August 24, 2024

In the summer of 1985, I remember looking hard for my first full-time job in teaching. As eager as I was to start teaching history and social studies in the Bay Area, there just weren’t any positions available. I would hang out in school offices if I heard rumors of openings, just to leave my resume and maybe strike up a conversation with anyone who might be able to put in a good word for me. As a lifetime early riser, I looked at jobs in bakeries to make ends meet until I could find a teaching job. I wished I had passed the test that would have allowed me to teach math. When it comes to getting teaching jobs, Math and Special Education credentials were (and still are) kind of like Willy Wonka’s golden tickets. 

Then, late in August, I got an interview at San Lorenzo High School, just outside of Oakland, CA. I remember Principal Joanne Knowles asking me a unique question – What kind of animal would not like my classroom? My answer: A three-toed sloth. She asked why, and I answered that students in my classroom would need to participate actively every day, and there would be no place to retreat, be lazy, and do nothing. If I had thought about it more, I might have added that my students would need to stay on their toes, and three just wouldn’t be enough. Maybe my dad-joke game wasn’t as good then as it is now. And I don’t care what you guys say, I’ve got good Dad-joke game.

Ms. Knowles hired me, and I quickly fell in love with my students and my colleagues (many of whom are subscribers to this blog!) from San Lorenzo High School. And I did my best to live up to my answer to her interview question. 

I was reminded of my quest for student participation when I learned about Phil Donahue’s death earlier this week. Phil Donahue was all the rage as a talk show host for about twenty years, but his heyday was in the 1980s. Prior to Phil Donahue, audiences were expected to stay quiet, listen, and occasionally clap for the host and the panelists.

He was the first talk show host ever to include the audience as a key part of the program. He even took phone calls, looking at the camera while he asked, “Is the caller there?” It’s stuff we take for granted now, but it was truly groundbreaking back then. Phil Donahue’s wild success was partly due to the fact that he treated his audience with respect, and he genuinely believed that their contributions made the show better. Donahue said, “Asking the questions was more exciting than thinking I had the answers. It was a real epiphany for me.”

That’s a great attitude for a talk show host, and actually, it may be an even better attitude for an educator.

Most of my own high school history classes had featured teachers feeding us information in lectures, or reading textbooks designed not to offend anyone, and answering questions at the end of each chapter. Then we regurgitated that on our tests. Luckily, I have a good mind for facts, so those high school history classes were always pretty easy for me. But it was boring – and because my teachers were trying so hard to finish the book (which they never did!), they didn’t have time to go in depth on even the most important events, and did they have time to discuss current events that just might have mattered to me.

When I became a history teacher, I wanted to take the time to look at some historical issues in depth, discuss current events, and not worry so much about studying every chapter in the textbook. That’s how Phil Donahue entered my classroom.

I had a fairly loud sport coat, and I bought some large framed glasses, rolled up a magazine to use like a microphone, and my low-budget transformation of Classroom B-10 into the Phil Donahue show was complete. Sometimes it was just me (aka “Phil”) leading a discussion. Sometimes I had students prepare and role play as panelists. But we always had the entire classroom participating, in the same way that Phil Donahue did. In the picture above, we were discussing an 18-week paid maternity leave for women, an idea that was being discussed in Congress at the time.

Most students loved these Phil Donahue-esque segments in my class. They had to listen to others, respectfully speak their mind (Jerry Springer didn’t come around until many years later, and I think his show would have been a poor format for the classroom), and really think about the issue being discussed. 

But not all students loved Phil Donahue or my other active classroom teaching methods. I had more than a few say, “Can’t I just answer the questions at the end of the chapter?” For some students, being a sloth seems like the easy life. But it’s not the good life.

There are some people who push teachers to stick to the textbook, as it keeps any controversy from entering a classroom. Anytime I hear a politician say that teachers should stick to the textbook, I say that they don’t know enough about how to engage students. Classroom discussions, meaningful work in small groups, high-interest reading materials, considering ideas from different perspectives, and being pushed to think and write clearly and effectively – these are just a few of the ways to make classrooms more meaningful and interesting to students.

And, by the way, just because the classroom is quiet, don’t assume the students are engaged. Particularly in schools where students are focused on college admission, they will put up with some pretty boring teaching just to get a good grade. There’s a big difference between compliance and engagement, and as an educator I am far more interested in engagement.

Traditional high school history classes cater to strong memorizers. But when I went to college, I found that writing and thinking mattered WAY more than memorizing – in every class. And in life, it’s not even close. Don’t get me wrong – having the ability to recall facts is always helpful. But being able to effectively think, speak, and write blows the doors off of memorization. In four years of college, I never had one single multiple choice test. That all changed when I entered my masters in education program. Sigh.

So thank you Phil Donahue. Thanks for breaking the talk show mold. Thanks for modeling how to respect all participants, and eagerly listen to what they had to say. Thanks for delving into important, difficult, and sometimes controversial issues of the day. And thanks for making me a better and more interesting teacher, and maybe making the learning experiences of my students just a little more enjoyable.

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Post #115 on www.drmdmatthews.com

NOTES

Phil Donahue’s daytime show was one of the first shows to treat women as intellectuals. Wrote humorist Erma Bombeck, “He’s every wife’s replacement for the husband who doesn’t talk to her. They’ve always got Phil who will listen and take them seriously.” Funny, and sad. It reminds me of John Prine’s line in Angel from Montgomery, “How the hell can a person, Go to work in the mornin’, And come home in the evenin’, And have nothin’ to say.”

Joe Biden recently presented Phil Donahue the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying he, “helped change hearts and minds through open and honest dialogue.”

Phil Donahue married Marlo Thomas (of That Girl fame). They met on his show, and if you watch that clip, you can kind of see their feelings for each other live on air. They were married for 44 years, and their close marriage was legendary. Just last year, when asked about what made their marriage so successful, Marlo Thomas said, “I call it the three Ls: love, listening and lust … You have to listen, and then you’ll know what the other person is really thinking and going through. You have to love each other. And without lust, you don’t have anything.” Good stuff right there.

My thanks to my senior social studies teacher, Mr. Don Lawson. He taught a National Problems course that had no textbook at all. We read interesting texts, discussed the upcoming election of 1980, examined local challenges of poverty, and he gave us the time and the freedom to write a research paper based on what we were studying. And I will say it publicly that though I thoroughly enjoyed writing that paper (Title: Poverty Profile: Little Rock) with my friend Craig, it would have been even better if I had not been infected with an acute case of senioritis. In spite of that lack of total commitment, I loved the class and the way we went into depth on real and current issues, and it certainly influenced how I taught later.

A thought about Maternity Leave. When I left my education career, I had hundreds of unused sick days. They were kind of my disability insurance, as, if I needed to be out for some kind of long illness or injury, I could have been paid for over a year while I recovered. But for female teachers who choose to have children, they have to use at least three years worth of those sick days during their maternity leave. It never seemed fair to me, as mothers had to build back their sick leave to have any kind of significant bank. Just one more thing I’d like to see changed in this world.

Phil Donahue picture from USA Today