About the Author: Jenn Breisacher
I remember the exact moment I realized something had shifted. I was teaching my World History class, and we were discussing primary-source accounts of the Rwandan genocide. A student raised her hand and asked, completely matter-of-fact, “Why didn’t they just move to a different country?” No malice. No coldness. Just a genuine question that revealed … Read more
I remember sitting at my desk during planning period, staring at a stack of unit tests on the causes of World War I. For weeks, I’d watched my sophomores confuse long-term causes like militarism and the alliance system with short-term triggers like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I’d seen it in their document analyses, … Read more
In month 3 of my first job, teaching World History for three months by then, I still had a student who hadn’t muttered a word. Not once. She turned in maybe a third of the assignments. I remember standing there, thinking, “I have no idea what to do with this kid.” That moment stuck with me … Read more
I vividly remember standing in the back of my classroom watching a student meticulously fold a paper football. He wasn’t disruptive. He wasn’t sleeping. He had simply checked out so completely that origami felt like a better use of his time than the debate we were having about the Treaty of Versailles. That moment stuck … Read more
I still remember the moment in the spring of 2016 when a student raised his hand not to answer a question, but to ask one that stopped me cold. “Mrs. B,” he said, “why are we learning about the Treaty of Versailles the exact same way every single class learns everything else? Read the chapter, … Read more
I remember the exact moment a teacher I was coaching realized she had completely lost one of her students. She had been struggling to reach this particular kid for weeks. No eye contact. No participation. Assignments were turned in blank or not at all. She told me about it during one of our coaching calls, … Read more
I remember the exact moment I realized that “just try harder” wasn’t going to cut it anymore. It was the second semester with a group of high school juniors in a World History class. I had spent the previous evening meticulously crafting what I thought was a genuinely interesting lesson on the Silk Road, complete … Read more
I remember the first time I tried to teach the Age of Absolutism to a room full of 11th graders who were far more interested in whether we’d have a snow day than in the power structures of 17th-century France. I had spent hours crafting what I thought was a brilliant lecture, complete with detailed … Read more
I remember the first time I handed a blank map of Europe to a class of high school sophomores and asked them to sketch the borders from memory. Most couldn’t place Poland relative to Germany. A few labeled France where Spain should be. One student, completely earnest, drew a single large blob and wrote “USSR???” … Read more
I still remember the first time I projected an image of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam onto my classroom screen during my second year of teaching World History. A student in the back row, the kind who had perfected the art of looking attentive while mentally checking out, suddenly leaned forward. “Wait,” he said, squinting at the nearly … Read more
I still remember the exact moment I realized how badly I had misread a student’s disengagement. It was my third year in the classroom, and a 10th grader sat in the back row of my World History class, hoodie up, head down, contributing absolutely nothing. I assumed he didn’t care about the material, that he … Read more
After 17 years in the classroom, I learned that the most dangerous thing in a room isn’t a disruptive student…it’s a silent one. The first time I realized student apathy has nothing to do with laziness, I was staring at a former student who’d failed my history class but could recite the damage-per-second stats of … Read more