"teaching history backwards" Topic

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Hmmm. Maybe. I see the advantage of beginning with recent events for which there remain living witnesses. But as a classroom teacher I'm not sure how I'd proceed. Might be fun to try though.

True story. A man named Parish was a Rice student back around 1940, did poorly, but went into the Air Force and ended up a brigadier general while Vietnam was going on. (Rice students are almost uniformly very bright. Of my 1964 class of 350, more than two hundred were National Merit finalists or commended.)

In 1970 he was retired and applied to Rice as a grad student in history. I was in a seminar in Recent American History, and we were doing the Pentagon Papers. The professor, a typical leftwing Democrat and deeply anti-war, declaimed on how crazy the plan was to sew radioactive material along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. General Parish, a student in the seminar like me (a just-commissioned 2LT in the Army Reserves) looked up and said "I didn't think it was so crazy when I proposed it."

Well, the general MIGHT have been joking, but he HAD been a colonel in the Pentagon at the time, so it MIGHT have been true. . . . But I suspect the professor would at that point have rather been talking about the Civil War or Revolution, all of whose participants were safely dead.

It's not a problem limited to History professors. My uncle once described a TAC officer criticizing how an officer candidate had packed his rucksack, ending with a rhetorical "what gave you the idea you knew how to pack a ruck?"

Still at attention, the candidate replied "Sir, I carried a rucksack from the Pusan to the Yalu, and better than halfway back."

It's not often, my uncle went on, that you get to see a TAC officer just melt.

Yes, after WWII a number of combat veterans were admitted to West Point etc. Iirc Audie Murphy was so offered, but went into movies instead. But imagine having a Medal winner in your plebe class, to play drill sergeant to?

Of course keeping your mouth shut and obeying would be tough for the vets, too.

ind of off subject but similar to some of the above. When I was a new probation officer, we had a retired parole officer (30+ years) working with us. (side note, he was a white officer in a black artillery unit in Korea – couldn't read a map to save his life).
After a few years he decided to go back to parole, but because he had been retired for aa few years and he didn't go to a parole academy (didn't have them when he started) – they made him go to one.

In a related format I was sent on a teaching course on how to use new technology in university teaching and the trainer one of the admin people was using a particular article to teach from and I made the mistake of suggesting the trainer had misinterpreted one of the points and he ripped me a new one for questioning his approach. Normally i would have let it pass but he got up my nose so I had to tell him I actually wrote the article.

after a small silence he called a coffee break and never came back but never said sorry. end of training.

steve, that is hilarious.

Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; and those who can't teach, become professors of education. Or administrators.

Steve +100