i still have 10 minutes

I realized that I'm giving my students time to work on their propaganda projects in history class this afternoon, so I don't have to pretend to prepare for class at all.

I like teaching history. I think I prefer teaching English, because it's really hard to explain World War I and World War II to 6th graders in a way that they will understand, especially considering the fact that they've never really studied history before. There are so many important points to bring up that they know nothing about...

...such as in class now. We're talking about the Russian Revolution, and needless to say, the topic of communism is a touchy subject in China. I feel pretty uncomfortable discussing it in class because my students keep asking what my opinion is. The last thing I need is for them to go home and tell their parents what I say about whether communism is good or bad...so I try to avoid the opinion part altogether. I tell them that there are good things and bad things about everything.

Anyway, I'm introducing them to Bolshevism and explaining how the Bolsheviks wanted things to be equal (aka...no rich people and no poor people, just working people). However, my students' parents pay $10,000 a year for them to attend this school, which means that they are by no means badly off. I would go so far as to say that many of my students are probably rich. So, because of their background, they keep raising their hands in class to talk about how the Bolsheviks were doing something very UNFAIR, that the poor people didn't deserve more food or more money or to live in a nicer house because if they just worked harder, they'd be rich too. I got this a lot. "They just need to work harder. A lot of poor people are just lazy."

So...during my last class, I had to go into a lengthy explanation of what "social mobility" is, and how even though we have it now (for the most part), in 1917 in Russia, social mobility didn't really exist. People were either born rich or born poor and for the most part it stayed that way. There weren't a lot of peasants striking it rich with a brilliant idea, like my students said could happen. I also had to explain that the fact that so many rich people were simply born rich was why the Bolsheviks resented the aristocracy and didn't think they deserved to be rich any more than the poor people deserved to be poor.

Now...this is stuff that we discussed in my college classes. The material seems rather elevated for a 6th grade history class. And yes, "social mobility" wasn't in the textbook, but I felt it was important to explain in order for them to gain a better understanding of the situation.

Time for class.