting civilized essays in defense of their subject, we all would have the week recess to recover and to reassess.
Quickly the paper topics came in
Rubens as Diplomat
Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Women
Nihilism in Russia
Machiavelli’s Mandragola
Expressionism in the Early Twentieth Century
Utopian Socialists Contrasted with Early Utopianism
Beethoven as Revolutionary
Mme. Roland’s Journals: Woman as Political Thinker
Individualism in Iceland
Jefferson’s View of Louis XVI
Charles I and Henrietta-Marie
John Milton as Politician during the Interregnum
The Strategy of the Invincible Armada
The Miracle at Valmy
Galileo as a Propagandist
Richelieu and the Destruction of La Rochelle
Michelangelo’s Poetry
Mme. de Stael, Enemy of Napoleon: Gutsy Lady
Martin Luther as a Nationalist
Botticelli and Salvadore Dali
John Law and the Bubbles
and many more—about 175 in all–including perhaps ten further papers with “… : Hero or Villain?” to which teenagers, however sophisticated, are invariably drawn.
We had asked for an indication of both those students who were willing to present papers from each school district and those students who had written papers in one of the eight general areas of the curriculum and could therefore provide as informed an audience for the presenters as possible. We then divided presenters and audience into eight seminars. Students of all AP teachers had either opted to present or to be the audience for a presenter. The seminars were as follows:
- The Renaissance,
- English Democracy,
- The Age of Louis XIV,
- The Enlightenment,
- Nationalism,
- Art,
- Revolution,
- The Modern World.
Obviously, it was impossible to dovetail each paper-writer into a perfect category—what to do about the author of “Individualism in Iceland” became a running joke: was he a revolutionary and thus belonging in category VII? nay, surely a nationalist and most comfortably placed in V? an artist longing for VI? definitely enlightened so berthed in IV? Because Icelandic affairs were quite beyond the expertise of any one I knew, I think we eventually plopped him into the “Modern World,” and since there’ve been no fulminating letters to the New York Times, I can only assume the lad was happy.
Each of the seven accompanying teachers was placed into one of the seminars not, for a change, for the purposes of “supervision” (though we remained aware of our Hero-Villain contingent and wondered about the depth of their feelings) but rather as facilitators.
Again, our purpose was to provide a forum for students, not an extra soap box for teachers to thump for two periods of an hour and a half each on a day off. Indeed, though this will come later under a discussion of the colloquium’s successes and failures, one of the few major problems was one teacher who did harangue and cow presenters.
And so the format was set. The logistics alone would prove formidable. How do you bring 150 to 200 young strangers into a fully functioning comprehensive secondary school on an average Wednesday, make them comfortable, feed their adolescent appetites, provide eight small as well as large fori for the exchange of ideas and a speaker of interest to keynote, get them off buses and out of cars, back into vans and mini-wagons, assuage teachers’ ever-present egos, and above all provide the “space” so that our scholars could trill forth? Administrators may relax: the facilities are there.
The speaker was easy. Wayne Philip Te Brake from the State University of New York at Purchase accepted quickly and proposed as the topic of his address, “Natalie Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre: Women in Early Modern Europe,” a choice which proved of interest to everyone. It all began at 9:30 a.m. in the auditorium.
Despite a snow storm and a minor accident, my own kids—”but it was the old car”; the opening proceeded smoothly, the introductions were made, the plenary session buzzed with con tained excitement, lunch tickets were given out, room assignments were made, student guides were appointed, and the morning seminar was under way.
Everyone was of course nervous, adults as well as students, but there was a palpable sense from all that this was different, this was special, this should succeed. Kids who spent the night addressing mirrors in sequestered bedrooms as they sweated in terror revealed themselves to be natural orators; kids who had clutched research papers with the tenacity of drowning men trying to use them to stay afloat calmly lay them aside and spoke extemporaneously about topics which, they knew, were intrinsically interesting. Their poise and interest made their subjects exciting, and such excitement became infectious. Some of their unvarnished comments (taken anonymously from a follow-up handout) follow:
“I never thought I could do it.”
“It was a real high.”
“I never had an audience before except for my dog.”
“They were really interested in what I had to say.”
“It was over before I thought I opened my mouth-let’s do it again.”
“I never want to have to go through that again, thought I would faint. I’ll tape it next time.”
“Maybe we could have it videotaped to show college admissions?”
“Were you watching? I couldn’t see you, I couldn’t see anything I was sweating so bad.”
“I was really terrible, wasn’t I?”
From the New York State Education Department Director of Social Studies, Donald Bragaw: “I enthusiastically endorse and encourage your efforts to bolster European History AP programs. The special colloquium for students will certainly provide an incentive to the students attending, and to future students to continue their scholarly interest in this social studies subject. … Probably the most exciting part of the program would be the linkage that could be formed between schools and college/university faculty—an alliance that is long overdue.”
The afternoon session, during which most remaining papers were presented, was likewise successful. Some seminars had finished presenting their papers, and it was time for students and teachers to sift through the themes which had emerged from the individual addresses. In my own, one of the largest seminars, we never in fact finished and papers were being presented right up until the session was over. Students were allowed to drift from group to group, looking for friends, participating in discussions, listening, or taking notes.
I am a would-be musician and were I to sum up the entire Westchester European History Colloquium it would be in musical terms: the flurry in the strings at the onset of the overture to Le Nozze di Figaro comes to mind, the promise of hours nothing shy of thrilling. Rarely, perhaps never, in my career have I seen such sustained excitement in education before, during, and after what seemed, at first, to be merely an intellectual exercise.
In order to achieve these harmonies, one needs first a conductor, such as Ira S. Glick, who is selfless in his desire to bring students together. And I would advise anyone planning such an event to enlist an overseer of significant details with the capacity of Carol Bennett as concert mistress: her title as school aide is as silly as her role as functionnaire is extraordinary.
As I sat in the galleries of the high school auditorium that wintry day and saw that favored student open her paper, as if opening a score on the stand before a restive audience, I watched her presence still half a hundred adolescents to quiet attention. And I knew it was a Students’ Day such as I’d never seen before as she began humbly and with quiet dignity: “Perhaps some of you have wondered who Virginia Woolf is and why she might be important in European history. I certainly did until I read this strange book, which I thought was about Elizabethan England, called Orlando. …”
Donald G. Morrison, who set up the European History AP program in New Rochelle, New York in the early seventies, discovered teaching in Biafra.
