Teaching What Really Happened By James Loewen

With increased importance of standardized test scores, teachers are encouraged to focus on only educating students on information that will increase test performance rather than allowing students to gain comprehensive knowledge of the course. In his book, Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks & Get Students Excited About Doing History, James Loewen addressed problems that have developed in high school history courses throughout the United States. He targeted that the low satisfaction rates and rating low on the category of favorable subjects is partly as a result of dully-written textbooks. He also mentioned how a great number of textbooks that are being used in history classrooms have facts that are omitted, …show more content…
In his book, Loewen strongly emphasizes the importance of going beyond textbook teaching to offer students the chance of grasping a more accurate comprehension of the past and the present. If for any reason teachers must rely on textbooks, Loewen suggested the teachers should focus on narrowing their topics rather than overloading students with needless materials – this, according to Loewen, brings more excitement among students and will be more effective. Emphasizing how teachers must be selective in creating a meaningful curriculum that they are passionate about, Loewen mentioned that students generally remember more when teachers cover fewer materials. Also, he said students are more engaged in lessons that may be related to their own lives. He used forests, trees, and twigs as examples of how the curriculum should be set up. According to Loewen, forests should be the continuing major themes in history to which specific topics may relate, trees should be constructed on a range of thirty to fifty exciting topics that the teacher wishes to teach, and twigs should be specific information about the topic including names and dates. I very much agreed with Loewen on his claim about narrowing down topics to bring out students’ interests because as he mentioned, I also do not …show more content…
Poverty and cultural biases often results in poorer test scores. Often, teachers hold false beliefs or expectations of students and underestimate their ability to be academically successful; consequently, students respond to teacher expectations by adapting their behaviors or abilities to match the teachers’ misleading expectations, following the teachers’ original beliefs and expectations. However, Loewen claimed in his book that standardized tests scores should not be used as tool to develop teacher expectations towards their students because they are “inadequate ways of measuring aptitude” as “what is common knowledge to one group may not be commonly known by another…the tests are biased when used to compare students from different backgrounds” (51). It was also mentioned in his book that words used in standardized tests may not be familiar to those in lower socioeconomic standing because they are exposed to far less words than those of higher class standing. Poor parents talk much less with their children and use shorter, incomplete sentences. This may be due to speaking English as a second language for some immigrant families. Children of immigrant families and those of lower class face many occasions where they have to get early dismissal from school or absences to translate for their parents at the doctor’s offices, or to care for their younger siblings at home while their parents work.

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