Teaching history to middle school students has always been a favorite subject / age combo of mine, even with its unique challenges.
On one hand, it’s a subject built on facts, documents, and events that students can often find distant, irrelevant, and impersonal. On the other, it’s filled with human stories, moral dilemmas, and ongoing debates about how we remember our past, and how the past impacts the present and our future.
These human stories and lively debates personalize history for students and often pulls on the big emotions of this age group. The balancing act of this subject is to bring together the reliable primary sources and the personal stories to create an honest and well-rounded idea of an event or time period. For me, the goal is not to tell students what to think but to help them develop the tools to think critically, especially at a time when the teaching of history feels both vital and contested.
In the last 9 years of teaching, my curriculum has included units on the Holocaust, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the women’s suffrage movement, and examinations of the founding documents of the United States. These aren’t just “chapters in a textbook” subject to censorship, alteration, or removal, they are real moments of human struggle and courage, and are important events that changed the world. Middle schoolers are ready to engage with those stories, and they deserve the opportunity to draw parallels between the past and their present experiences.
For example, when we studied Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, I paired it with Mahmoud Kalil’s Letter from a Palestinian Political Prisoner in Louisiana. The parallels in language and ideas sparked powerful reflections. Students noticed how both writers appealed to justice, morality, and the idea of waiting too long for change. It was a moment when history wasn’t just something that happened “back then.” It was connected to voices still speaking today.
As a language arts teacher, my curriculum also asks students to analyze the power of language in history by exploring topics like propaganda, rhetoric, and the careful choice of words in powerful speeches. By comparing presidential speeches across multiple generations or from leaders in different countries, students are able to identify patterns of language that can represent differing ideologies. We talk about misinformation and disinformation, and why those terms matter for students, like when they are doing research for their inquiry projects, and for voters when they are trying to make an informed choice during elections.
Students quickly recognize that history isn’t just about memorizing dates and names of the past. It’s about learning what has happened in the world, in the country, in our state and communities, and the ways that it has a very real and lasting impact on our personal experiences today. Students understand that we are living in history, and that the people and events that they are currently experiencing will shape the world for years to come.
That’s why the old saying—“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”—feels so urgent right now. There are growing pressures to narrow what is taught, to soften or even erase difficult chapters of our history, or to change the narrative altogether. As a teacher, I feel a responsibility to resist that pressure. Our children deserve the whole truth, even when it feels heavy, and they deserve an honest representation of our history. They deserve to wrestle with hard truths, ask deep questions, and see how yesterday’s struggles still echo today. My job is not to tell them what conclusions to draw, but to make sure they have enough evidence, perspective, and courage to draw them at all. Middle school aged students are particularly primed to engage with history as they are eagerly learning about the world around them for the first time, and it is my job to continue to encourage their learning and involvement in meaningful ways.
If our students grow up without learning the full breadth of our history, we don’t just risk repeating mistakes, we risk losing the ability to recognize them in the first place. That’s why I keep returning to these lessons, year after year. Because history, taught with honesty and care, is not a burden or a political talking point, but is an essential part of the health and wellbeing of our communities and a better future.