As I prepped for this week’s lessons in 8th Grade History, I questioned what kind of teacher I really am. My contract says I’m a middle school History teacher but my district values what state tests say about my student’s reading skills far more than what my tests say about their historical knowledge. So the question burst into my mind and began wreaking havoc on my thoughts, am I a history teacher or a reading teacher?

Many people who work in my district but are no longer teachers, we will call them the others, would answer my existential question with the following “You’re both.” Really?! Both?! Well geez, why didn’t I ever think about that? Maybe because It’s impossible to be both at the exact same time. That would be like saying a bodybuilding coach and a fitness coach are the same, or a quarterback coach and the strength and conditioning coach are both football coaches. A person with a rudimentary understanding of fitness or football would answer that these coaches are both fitness and football coaches, but someone with some in depth knowledge would quickly point out that a Bodybuilding coach is going to focus on entirely different things than a fitness coach will.  Same way a Quarterback coach will focus on getting his quarterbacks to play better, while a strength and conditioning coach is going to focus on getting his athletes stronger and more conditioned. 

A History teacher focuses on teaching the content and the analytical tools that come with analyzing a historical narrative. A reading teacher is going to focus on general reading tools that will demonstrate comprehension. These two teachers overlap in many ways but have two very different goals for their students. For example, a History teacher is going to have their students read a historical narrative and have his students focus on the people, places, dates, and events that took place within the narrative. Then have the students either explain the causes and effects of different events, describe the changes and continuities between events, cite and evaluate sources that support or contradict an event, or maybe even creating an argument that answers a Historical question such as “Was Mansa Musa truly the richest man of all time? Or How does the Constitution guard against tyranny?” 

A reading teacher focuses on teaching the skills and prerequisite knowledge to understand a passage and answer various forms of reading comprehension questions. These usually fall under the following categories: Vocabulary, Reading Informational Texts, and Reading Fiction. These students will probably answer questions about key words and the context clues that surround them within the text. The questions could also ask students to identify synonyms and antonyms of key words or maybe identify the correct definition of a keyword, given the context it is being used. Students could be asked to identify the Main/ Central Idea of a passage, then cite evidence from the text to support the main idea. Students could also be asked to make inferences based on sections of the text. 

As I write this post, I find myself seeing the similarities between the two different types of teaching and begin to agree more with the others. But the 6 years of practical history teaching experience firmly pulls me from this line of thought and grounds me in reality. These two types of teachers are very different from one another. One uses understanding historical content as the main objective, while the other uses historical content as a vehicle to demonstrate so-called generic “reading skills”.  To me generic reading skills are like reading fundamentals that students should focus on from 1st- 5th grade. But students who are in 6th-7th grade and are taking a designated history course, should be taught how to read and understand a historical text, meaning that the generic reading skills are built on, and not forgotten. 

The problems arise when students did not demonstrate mastery of the generic reading skills in elementary school, so now they are in 7th and 8th grade and read at a 3rd and 4th grade level. This has always been a problem but the pandemic has clearly made this even worse. So here I am on a Sunday night, fighting the “Sunday Scaries” by writing about my existential question. Am I a history teacher or a reading teacher? I’ll keep thinking about this and hopefully one day I’ll come up with a good answer. Until then I’ll settle for just being a teacher who cares.