 Hello, this is Carl Ackerman and I am the host of Journeys of the Mind, and I am so pleased today to have Roy Garrison from Providence School, a day school in North Carolina. And you will notice right away that he indeed is from North Carolina when Roy starts speaking. And you know, Roy, let's find out a little bit about you first. So, you know, were you always living in North Carolina? Where did you grow up? And what led you to a life of teaching? Well, I did spend my entire childhood in North Carolina, except for one year. I made my way to Maryland in ninth grade. My mom was in the PhD program for Russian history at the University of Maryland. I went along. We lived in a planned community called Columbia, and the school was experimental. So I mentioned this partly because all of those things have influenced me. Her time while studying for a PhD, as well as the fact that I was in a very different school where everything was self-paced. And so that has influenced my interest in education. I did go to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. So my time in North Carolina continued, and I've worked in North Carolina since. So pretty much the North Carolina guy. Well, this brings up a point. Did you happen to take any classes from Donald Raleigh or Louise McRennel since your mom was a Russian historian? Not that I recall. I do remember a Dr. Janie, who was apparently the more, I guess, traditional teacher at the University of Maryland in Russian history. And I remember meeting a colleague at the AP Euro reading who was teaching at the University of Louisville, who had been under him and heard some stories about Dr. Janie then. But the two names you mentioned, she may have taken classes there, but I do not remember those names. OK, well, it may have been later anyway. Right, yeah, this would have been in the 70s when she was taking classes. Oh, yeah, so much later they went, I think, probably in this century. So, OK, next question is, what got you, since this is all about teaching, what got you involved in teaching and specifically at this school? And if I recall, and this is talking to you maybe 20 or 30 years ago, not only did you teach, but you drove a bus during the summer. I did, good memory. Yes, I did. For a while, I was coaching along with my classroom duties. And so one of the things I was asked to do is drive teams to matches, coach soccer. And so I am very happy that that particular hat has been retired. But my original connection to teaching, as you can probably already tell, was my mom, she was a history teacher for a while. And then she decided to go into real estate. And I always got the sense or she may have been projecting this for my benefit that she kind of missed teaching. I think she liked being able to make her income the way she did through real estate, but she missed the material as well as the time with students. So that's part of it. Both my grandparents on my father's side were also teachers. And so I mean, just growing up and hearing my grandmother talk about how she needed to, quote, get her lessons before she would go into teaching English at Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem, it was just sort of part of the, I guess, culture in my family that teaching was an option. Well, so have you always taught at the Providence Day School or have you taught at several schools? Well, I've taught at three schools total, but almost most of it, the last 40, this is 41 years at Providence Day. My first year, I actually taught at the school where I went to high school. That's just outside Winston-Salem in Lewisville. That's for Scythe Country Day. And then I taught two years at Ravenscroft in Raleigh. And so when I was teaching in Raleigh, I was teaching middle school, which I enjoyed tremendously on the soccer field, but not as much in the classroom. I don't know that my style and my level of interest in the content quite matched the sixth and seventh graders I was teaching. So I was very happy to be hired over to Providence Day to teach in upper school. And so mostly I've taught 10th grade since I've arrived here. OK, so now let's get into the nitty-gritty of your teaching stuff. What do you teach and why do you teach those subjects? And do you have preparation for teaching those subjects? Sure, absolutely. So my major in undergrad was history and my focus was European history. God bless you. Thank you. So I really enjoyed my time taking those classes. My mom was a history teacher, as I mentioned before. And so I had an interest with regards to Western societies. And not just the political but the cultural. I think I took almost as many English classes as I did history classes in undergrad. Eventually I did go to UNC Charlotte to get my master's in history. I was I think I finished that up with is that was my early 40s. And so I have continued to have an interest in that and continued to find ways to try to get some training. But to be honest, Carl, I think that a lot of it just had to do with the fact that I just seem to have this unquenchable interest in history. And so I feel blessed. I've had colleagues through the years who feel that way as they first arrive. But I think over time, their level of interest is not that they don't like history. It's just they find other interests. And so I have found other interests, too, but not ones that have called me beyond the classroom. Now, from my understanding, you teach both and correct me if I'm wrong, both advanced placement, world history and advanced placement European history. What drew you to advanced placement? Well, I think part of it was that the one class that I took in high school that was AP was AP European history. And so I had a teacher who was one of the very first people back in the 1960s to be a score for AP. His his name is Mac Mitchell and he taught it for my country day and it Reynolds High School and then at the professional development in Forsyth County. And that was his baby. He taught AP European history for something like 35 years or so. So I was already interested in that and because I'd had that experience and I felt like it was a good experience with AP, I wanted to get back into it as a teacher. I had to wait about eight years once I got to Providence State to kind of be seen as the teacher who would teach seniors. I imagine a lot of teachers have had the experience when you first arrive, you're going to be teaching the younger kids. I was teaching ninth and tenth graders and over time I think I was able to kind of earn my wings and when they decided to bring AP Euro onto the curriculum at Providence State, I got to start teaching that back in, I believe, 1988. Now, you know, currently there's a debate about standardized testing but of course European history and world history get an exam at the very end after you've taught the class. Do you find the AP curriculum both valuable and do you find the testing a pretty accurate assessment of what your students can do? I do. I am a fan. I have to say that I've been doing AP for upwards of 30 years and so I may have been kind of programmed to think this way but I've also been part of the reading for many years and even though the reading has somewhat shifted in some ways, I really do value a lot of the skills that AP calls on students to develop. I'm a big fan, although I wasn't that way to start with, I'm a big fan of the document-based question and I always liked it conceptually. What I didn't like in the early days was scoring it because I always felt that there were so many moving parts that students could challenge me on a variety of things that I might not have considered. I'm more confident now and also more comfortable with students who might challenge me and so I think that in particular is great. As you probably know, they've made a transition I think back in 2016-17 where we kind of moved away from the types of questions that were based more straight on memory and more on application and so the DBQ was always that way but the multiple choice have moved to where they're all stimulus-based and so in my first few years with that, that was a bit of a struggle to kind of get up to speed with my students but I'm also a big fan of that as well. The idea that they need to be able to interpret a variety of different sources whether they're primary or secondary, I think that's a valuable set of skills that they can use in lots of things beyond history. I just hope that they keep reading Bismarck documents even after they leave my classroom. So you mentioned the document-based question and for our audience, this is a series of documents. There's a question posed and the students have to interpret a series of documents. We're documents, some are maps, some are tables and things like this and it's a pretty high intellectual task. So I'm going to ask you the same question that I asked Professor Oliver Wendell Holmes from Wesleyan College who's a historian of France. So if a student can master the DBQ, the document-based question, do you think that a student will succeed in any kind of history class at the university level? I do. I do feel like there's an understanding that it's not just as some of my students, when they first arrive, they think of history as a trivia game. How much information can I memorize? How much can I keep straight so that I can answer faster than somebody else? And over time, I feel like many of the students realize that that's just sort of the alphabet, that understanding is part of that factual material can then help you interpret what you're reading and then the real fun starts when you realize that it could be interpreted more than one way, that perhaps the author or the creator may have had many different possible interpretations in mind. And so I feel like it's a good springboard to what might be asked of a student when they get to college. I was fortunate to have Joan Scott, who was my professor at UNC, and I still remember when she brought out primary documents during class. Now, we had certainly seen them in AP Hero, but rather than just kind of seeing them as an assessment tool, she used them as a discussion and class tool. And still remember talking about how some of the things that Napoleon had produced seemed incredibly detailed. And the question she asked was, well, why would he spend time developing this? And so I have felt that that particular question she asked, I have tried to maybe reflect in different ways with my students, where if a student can put themselves in those shoes of the person that may have written them and not only think about what are they saying, but why would they say it and why would they have taken the time to produce this? I just feel like there's a lot more complexity that the student might approach. And so I do believe that while I think there's lots more to be learned as far as skills, once they get to the college level and the grad level, I do feel like that particular kind of small version of a research paper can really serve to help them understand what history is really about. Well, you know, you began this last answer by talking about historiography, and it's interesting that you present it in your high school classroom. And yet, whenever you go to, as you will know, the graduate school in history, you begin with a historiography class, which is saying a lot, not only about an undergraduate degree, but also about a graduate degree. So you also teach world history. And my question to you is, how do you cover thousands of years and in different places? I mean, much less covering empires like China, so how do you do it? Well, I think, first of all, we try to help the students realize you're not going to know it all. I tell them I don't know it all, far from it. But we also talk about themes. And so we have an acronym we use, the pieces acronym, which you may have heard of, political, innovation, environmental, cultural, economic, and social. And so we try to help them understand that you need to have a framework as you're looking at different societies. I don't have a lot of success with trying to create a debate about why are we studying this, but not that. But I occasionally will throw that out as we're spending a lot of time on China. Why aren't we spending more time on what's going on in India, for example? And so I think it can make for some interesting discussions. But I have found that 15 year olds are much more in tune with what do I need to know for the test? And so trying to get them out of that framework a little bit is sometimes a challenge. But it's a challenge I like. I think that as students get to know me, I feel like they can sometimes leave the college admissions equation to the side so that we can actually talk about the actual material and the skills in history. You know, sometimes, because you brought up this issue, sometimes critics of advanced placement say, oh, well, you know, it's prescribed curriculum. And so there's not much variation and things like this. How would you respond to that, especially as a, you know, a very good and teacher who is so devoted to his craft? How would you respond to that criticism? Well, I think there are a couple of things. So I think there's a misconception. And I guess I need to speak for my school. But sometimes I think there's a misconception from the people on the outside that teachers are judged primarily by the scores that their students achieve on the exam. And it's certainly measurable. But I also believe that the worth of the class is not necessarily defined by that curriculum that they publish, which I think is quite good. It helps me to kind of get a sense of what are the bigger picture things. And I know there's been several different committees that have worked on creating that curriculum. But I believe it. I sometimes do other things. For example, one of the things that I feel that I should do that does not find as much emphasis in the AP World curriculum, I try to make sure that we study the history of Mexico and Canada in a bit more detail. I find it and I've had this question from students, you know, Mr. Garrison, why have we learned so much about France, but we don't know very much about Mexico? And I have felt a little at with some, I guess, trepidation about how to answer that. So I have added some things there. I do believe that the curriculum is a solid one. I also believe that it doesn't have to be a limitation. I mean, I agree that you can look at it as a formula. You can look at the rubric for a DBQ or a long essay question as a formula. But there's so much room for variation. There are so many different approaches you can take. Sure, you could take the, you know, let's get from A to B as quickly as possible. And some students do. But I also find that some students are willing to take a different tack to find ways to say challenge the premise of the question or to, you know, get interested in some topic that may just barely be mentioned. And then they begin to realize there are all kinds of connections with that topic. And it doesn't even show up in the course curriculum or the unit guides. So I do believe that those folks who are critical of it may feel a little bit like it's too prescribed. But my feeling about that is that's a decision I get to make as a teacher. I think that most of it's excellent. But there are some things that I feel, you know, as a teacher who's been teaching it for a while and I feel pretty secure in my job, I almost feel like it's my obligation to make some decisions on my own that might not reflect the exact decisions that those committees have made. Yeah, and you know, you just mentioned the committees and the committees, of course, in advanced placement take an enormous amount of time to go over each question, to test them, to go over the curriculum. And, you know, we know both you and I as teachers, how difficult it is to make up a test, especially when you're rushed. And so this is this is a really powerful testing tool that's been tested, etc., etc. Now, here's a question that I always love to ask teachers, just an aside. Can you remember three memorable students and they don't have to be the A plus students, but students that you think really made your day as a teacher of advanced placement or anything else? Right. Oh, certainly. Three might be hard to keep the limit there. But if I were trying to think about three students that haven't had an impact on me, I think that there are several that weren't necessarily my top students. I confess, Carl, I have a weakness for those students who are willing to take the risk of jumping into class discussion. We sometimes joke among my colleagues that sometimes some of these students don't feel that they have to know the answer in order to answer the question. And so it's a little bit like a 200 hitter, going up to hit with his eyes closed, but I love the fact that they're willing to jump into discussion. And I find that it's very satisfying to see if I can convey this. And I think I do, that it's okay to speculate. And maybe you don't know the exact date of when the Suez canal was completed. But you might think about that the timing of that and how it connects to, you know, other developments with regards to say nationalism. And just think about those connections. What I have found when I asked those kinds of questions in a class discussion, a lot of the stronger students are going into observation mode. Whereas I have other students who just kind of look at it like an adventure. Well, maybe it's this. And you know, maybe what they're saying is just like, not quite what you're kind of hoping for, but I try to keep my mind open. And sometimes I can piece together their logic. In other cases, they just blow me away because they will come up with something that I would never have thought of that's so much better than I had ever hoped that it's very encouraging. And so in your question, I'm not sure if you're asking me about three specific students, which I'm happy to come up with, or if you're looking for a kind of a description of students in general. Well, you know, I don't want to put those students on the spot. So yeah, I don't want to name them either, but that was a good answer. So okay, so this is probably we're getting to the gist after, you know, you're talking about how you got into teaching and also, you know, what you do as a teacher and why you really enjoy the AP program. So what keeps you doing what you're doing, what makes you a teacher who is devoted to your craft. And of course, we all know that that teachers, you know, did not make the money that Wall Street Wall Street brokers make. So you really have to be quite dedicated. Now, I assume your school is a private school. It is. And so that may make a difference. But still, what what what makes you, you know, stay in the position that you're in. And that that Roy Garrison continues to be the man of history in the classroom. Right. Well, I think that probably first and foremost is the enjoyment I have of interacting with students. I am sometimes asked by colleagues who are no longer in the classroom, they may be administrators as they move may have moved on to different jobs. How can you keep teaching the same thing year after year? And I'm thinking about that. Yes, sometimes it does get a little bit boring to talk about the three wars that you know, the Prussians fought in order to bring about unification in Germany. But my students react to it in so many different ways, whether it's that lesson or some other lesson that it doesn't feel the same. And so that's part of what keeps me coming back. I was lucky enough to work with some veteran teachers when I first arrived at Providence Day and they shared some of the things that had kept them going. And one of them in particular resonates for me. And this has to do with one of the one of the English teachers was talking to me about, you know, it's not so much the content as it is the interaction with students. And I'm sorry, I'm going way off track here. But I think you'll go figure out where I'm going. I think most teachers when you do those evaluations at the end of a semester and you get comments back. The teachers I've talked to tend to remember the negative comments a lot longer than they remember the positive comments. And this particular teacher would often tell me about her experience as a teacher. I know I can do it better next time. And so that's part of my motivation. And it's not just about being able to teach the material better, but to have certain students who say, for example, my check out when they are second semester seniors, how can I continue to connect with them when they're about nine tenths out of the room and are out or out of the school and they're really thinking next year, what can I do to bring them back? I find it both a frustrating and an engaging challenge. And those moments when I'm successful, I mean, those can fuel me for two or three weeks at a time. So I really enjoy watching students react. And I've even gotten to the point where I'm trying not to take it personally when they are totally zoned out and, you know, just really looking like they're holding their breath until the end of class. I remember being in that situation as a student and as a grad student. And I try to break through that and I keep looking for ways to try to change it up. So I think those are some of the reasons that I've stayed in. I still love the material. And part of what I hope to do is inspire that among some of the students. I'm a believer that you can't do that for everybody, but if you can just do it for a few, then I feel like it makes a difference. I certainly feel that that was true for me as a student to really kind of get a connection with the teacher and then feel like what they're teaching me is more than just the information that there's something deeper. So on that sort of same subject, do you have students that come back to you and talk to you about their history experiences in college? Yes, it's a very satisfying experience. Generally speaking, they confirm one of the things that I will tell them. So I generally will tell my AP Euro students who are mostly seniors, try to make sure if you can work in a Russian history class when you're in an undergraduate, because the stories you're going to hear are just going to blow you away. And I tell a few of those stories, but the reality is I think in a high school setting, you can't really dig into things as much, nor can you really address it as fully as you might in a college classroom. So and they will come back and sometimes confirm, yes, I enjoyed learning more about Catherine the Great, some of the things that we really couldn't talk about so much in class because we had to move on. And so that's one of the things that has been a nice motivator. Occasionally, I'll have folks who will decide to be history majors and sometimes they'll get into teaching. Those conversations tend not to happen as often. Usually at the conversations I have had, they take place two to three years after they graduated from high school. And so they'll come back and they'll be visiting different teachers and I'll get a few anecdotes about their history classes and how they like them and how some of the things that we learned in high school, not just my class, but across the board at Providence State, have really helped them to connect better and to be more successful. So that's also a nice reinforcement. Well, that's a great way to end our program today. Okay, awesome. And this is Roy Garrison from Providence Day School and in North Carolina and you probably tell by his accent, which is a lovely accent, I may not. And what a pleasure. And we now all know that is the audience in Hawaii, the United States and the world from Think Tech Hawaii that why teachers teach and why they stay in the profession. And it all comes down to Roy and what he has told us today. So I wanted to thank Roy and wish him a very fond aloha and thank you from journeys of the mind and please turn into all Think Tech programs because they're valuable and wonderful. And today you learned why a teacher will stay in the profession, which I think is extraordinarily valuable.