HILLCREST HIGH SCHOOL, 1971

The following is another chapter from my autobiography, also titled TEACHING AS HELL. The excerpt profiles my baptism of fire teaching social studies at Hillcrest High School in Jamaica, during the school's first year of operations. With two years of teaching experience under my belt I secured a job at a newly constructed school building during its maiden year of operations.


When Hillcrest High School opened its doors in September of 1971 it was engulfed in problems and politics, some of which spilled out on the evening news. The zone of the school took in the high poverty area of South Jamaica, parts of the middle class Kew Gardens and a small portion of middle class enclave of Forest Hills. The Forest Hills parents were up in arms and protesting about their kids being sent to Hillcrest, rather than the high regarded Forest Hills High School. Many parents refused to send their kids to Hillcrest, opting to send them to private schools instead. As a result the school opened with far fewer middle class kids than anticipated.

Hillcrest opened with roughly 2000 youngsters, but only in grades nine and ten. It was then slated to expand by one grade in 1972 and reach full capacity in 1973. For some unknown reason the junior highs in middle class areas comprised grades 7,8 and 9, while the so called intermediate schools of the inner city took in grades 6,7 and 8. As a result the ninth grade was comprised of more difficult and challenging students, while the tenth year saw many more academically motivated kids. Moreover, the ninth grade also contained many kids who had dropped out or been expelled from private and parochial schools, none of whom were apt to be Rhodes Scholars.

Hillcrest, modeled after a school name John Dewey in Brooklyn, was designed to be very progressive and innovative, with the principal, Dr. Daniel Salmon, always emphasizing the "innovations." Most high schools had two semesters or terms, the first spanning September to January, while the second (or Spring term) went from February to June. At the end of each term the kids were given new programs, courses and teachers. Hillcrest was different, simply for the sake of being more "innovative." In lieu of two semesters per year there were four "cycles," necessitating new programs, teachers, rooms and courses every nine weeks. Before you or the students had a chance to really know each other, the kids were handed off to a fellow colleague. Many students who needed the stability of the same programs and rooms each day were on a constant merry-go-round of change and chaos. No sooner had they bonded with a teacher and settled into the routine of the class when the nine weeks were up and they were off and running
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In lieu of having a year of courses such as World History or American History, the kids were encouraged to take what were called mini-courses and electives, each course lasting nine weeks. In the tenth year, for example, the kids could opt for courses such as Nationalism and Colonialism, Struggle for Democracy, Emergence of Modern Europe and Twentieth Century Europe. If you took these four classes in the right order, you could probably get a decent year of European History. However, instead of these courses you could opt instead to pick from courses such as Sociology, Behavioral Science, The Future or Psychology. As a result the kids missed out on part of European studies while being allowed to take less challenging electives. Instead of learning about the causes of World War I they could have discussions about such profound topics as, "Is there a positive existence after death?" In lieu of the Renaissance you could learn about ceremonies and celebrations in tribal societies occurring when pubescent females experience their first menstruations Believe it or not I once walked by a classroom where a teacher was giving a lesson on the important topic of penis envy.

Besides "innovation" the second great code word at Hillcrest was "choice." More choices. More electives. Kids who were barely literate were constantly being dazzled with more and more exotic electives. Since classes changed so frequently, it seemed that every other day youngsters were being given sheets of courses with new electives to pick from. It didn't matter that they had no idea what they were choosing; if it sounded good, take it. On opening day of Cycle I, Year I, the kids were handed out course selection sheets for Cycle II.

In the English Department the situation was even more insane than Social Studies. As in every high school you needed four years of English to graduate, which translated to sixteen cycles at Hillcrest. There were meaningful courses in Shakespeare, American Literature or European Literature. But there were less challenging subjects such as Literature of Sports, Mystery and Detective or Horror. As a result you could go through high school without ever reading Shakespeare, Dickens, Elliott, Hardy or numerous other classic writers. How you were supposed to learn writing or grammar was always a mystery to me.

There was also a separate Communication Arts Department, with its own chairman, a fellow name Stephen Posner. The department offered such academically oriented courses as Mime, Improvisation, Advanced Improvisation, Advanced Mime, Comedy, Film and Tragedy. Two Communication Arts courses could be substituted for two English courses. Instead of reading or writing anything significant, you gained English credit by acting out little meaningless skits or pantomimes.

There was no reason why communication arts courses were basically bullshit and lacked substance. I always wondered why the department did not offer meaty courses such as Shakespeare, Greek Comedy and Tragedy, Existentialist Drama, Theatre of the Absurd, Ibsen, Victorian Drama, History of the Broadway Musical, O'Neil or Miller. I suppose that these drama literature classes, involving real work and study, would not appeal to the average student. The idea at Hillcrest was to give whatever sells, not whatever the kids should really have to prepare for college. Whatever happened to in loco parentis. We're not here to amuse and entertain the customers, we are here to educate them and impart knowledge to them.

Academically challenged kids had no conception of the courses they were opting for. I'm sure that a student who already possessed a criminal record thought long and hard when selecting courses. A fellow teacher and I once stopped a kid who was racing around the halls yelling, screaming and cursing. We looked at his program card and saw that he was registered for such subjects as Chance and Games, Teutonic Literature, The Future and Tour of Spain. I'm sure that years later while he sat in his cell at Rikers Island he contemplated the past and thought, "Why didn't I take Kafka or Shakespeare instead of Teutonic Literature?"

The problem with Hillcrest (and many other schools) was that the powers that be designed a four-story building capable of housing 4,000 kids without asking the advice or input of any veteran teachers. Roughly three fourths of the actual classrooms were on the third and fourth floors. Any academic teaching and learning was going to take place on these two floors. Yet in the center of these two floors were two large cafeterias, each with its own kitchen facilities capable of feeding five hundred kids. Every other school I've been in had the cafeterias in the basement, away from the learning centers. Here the cafeteria occupied the central fulcrum of the floor, with the classrooms radiating around the eating facility. The design reminded me of the architectural layout at the Palace of Versailles where King Louis XIV had a large bedroom in the center of the floor, and all the nobles had rooms radiating and surrounding the room of the Sun King. At Hillcrest the cafeteria was the sun and classrooms mere planets revolving around this star. Everything in the school revolved around eating lunch.

The administration claimed that their cafeteria planning was extremely creative and innovative; instead of housing 1,000 kids in one cafeteria we would have better control of our customers by splitting the youngsters up into two 500 student facilities. This meant that as you imparted knowledge to kids, students would be constantly running through the halls yelling and screaming on their way in and out of the cafeterias. To further improve school tone no bathrooms were built inside the cafeterias. (Now every restaurant is supposed to have a bathroom inside for the customers.) This meant that all period long kids would be running in and out of the cafeterias to use the restrooms. Any teacher of course would have known that as the doors to the eating facility opened and closed every thirty seconds, there would be a steady stream of students running in and out, filling the halls with the sounds of music. The cafeterias became a magnet and a haven for cutters and intruders, as many students just majored in lunch.

In every corner of the third and fourth floor were large unused open areas known as Resource Centers, with each department having its own Resource Center. Each center was surrounded by five classrooms and a departmental office. The administration promoted a Land of Oz scenario whereby these resource centers were going to revolutionize and enrich education by providing a milieu for books and/or enrichment materials. Teachers were even given compensatory time assignments to function as resource center coordinators. The administration was always vague about how these centers were going to be utilized. Of course these facilities were again designed without ever asking input from teachers. With over 300 students passing through each resource center at the end of each period, the centers rapidly fell into disuse. By the end of the year they became little more than hangouts or impromptu cafeteria annexes. After a few years all that remained of the resource centers were huge empty spaces where more classrooms could have been built.

Teachers were not asked about classroom design, and many rooms had partitions in the back in lieu of walls. Some rooms even had paper-thin partitions in front and back. This meant that while you taught, the students could stereophonically hear the fellow in the classroom next door. If your next-door neighbor was showing a film, you heard the entire sound track in your classroom. If there was a sub next door, forget it! The yelling and screaming of the kids would completely drown out your lesson; plus the students next door would often play with the partition and bang against it. The rooms housing partitions on both the front and back walls lacked blackboards. (You needed to bring in a portable blackboard to teach.) The reason for this insanity? The principal felt it was wonderfully innovative to be able to remove partitions, thereby doubling and tripling the size of rooms. The arrangement would be perfect for guest speakers and theatre in the round! (This madness made about as much sense as the logic some years back of a member of the State Board of Regents who increased the foreign language requirement by a year. He took this step because he had trouble communicating with foreign visitors during tennis matches at Flushing Meadow.) In all my years at Hillcrest I never once saw any rooms utilized for theatre in the round.

In place of normal forty-five minute periods, Hillcrest possessed what was termed "modular programming," with periods replaced by "blocks." A block was either half an hour or one hour long, depending upon which day it was. What this insanity signified was that each class met for half an hour one day and an hour the next day. An hour was really too long for most kids to sit still for. If you had a bunch of crazies it seemed like one hour was an eternity. For the less academically oriented kids half hour classes each day would have been ideal. Forget about the hour classes. On the other hand a really good class was penalized by this arrangement, as half hour classes were really too short for many lessons.

There was also a huge planning problem. You could have three identical European history classes on a given day, with two of them meeting for an hour and the other for half an hour. How do you teach the same lesson to three classes comprised of different time frames? We often asked the administrators this question, only to be told in political rhetoric and Newspeak jargon that it was very possible to write lesson plans. Teachers who had the audacity to question the Solomon-like wisdom of Dr. Salmon were simply labeled "inflexible" and "un-innovative." Really good teachers would know how to deal with this quagmire. Our crackerjack assistant principal of administration, Irving Laverman, often suggested that teachers prepare twenty-five minute self contained lessons, teaching one during a short block and two during a long block.

What happened in actuality was that all the teachers quickly signed out all the video equipment during the long blocks. When you walked through the halls during the long blocks rooms were dark and the school was filled with the sound of filmstrip records beeping incessantly. Back then teachers would show these usually not very interesting filmstrips accompanied by scratchy records played on antique phonographs with needles past their prime. During the monotonous recorded narration a beep would sound from the Victrola instructing the teacher or monitor to turn the filmstrip projector to the next frame. Some teachers showed so many filmstrips that their rooms were perpetually dark, and their kids never saw the light of day. The filmstrips were also a strain on everyone's eyes as the pictures never seemed to quite be in focus.

After a few years of teacher protests over long and short blocks, the modular programming was revamped so that the school had four different bell schedules, appropriately dubbed A, B, C and D. Out of an eight period day there were now two long blocks instead of four. For example, on Monday periods one and five would be an hour long, with the others being about thirty-eight minutes in length. Then on Tuesday periods two and six would be the interminable designees. And so on. This reduced the AV periods down to two daily, and made for some unique programming decisions by Mr. Laverman. If Monday was bell schedule A and Tuesday B, what happens if Tuesday is a holiday. Do you make Wednesday B, or do you skip B and go directly to C? Only our crackerjack AP of supervision could solve this quagmire, as he meticulously composed monthly calendars indicating which bell schedule would fall on which day. I'll never forget the time when April 30 was scheduled for A and May 1 deemed a C. It seemed that Laverman had programmed April 31 for B, overlooking the trivial fact that there was no April 31.

Another state of the art innovation at Hillcrest was the absence of late bells. Dr. Salmon
believed that late bells created too many un-necessary bell rings, which wasted time and interfered with instruction. Of course it didn't waste time when kids disturbed the start of the lesson by walking in late and then yelling, screaming and carrying on about how they were on time. "I wasn't late. Your watch is wrong man." A simple thing like a late bell would have alleviated these scenes, and clearly established that the honor student was late. However, we didn't want any un-needed bells to disturb the academic tranquility of the classrooms.

Hillcrest also was a devout follower of heterogeneous grouping, as opposed to homogenous grouping. There were no advanced, average, academic, remedial classes or anything else resembling tracking. Students reading on a 12th grade level were thrown into the same classes as kids reading on fourth grade levels. The theory behind this was that the superior pupils would inspire the less motivated youngsters to strive harder and advance to higher levels. In actuality, the advanced kids were simply prevented from learning by the academically students. If students who are borderline criminal are acting out in class, preventing the teacher from imparting knowledge, how do the academic kids benefit? If an English teacher assigns a class to read THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE, how pray tell can a student years behind in reading get through the book?

A constant theme of NYC education is that everything is geared to the lowest common denominator. Everything is geared to the kids at the bottom who are least likely to contribute anything positive to society. Instead of skewering education to motivated, brighter and/or academically oriented kids, it is always focused on the youngsters at the bottom of the totem pole. Instead of zeroing in on the kids who study and do homework nightly, it is focused on kids who do nothing but go home and party till the wee hours of the morning. It is also geared to kids who do other things all night that are best left unmentioned. At one time years ago Chancellor Rudy Crew actually wanted to have a high school that would commence classes at twelve noon for kids who had alternate lifestyles and biological clocks. I suppose this would accommodate the nocturnal party goers who needed to roam the streets all night. Crew¢s phenomenal brainstorm would also be great for teaching kids to get into positive work habits for future employment. How many organizations let you stagger into work every day at noon?

By grouping kids heterogeneously you would allegedly be helping the slower students self esteem. This was not only the goal of Dan Salmon, but of every administrator I've ever worked for. You could never tell a kid that he was years behind in reading; you always had to hide the fact. No matter how deficient the kid was, you had to tell him he was really a genius. Supposedly by placing him with more intelligent individuals he would feel that he too was very smart. The fact that he would fail all the Regents exams supposedly would not dissuade him from the knowledge that he was in reality Einstein Junior.

Hillcrest also possessed a guidance office offering something new and innovative called Omnibus Counseling. With my limited knowledge of education, I never really understood or figured out the difference between regular guidance counseling and omnibus counseling. All it seemed to signify was that we had twice as many counselors as any normal high school, and that the kids were constantly commuting daily from the classrooms to the guidance suite. Since the kids were reprogrammed four times yearly, instead of the usual two at every other school, they apparently needed to be called down to the guidance office more often. Each class was constantly disrupted all period long by kids commuting to and from guidance.,

The first few weeks of September, 1971 were scenes of total anarchy and chaos, as the administration had no idea how to run the school. Kids were running amuck through the halls, or in and out of the cafeteria, helped by the fact that the lunchroom lacked bathrooms. Lines for counselors snaked out into the halls as far as the eye could see.

For the first nine-week cycle I taught a class called 20 Century Europe, which was simply the latter part of a normal year of European history. In every other high school the tenth grade was given over to one full year of World History from ancient times to the Cold War. Here the students were given the latter part of the subject without the first three quarters of the course. The other class I taught had the fancy name, Emergence of Modern Europe, which was simply world history from ancient times through the Renaissance. The kids in the class were taken aback by such topics as the fall of Rome or the Middle Ages, since they wrongly thought a title like Emergence of Modern Europe would deal with World War I and World War II.

The 20th Century classes had some highly motivated kids who were enthusiastic about studying the Russian Revolution and the World Wars. World War II was still a hot topic in 1971, whereas today's kids would regard it as ancient history. One of the activities that enhanced and enriched the course involved screening a couple of sixteen mm films that the social studies department had inherited from a defunct vocational school. I remember setting up the old 16mm projector, and showing the black and white films. There was a great Screen News digest on Russia that had some clips from Eisenstein's masterpiece Ten Days That Shook The World, as well as some great newsreel footage of Lenin, Stalin and Khruschev. There were some really great propaganda moments in it with narrated lines such as, "Lenin eliminated all objections by eliminating those who objected.....Stalin was ruthless, but he learned his ruthlessness from Lenin." The kids loved the films and the movies really livened up the class. But the best was THE NAZIS STRIKE. Amazingly the department had inherited a copy of the greatest propaganda documentary ever made, Frank Capra's 1943 magnum opus. It was the highlight of my eighth grade social studies class in 1961, and now I had the honor and privilege of showing it in 1971. The kids loved it, and many wanted to see it again.

Over the next few years I would show it so many times that I was able to memorize the entire script. "Hitler tore up treaties the way we tear up scraps of paper....No labor unions here. No overtime. The Fuehrer tells you where to work; when to work; how much your work is worth." In addition to world history classes, I later showed it to American History classes. It always brought down the house. The students were always mesmerized by the Nazi Luftwaffe bombing Poland, or the Panzer divisions marching into Austria and the Sudetenland.

In November of 1971 the first cycle came to an end, and we were given new classes and kids for Cycle II. This time I taught three classes of a world history class entitled Struggle for Democracy and two classes of a ninth grade course called Africa. The entire 9th year of social studies was always one big waste of time. Instead of learning about important people and events in World and U.S. history the kids were given a year of what was termed Area Studies. Instead of learning about the fascinating history of France, Germany, Russia, and so forth, the kids had to learn about the history of Nigeria, Libya, Uganda, Ethiopia, etc. The subject matter and the classes were absolute bores. I even remember taking a graduate course in the Cold War in 1970 where the professor talked about which nations he would focus on in his lectures. "We're not going to be discussing nations like Libya, which never was or will be a great power in the world."

To teach area studies should have required a separate license and college major. Ideally, graduates with degrees, backgrounds, interests and majors in Afro-Asian studies should have been given the ninth grade classes . To my knowledge, not one member of our social studies department had taken any courses in this area. In reality, we were short-changing the students by not really having qualified specialists instructing these courses.

It always amazed me how the kids knew next to nothing about such important topics as our European heritage, the development of democratic values and ideas from ancient Athens through the Enlightenment or ways in which our government operates and functions. A year of world history and a year of American history do not do justice for preparing our students to exercise their rights as citizens and to vote and participate in our democracy.
Yet here we are wasting an entire year going over such meaty topics as why so many third world nations have poverty, and why so many African and Asian nations experience one holocaust after another. Kids who would never learn about the Battle of the Bulge had to be taught about Robert Clive's victory at the Battle of Plassey.
If I was designing a social studies curriculum world history would take up both the ninth and tenth grade. Interwoven into a two year world history sequence would be lessons on Africa and Asia. If the teacher thought that it was important to have a lesson or two on ancient Timbucktu, he could have one. But an entire year spent on area studies is a waste of precious time. What makes the ninth grade area studies more deadly is that the kids in the class are usually some of the lowest performers in the school. As I pointed out previously they all hail from inner city intermediate schools or are private school dropouts. So in addition to having the most difficult youngsters to teach, you are stuck with the most uninteresting curriculum imaginable. It all added up to a cycle of hell, which every Hillcrest teacher went out of his or her way to avoid. After the first year teachers began to battle for the tenth grade, and in later years for the 11thh and 12 grade classes.
Today you could easily survive and while away the time in the ninth grade by showing dvds of movies such as Hotel Rwanda or Ghandi. There are dozens of great documentaries and docudramas from the History Channel, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, and so forth graphically depicting everything from King Leopold's genocide in the Belgian Congo to the extinction of the African elephant. (Of course you would have to show them at a time when the administrators weren't running around writing you up for showing films that made the class too interesting.) But back in 1971 you didn't even have a Xerox machine to copy and reproduce an interesting article from Time or Newsweek. All the department had was one hand cranked rexograph machine, which often broke down from over-use. Moreover, teachers who typed who spent countless hours typing up rexogrphed stencils to reproduce for reading materials and class handouts were often criticized by their fellow co-workers. "All he does is run off reading materials every day on the rexo," was an all too common complaint. We wouldn't want the kids to be doing too much reading now, would we?
So I was stuck with a class devoted to Africa for nine weeks. For a text book I was given a small paperback book with black and white photos entitled AFRICA that was published in 1964. The text of the book could not have been more boring with chapters devoted to such fascinating topics as life along the Zambezi River, diamond mining in South Africa or farming in the Sudan. As I approached the room on the first day of class I heard some honor student screaming, "Who's the fuckin’ teacher of this fuckin’ class?" Most of the kids resembled candidates for Rikers Island rather than Rhodes scholarships. In fact maybe I should have taught about the latter, since Cecil Rhodes was so intertwined in the history of Africa.

I told the class that in addition to studying Africa we would also be learning about current events and world issues. This gave me a chance to show a couple of Screen News Digests under the rubric of current events, and move away from in depth discussions of the roots of corruption in Lagos. I'll never forget showing a pretty interesting movie on the international drug trade when the same honor student started screaming in the middle of the flick, "Hey this fuckin’ movie isn't about Africa. I took this fuckin’ class to learn about Africa." Yes, I'm sure a discussion of the Mali Empire was just what she was looking for. To survive the cycle I also gave out a great deal of class handouts for the kids to read and answer questions on, only to hear gripes about how I was overtaxing our rexo machine.

The name of the game for most of the staff became how to get out of teaching the freshmen. Members of our department would constantly think up new innovative elective courses they could design and of course teach that were skewered towards tenth grade kids. Incredibly, nobody ever came up with a great elective for ninth grade kids. (I wonder why.)
At department meetings our leading innovators, Bonnie Silvers and Estelle Karden, would propose to our chairman that we further expand such courses as anthropology, the future, psychology, sociology and behavioral science. These courses might well have provided for valuable learning and insights were it not for the fact that kids would be taking them in lieu of such classes as 20th Century Europe, Nationalism and Colonialism and Emergence of Modern Europe. So while kids might be immersed in the differences between schizophrenia and paranoia they were not learning anything about vital topics such as the World Wars or the Cold War.

To me one of the most useless courses that we offered was Bonnie Silvers' class on The Future. The text book was Alvin Toffler's best selling opus Future Shock, and the kids had endless discussions about life on earth a century from now. She was one of these so called with it innovative teachers who had the kids arrange their seats in a circle each period and call her Bonnie, rather than Miss Silvers. Each day she would tape blank white papers to each student's desk with the instructions DOODLE HERE on each one. I always used to categorize teachers as rappers, crappers or probers. Bonnie fell into the first two categories.

A number of proposals for really innovative courses never saw fruition such as the History of Advertising and the History of Rap Music. Richard Kobliner once attempted to start a course called Science Fiction, which to me sounded more like an English course. It was going to look at inventions and discoveries of the past that were originally sci fi and allegedly show how they came true. I guess the class was gong to study how Jules Verne Captain Nemo pioneered the original submarine. Bonnie Silvers once proposed a course which never got off the ground entitle My Community, where the kids would walk around the neighborhood each day supposedly taking notes on their observations. What is really scary is that today we have an entire New Visions school centered around such activities, named The City As School. Bonnie was way ahead of her time.

In cycles three and four (which corresponded to the spring term of 1972) I began doing something very unusual, unorthodox and unheard of with my more academically oriented tenth grade classes. I had always been into old television shows, radio programs, movies, nostalgia and obscure facts and information. I began spicing up classes by asking such profound questions as, "Name all five of the Marx brothers?" Name the old lady on the bicycle in Wizard of Oz who later morphs into the Wicked Witch of the West?" "What island was King Kong found on?" "Who was Sherlock Holmes' housekeeper?" "What was the secret identity of The Shadow?" "Which American President was the heavyist?" And on and on. I had thousands of questions in the ready. I was into trivia before the term entered our lexicon in the mid-1970's. The kids loved it and they kept wanting more. Many of them began writing up and bringing in their own trivia questions to class. I eventually established every Friday as TRIVIA DAY, and I would give out a rexo with ten tor twelve trivia questions, many of them multiple choice, for the kids to answer. What was the closest plantation to Tara, and home of the Wilkes family, in Gone With The Wind? Which book begins with the line, "The clocks were striking thirteen...?" Who narrated the Fractured Fairy Tales on the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show? Name the Lone Ranger's nephew? Where was Nixon when he made the immortal statement, "I am not a crook." What was the theme music to Captain Video? What was the name of the first boy to own the collie Lassie on television? Who did the voices of Charlie the Tuna and the Jolly Green Giant? The kids looked forward to Friday every week. On that day I would hurry through our lesson, leaving out any class discussion and get right to the trivia in the second half of the period.

Around April of 1971 two student reporters came to interview me for an article in the school newspaper, THE CYCLE, about why my classes were becoming so popular. The authors referred to me as the Trivia King of Hillcrest High School and the name kind of stuck. The article told how all of my classes had such profound queries as, in which movie does a citizen of Tokyo yell out "Look at King Kong, he's roasting." What does Charlie Brown's father do for a living? What was the only movie based on a Charles Dickens novel to win Best Picture of the Year? The nickname Trivia King kind of stuck, and that's what I began calling myself.

Around May of 1971 I decided to get in on the band wagon of this innovative elective nonsense and develop a course of study in Russian history to be offered in September. This would totally different than the Bonnie Silvers and Alan Kitt rap sessions and would never get off the ground today. It was a class designed to teach many in depth facts and issues about the fascinating history of Russia from its founding in 860 by Rurik the Viking through the Khruschev era. Even though I don't belive in curriculums, as I will point out later in the book, I had to make up a syllabus to hand to the chairman for the course to take off. The course would focus on the policies and personalities of the great Czars (and Czarinas) such as Ivan III (The Great), Ivan IV (The Terrible), Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Nicholas I, Alexander I, Alexander II, Alexander III and NIcholas II. We would have a detailed study of the causes and effects of the 1905, February 1917 and October 1917 Revolutions. We would examine the Soviet period of Russian history emphasizing Lenin, Stalin and Khruschev. IT featured reading primary source material such as the Russian Primary Chronicle, the Ivan IV-Kurbsky correspondence, the Communist Manifesto and documents written by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. The students would also have to read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich, Orwell's 1984 and Orwell's Animal Farm.

Omitted from the curriculum were a number of unorthodox topics designed to bring the course to life. WE would look at a primary source 1613 doument from The Time of The Troubles, when one third of the Russian population died, describing unchecked cannibalism in the countryside. A lesson wuld be spent, complete with eyewitness primary source account, on the tortures of Ivan The Terrible and his liquidation of the Boyars (old Russian nobles). A day would be spend on the sixteen creative assassination attempts by the radical anarchist association The People's Will to kill Czar Alexander II, the 16th of which succeeded. A period had to be devoted to Felix Yusupov's assassination of Rasputin, as well as another lesson on the Mad Monk's social life. In addition, we would continue to have our Friday trivia sessions.
In June when the time arrived for the kids to select courses for cycles one and two for the fall term I went from room to room plugging the course. One hundred kids signed up for the class in cycle one and another hundred signed up to take it in cycle two. The course was a tremendous success as kids were exposed to the remarkable history of a nation they knew little about.