The Role of an Educator | Featuring Jack Weinstein

Fremont is part of Silicon Valley, the second largest city in Alameda county and the fourth largest in the Bay Area, covering 92 square miles with more than 230,000 residents. Fremont Focus now hosted by lifelong Fremont resident and former city council member David Bonaccorsi, will delve behind the headlines to showcase our civic, artistic, educational, nonprofit, faith based and business community leaders in Fremont and the surrounding cities of Newark and Union City to explore matters of local interest.

My guest today is Jack Weinstein and we're going to be talking about the role of an educator in turbulent times. Good morning, Jack.

Good morning.

And I'm going to introduce you to our audience. Jack, for 23 years directed the Northern California regional office of Facing History and Ourselves. Facing History and Ourselves trained teachers and provided content development focusing on adolescent development and curricular case studies related to genocide, human rights, Holocaust studies and related topics. Jack has been a longtime Fremont resident, but he married well because he married somebody that came from a long-standing family from Fremont and before including his father in law, John, who was actually part of the team that built the Niles sign in Niles in the 1930s in the foothills. Jack, before we get into the serious topic today, do you want to talk about the Niles sign you shared with me before?

Sure. My father in law was and his brothers were among the groups of people that were tasked with marking those foothills with the big Niles sign that you can still see today from the Whereas you ride into Fremont on BART, you can look up to the left and see that sign perched in the hills. It was up for about 10 years before World War II began. It was taken down because it was a marker that could be used by enemy planes, which of course never happened on their watch. But after the war the citizens went back and rebuilt that sign and it persists to this day.

Wonderful. So although our show is called Fremont Focus now, that was before Fremont was Fremont — in 1956, it was one of...

The townships that were eventually incorporated within the city limits of Fremont.

Fantastic. Now for our topic today, the role of an educator in turbulent times. I failed to mention that you've been a longstanding teacher at Milpitas High School in your own right. And that was for how many years?

Just under 20 years. I taught at Milpitas High School.

And what curriculum did you teach?

I was primarily an English teacher, but in the last seven or eight years of my career there, I pioneered a course called Facing History, which was a mixture of an English and a social studies class. And that course is the longest standing elective, it's still taught at the school.

What is Facing History? When was it founded? And tell us a little bit about that organization.

Well, Facing History was founded in 1976 in Boston, actually as a local project, not as a national or international project. And it was founded by two middle school teachers, partly because what was going on right outside their doors of the middle school where they taught was the busing crisis in Boston in the civil rights era. And the chaos and the turbulence, I guess you could say that was happening at that time, was not incorporated into any kind of curriculum or any kind of sanctioned way for teachers to help children or adolescents cope with what was going on in the larger world that they lived in. They were navigating their way to school at a time when Boston maybe looked more like it would have looked 20 years earlier in the Deep South. It was such animus and such turbulence and chaos going on in the community, but nowhere in the curriculum were they paying attention to those things. So Facing History was first developed as a project that paid attention to those issues. It morphed eventually into a case study of cases in extremis like the Holocaust, or about genocides, other genocides in the 20th and now 21st century. And Facing History has been a long time nonprofit education organization that has trained and prepared teachers to do that kind of work over the course of all these years. I was very proud to come out of the classroom and to direct the efforts of Facing History and Facing History teachers for quite a while before I retired about 10 years ago.

And apparently during your tenure, more than 8,000 teachers in the Bay Area and elsewhere in the region have been trained in Facing History.

Well, trained might not be quite the correct word because they're not circus animals — or seals — to train. But I think the best way to think about it is that we were outfitting them with a way to become more fluent in case studies that were parts of their curriculum. And especially in regard to pedagogy that we believed needed to do the heavy lifting in terms of teaching methods that made classrooms democratic spaces and safe spaces for young people.

One of the things I try to do in the podcast is not speak like an attorney, but I'm also very attentive to vocabulary. What is pedagogy?

So the idea that there's method to the madness, that you don't just take what you know, what's in your knowledge bank into the classroom and spew it out in front of young people that there's a plan, there's methodology, that's at work. There are tactics that one uses, whether you have in mind the sharing of factual information or whether you have in mind the idea of helping young people that are sitting in front of you feel like they're part of a learning community. Pedagogy is what comes between the idea of simple sharing of knowledge and the tactics or methods that are used to make the classroom a place where learning can occur. And that plan is the pedagogy. That plan involves what materials are used, how the conversations are structured, what questions can be asked and to whom and in what manner, how you make yourself a catalyst as a teacher for student engagement. All of that is pedagogy.

Again, the topic is the role of an educator in turbulent times. Before we talk about the role of the educator, how do we define turbulent times? Are we in them? What does that mean to you?

Well, there's a range. Turbulence comes into the classroom individually and in collective ways. Individually, a child or a young adult can enter a classroom feeling like they are at the mercy of a lot of turbulence. That turbulence might be due to something happening in their own lives or in their own community, or it might be because they've taken in or absorbed the feelings that come with being part of a world as marked by chaos or turbulence. Of course, right now, both of those are at play quite often in the lives of young people.

What is the role of an educator, for example, in turbulent times? When reading a book like To Kill a Mockingbird, how does that catalyze a conversation? What is the function of an educator in that context?

Well, when content touches on things that might be related to what children or young adults are experiencing, whether it's about membership in the community, whether it's about their identity and the power of the labels they carry, whether it's about whether they're part of a community or whether they feel like an outcast, whether they are aware of the societal issues that come along with that curriculum? The example that you cited that you asked about, To Kill a Mockingbird takes place within a context that is not the same as what young people are sitting through or living through today. It takes place in a region of the country that may seem like it was very different from what young people are.

In the South here today, before the civil rights era.

And the meaning that they're making of their racial identities or the questions that revolve around the power of those labels might be unique to that setting, but it might relate in other ways to that setting. Think about the identity of young people of color sitting in a classroom where they are a numerical minority. And reading a book like Huck Finn, where the N-word is used over 200 times. Pedagogy intrudes when the teacher has to make a decision. Are you going to read those passages aloud? Are you going to re-traumatize people or expose people to things they may not have a context for understanding? Or are you going to use your best judgment about how to make those conversations both meaningful and safe from somebody.

Like Mark Twain right after the Civil War was really challenging the racist structure that existed in the language of his time. And that's something that, as a teacher, you need to enlighten students.

Well, when you're talking about teaching in turbulent times, that that is where I use that phrase, pedagogy doing the heavy lifting. And I'll use another kind of. I don't know, maybe it's a little bit too technical the term. But young people have the power to be metacognitive. They have the power to think about their own thinking. And maybe the tactic that might be best used in this situation is to make them part of the conversation about where language gets its power, about what the common or unique questions are that are being raised about something like whether to read a passage aloud because the language that it includes and what are the rules of the game, the rules of that engagement. I can remember, for example, as a young man being exposed to reading about a diary like the diary of Anne Frank when it was first being used as curriculum. And I remember being the only Jewish child in my classroom. And I remember that as we read that play version of that diary, some people turn to me as if because of my identity, I would know something that they might not know. Luckily for my teacher, luckily for those other students, and luckily for me, I'm not an introvert, and I took the bull by the horn. So I was happy to regale my classmates with what it meant to be a lone Jewish person in a class full of non Jews. I think there were probably other people in my Sunday school class or in my Hebrew school class on Tuesday afternoons who might have chosen to shrink away from those questions out of a sense of lack of safety emotionally. So pedagogy comes in when the teacher is charged with the idea of knowing what to do in such situations, how to make the classroom both a great learning space where daring escapades can occur intellectually and a place where they can guarantee some sense of emotional safety.

Anne Frank's story is amazing, for the fact that it's now being banned in some communities in this country is just Incredible. For me, it wasn't a stretch because I had a cousin in Holland, a family, Dutch cousins in Holland, who housed Jews to escape from persecution. In fact, my mom's first cousin married a Jewish woman who had been housed in World War II. So Anne Frank was very real for me. And I'm going to ask you about something that touches deeply with facing history as it intersects now with what's happening in Gaza, where the word genocide is being used to describe the rifle killing, by all measures, by all objective measures that's going on in Gaza. So what is the role of the educator when their study of the Holocaust results in some student making that analogy to the Israeli Gaza conflict? How do you navigate that? You've raised your own Jewish American identity. And how does one step out of the role of one's personal history and religious affiliation to be able to still be an educator facilitating that discussion?

Well, it's obviously a very difficult question. It's a very difficult role to be in. First of all, such questions, when they are raised, are context specific. There are reasons the question might be asked, depending on the person who's asking it. The context includes the goals of the teacher in that setting, the community norms and the expectations that all the stakeholders may have, from other teachers to administrators, to the community at large, to the parents of those children, and whether or not that question has arisen out of something curricular that is already on the plate that you are in the midst of building information about, or whether it's come out of something less tangible or less concrete than that, maybe arising because of something that was heard on the news that day. All of those variables play into the way a teacher must navigate and walk that tightrope. I will say that the power of a teacher resides partly in the position that she or he occupies. And a bully pulpit is not an appropriate chair for a teacher. It's not an appropriate position to occupy. What's appropriate in the classroom is to complicate the thinking that goes into the questioning and the answering and the delving that such a question can bring about, regardless of where a teacher may stand personally on those issues.

Well, let's break it down. If a student says, I think that what's happening in Gaza is just like the Holocaust, you're not using your platform to say to the student you're wrong. This is an opportunity for a conversation.

That's exactly right and to raise questions about where that comes from and why that supposition is made. And to test that supposition using the best examples one can find and enlarging the scope of the inquiry as a way of preparing people to have a right to have an opinion. So there are those who would suggest that that's a cop out, that if you're asked such a question, you owe your students a baseline answer to their honest inquiry. I would suggest that the role of the educator is to complicate as well as to lead them to being able to find their answers to such a question and how you curate information, how you make sure that they understand reliable versus unreliable sources, even making sure that if it's not a question, a teacher, many teachers are not prepared to take on that question. I may feel prepared to take on that question because I've lived my entire adult life thinking about them. But I would suggest that there are many teachers who, for the sake of having an honest adult level conversation with adolescents especially, they need to be able to both approach the question honestly and to take a step back and say, let's gather the information that what kind of information would we need in order to make a judgment? I call that third party perspective. What would experts from various places on the spectrum of beliefs say about that question? Let's line up all of as much as we can gather about what you're maybe going to be exposed to when you ask such a question and see if a position on that spectrum resonates for you for whatever reason or raises questions for you or complicates where you might stand on such an issue. That's a safety net for a teacher teaching in turbulent times.

Well, the phrase you haven't used but is implicit in everything that you're saying is the fact that the teacher instills in their students, if they're teaching effectively, the ability to engage in critical thinking. And that is such, I find in my profession, I find in society at large, when we're having civil discourse, it's not always civil that the critical thinking skills are missing. So describe what it means to engage in critical thinking and how your role as an educator helped promote that.

Well, one of the unwritten, unspoken, generally unspoken variables involved in all this is developmental psychology. When a three year old asks where babies come from, you don't get into a technical drawing about human sexuality, right? When a 14 year old makes an analogy between the Holocaust in Gaza, you don't bring out textbooks that are 4 inches thick and compare the Nuremberg laws to what's going on in Gaza today. What you do is you reframe their questions around bite-sized chunks. You enable them to go back to asking the questions that need to be answered before you can even approach such a question. And you break down and you analyze the parts that move into that whole. And anything that takes a shortcut to that is outside the role of the educator.

Excellent. I admire your career. Just briefly, biographically, the reason I'm in Fremont was my father was an educator. Took a job in 1960 at Washington High School and taught at Mission San Jose and taught civics and was the first vice principal of American High from 1972 until he retired in 89. But he had an experience, you mentioned earlier, being the only Jew in the classroom and everyone looking at you. He was not an introvert either. But when he first took a job in San Ramon unified in the 50s after graduating from Cal, they actually circulated a petition against him because he was Italian and Catholic. It was largely partisan community. He was the other. And so I never forgot. But he also was a World War II veteran. So again, when we're talking about Anne Frank, on one side of the family we had Dutch cousins. He actually liberated a concentration camp. So those stories in my own history, family history, were real. You didn't have to provide the context. You didn't have to go back in time. Those were very real. And I see now 1, 2, 3 generations younger having no connection to that. And this is. That, I think, is adding to the turbulence of our times. There's certain assumptions that we have about history and a consensus that we've had at some point that we no longer have. You see that, too, don't you?

I do. I do see that. I think, you know, my. I'm 75 years old. So when I look back at the 1950s, in my elementary school years, thinking about, you know, the fact that until my younger sister came to kindergarten at Schafer Park Elementary School in Hayward, I was the only Jew in. In sight. And I think that that status made me feel both unique and in some ways, powerful. Because they prided me. Yeah, because I knew some things that other people did not. I think later on, the insights that may come to someone because of their identity can be meaningful in the way that shapes their major choices in life. And I brought into my teaching life many years later a consciousness about the fact that we never know what young people bring with them into the classroom. We never know what family history they may be bearing or they may be benefiting from. We never know how they're interpreting what's going on around them in a complete way. And so the role of an educator in turbulent times may be defined as a kind of acceptance, of a humility instead of an arrogance about thinking, you know what you may never know and treading a little bit more lightly than you might otherwise because you don't know when you're. I'll just give you a kind of off the cuff example. We used to play a spelling game called Hangman where you would, you know, where you would draw a figure on the board and with every letter that was missed, another part of the hangman would, you know, appear on the, on the board. And the game was to get the word spelled correctly before, you know, the end of the game occurred with that design. But I remember in my first or second year of teaching, a little girl sitting in my classroom who, 14 years old, who, when I started to draw that figure on the board, quietly shed tears because in her younger life she had actually witnessed a hanging in the place where she had grown up outside this country, in a place that I was unfamiliar with. And I remember another time when I stopped at a gas station in Milpitas one day on my way to work. And I recognized in those days there was a gas station attendant. And I recognized that he had been the father of one of my students at the back-to-school night. She was a brilliant student, Vietnamese American girl. And I had complimented her to her father and mother very profusely, but we hadn't spoken about their lives at all. And so I looked at this man and I said, wow. I said, I didn't realize you worked at this gas station. I've been coming here for years. The first time we've seen each other. I recognize you from last week and your daughter's doing so well. And I, we started a conversation and I said, so what? How long have you been doing this? He says, well, he says, I just rejoined my family after several years of being in re education camps in Vietnam. I said, well, what was your role in Vietnam when you were there? I expected him to say that he was a mechanic or worked in car repair or whatever. And he said, well, I was a superior court judge.

Wow.

In and South Vietnam. Yeah. And I thought, okay. I'd known Miss Im Girl as 14 year old for a few months. She writes beautiful essays. Her language skills are amazing. She's trilingual. I had no idea what history she's carrying as she navigates the neighborhoods of a place like at the time. Milpitas.

So Jack, you have tremendous story, an enlightening one you have. What we do on these FremontFocus now podcasts is that we encourage people to move from listening to the podcast to what we term show notes and sources that you would direct us to. One we could talk for another 20 minutes about Randi Weingarten's new book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers. She's the president of the American Federation of Teachers and she got that book out. You've got that as a link. You also have a link to facinghistory.org and I also want to talk about your Substack posts you've now after you in your retirement, you've you've taken to Substack and so briefly describe what you do. I saw a very controversial one, I suspect for some people on deconstructing Chris Hedges' criticism of the Holocaust narrative in connection with Gaza. I don't want to discuss that here, but that was your most recent substack, I think today. So talk about it.

Well, I'm a grandpa and it occurred to me not too long ago because my first grandchild was born 11 years ago. I'm an older grandfather if I'm lucky, my oldest granddaughter and her younger sister and the two little ones that were born to admit their first cousins here, my third and fourth grandchildren will all live long enough so they can know me in many ways as an adult or at least as an older teen. If I live to be 95, you know that will be the case. But it occurred to me because of my own autobiographical background that I had two grandfathers that I never met. They died when my parents were 12 and 9 respectively, and it's been a long haul to try and figure out what I needed to know about them. I'm named for both of them, but I will never know them. I'll never know them. One day I discovered a cache of letters that my mother had kept for her childhood days. One of those letters was a letter that had been sent to her father in his dying weeks when My mother was 9 years old. My mother had kept that cache of letters and after she died we found that repository of older documents and there was a letter in there from my grandfather's friend citing his prowess as a second baseman on their baseball team. Well, that meant that my grandfather in his 40s was still playing in a baseball league and I'm a lover of baseball and I played for many years in a fast pitch softball league and I played this slow pitch softball league and I was not an All-American, but I was a decent ball player in Bay Area many years ago when I was a teenager and that moment when I discovered something that I had no knowledge of about my long dead grandfather whose name was the impetus for my middle name, that I wanted to know more. And it occurred to me that if I didn't tell my own story addressed to my grandchildren, how would they ever know me other than through the stories that their parents might tell? So I began writing soon after I retired. And Substack is just the latest iteration of the forum with that theme. So they have over 100 posts up on Substack, and they range from autobiographical to political to social to cultural, to images. But they're all unique in this one way. The point of view of each of those posts is meant to be elucidating of who I am for a future that I may not be here, to be the arbiter of, that my grandchildren someday will have this repository of words, repository of stories that tell them a little bit more than they might ordinarily get to know about who I am and at that point in history, who I was.

What a legacy. Jack and I want to thank you for spending some time today on the podcast and encourage the listeners to go to the show notes that we're going to be posting on various platforms. And one of the things that we do at Fremont Focus now is promote local community organizations and small businesses. And you and I see each other virtually every day at Hops and Beans with our South Indian filter coffee and just learned that our content producer and my producer Jonathan worked there for a while, so we have that in common, too. So these community gathering places where you sit down and have conversations are so vital to our community. So, Jack, I want to thank you for.

David, just a note. All of my Substack posts have been written. My table at Hops and Beans. I told the owners one day, I know I'm never going to be so famous or infamous that you'll need to put a plaque. So Jack Weinstein wrote all of his articles, all of his posts, and all of his books in this space.

There you go.

So there you go.

Thank you very much.

Pleasure.