Doing What I Do

James A. Percoco

For the last decade or so, traveling around the country attending conferences or speaking at any number of history education venues, I have been repeatedly asked by participants one simple question—how do you do what you do? The question generally is directed to the fact that I remain a full-time high school classroom teacher, write articles and books, teach part-time at American University, give history education workshops, take teachers and students on tours of historic sites, lead history education groups overseas to places like China and Egypt, while at the same time raising a family and contending with life in general. In March, at the OAH meeting in New York, Vivien Rose, Chief Cultural Resource Officer for Women’s Rights National Historical Park, urged me to write an article that gives a peek into how I am able to do what I do. At first I demurred. I really have no plan for how I do what I do—it just kind of happens, serendipitously. But upon reflection I decided to take up Vivien’s challenge. Offered here is not a step-by-step, foolproof method for “becoming who you are,” but rather a kind of philosophy of how to best approach teaching. My approach creates an environment where professional and personal growth flourish simultaneously. In recent years this has permitted me to provide guidance and direction for folks new to the profession while at the same time supporting the cause of history education.

Fundamentally, I think it comes down to attitude, commensurate with an understanding that to be successful in any endeavor one needs to seriously engage the “school of their life;” taking experiences and using them to better inform yourself about who you are and how you relate to the world. If you are familiar with the Verizon Wireless television ad where an entire network of support staff show up to help their clients in the wireless world, well that is kind of how I approach teaching. Each day I bring with me to my classroom, workshop, or writing project a host of support personnel from the pages of history which include, among others, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, George Washington, and the American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. From each of these figures I take important life lessons from their experiences and apply them to my life and teaching. From Washington, I have learned the value of understanding that the position—not the person—is most important. In Washington’s case it was the presidency, while in mine it is the daily interaction I have with students and colleagues. Understanding Washington’s life in this context makes it easier to not take myself too seriously, but to take my work seriously. Lincoln taught me to overlook slights and to value compassion. From King, I learned the sublime work of persistence and determination. The First Lady of the World taught me humility and the value of empathy. Saint-Gaudens had one simple mantra, “It’s the way a thing is done that makes a difference.” I try to emulate that. Adding to this mix are writers of mystical religious traditions including Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Joseph Campbell, the Dali Lama, and Thich Nhat Hanh. Looking at the lives, words, and actions of historical figures coupled with reading these spiritual masters has helped me to navigate effectively the world to which I feel I am called to respond.

To be honest, I do think I was born to be a history teacher. History, it seems, has always been a part of who I am. When my father worked in Washington, D.C. in the early 1960s, we made frequent visits to the Smithsonian where Mercury and Redstone rockets stood adjacent to the Castle. By the late 1960s, I was living in Massachusetts on the doorstep of Minute Man National Historical Park. As a ten-year-old, 1968 was a pivotal year for me. I watched the funeral processions of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. I saw the Vietnam War and Apollo spaceflight launches on television, and I began to understand the larger world around me. In high school, my passion was further fueled by having a terrific history teacher, with whom I still remain in contact these three decades since graduation. It was because of him that I became a history teacher. By the mid-1970s I was off to Philadelphia, a city with a rich and vibrant historical heritage and memory, to attend college at Temple University. In 1980, when I arrived at West Springfield High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, just a stone’s throw from where those rockets once stood on the Mall in Washington, D.C., I knew that I could make good of myself using the wealth of resources in arguably the great laboratory of democracy, the nation’s capital.

It took me about ten years to become grounded—formative years which were shaped by my constant reading of books well beyond what my students read in their textbooks. What I really learned the first ten years of teaching was how little history I really knew, particularly the critical and analytical aspects of the discipline. So I became an autodidactic learner, reading almost everything about history that piqued my curiosity, and incorporating newfound discoveries into the classroom. It is a practice that continues to this day. In addition, visits to historic sites and museums were a must. Having tramped through places like Gettysburg and Fort Ticonderoga as a youngster, I better understood the power of place in my own learning and I transferred that into my classroom.

In some ways I am a “wannabe” National Park Service ranger. During the countless times I visited the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts, and walked over the trails at Minute Man National Historical Park, I was always fascinated by rangers giving their talks. Teaching applied history, a kind of high school public history course where students spend part of the year working as interns at historic sites in the Washington, D.C. area, allows me to fulfill that fantasy. Student interns have worked at National Park Service locations including Arlington House, Ford’s Theatre, and Manassas National Battlefield. Several students have gone on to earn Master’s degrees in public history while many others turned their work as student interns at national parks into paid positions as seasonal rangers.

Building bridges and reaching out to people have also been central to my success. Some of these people, including James Oakes and Elizabeth Brown Pryor, both recipients of the Lincoln Prize, have come into my classroom to speak with my students. Ed Linenthal’s conference call with my applied history students has been a permanent fixture for more than a decade. The nourishment I receive from these relationships also helps to enrich my instruction and my students. When I was asked by filmmaker Paul Sanderson to appear in his documentary, Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Master of American Sculpture, I made sure that my students were part of the production. It was a sublime experience, as students not only learned content about this important American artist, but were also able to observe, firsthand, how a historical documentary is created. They also got to participate in the production.

The same principle applies to collaborating with colleagues. Teachers do not work in a vacuum in isolation from each other. We share the space of a professional learning community. That is how it should be. Working creatively and organically from the roots of the wellspring of one’s intellectual and personal being is critical to aiding a community reach its goals. Helping each other to succeed in this atmosphere promotes not only individual scholarship and intellectual depth, but ultimately student academic and personal success. I have always enjoyed lively and engaging teacher workroom conversations about books people have read, documentaries they have seen, places they have been, or original ideas about content and teaching. These real world, impromptu in-services go far in sowing seeds of honest intellectual dialogue.

Cultivating positive, productive relationships with the four principals under whom I have served has also been critical to my success. Each of them seemed to recognize my commitment to the ideals of not only making classroom instruction engaging through my enthusiastic approach, but also trying to make the world a little bit better for having lived. Their recognition provided me a degree of flexibility to take risks with my instruction. They encouraged me to write and enthusiastically supported my work outside of the classroom, understanding that it was part of the same whole.

Much more good work can get done by anyone who utilizes their skills and energy in a positive manner. I could tick off many of the real challenges that face everyone in public education from division superintendents down the line to school administrators, counselors, teachers, students, and parents. At times it seems crushing and daunting as public education is a far cry from what it was when I entered the arena. In the increased high stakes accountability climate in which we all live, it has sometimes been difficult to maintain that cheery disposition. Yet, the older I get, and the more that I read history and biography, I have come to realize that goodwill takes one much further in life than ill will. Generating goodwill is really a blessing and, if done genuinely, creates win-win situations for all parties.

I cannot say how I do what I do will work for everyone. The way I approach teaching today is based on having spent more than a generation in the classroom. None of this happened over night. Teachers need to find for themselves their own particular “zone” and work accordingly to where their journey takes them, discovering for themselves who they are.

James A. Percoco teaches at West Springfield High School in Springfield, Virginia.