I always include a bonus question on my exams. This bonus question usually involves a map. For example, I might ask students to circle the Chesapeake or New England on a blank map of the East Coast.

Last spring, I was struck by how many students left the extra credit section blank. These students didn’t merely get an extra credit question wrong; they refused to even take a shot and circle something on the blank map. They knew there was no penalty for getting the extra credit attempt wrong. And just to be clear, I had incorporated a lot of maps in my lessons, so I wasn’t asking them to randomly know the location of the Chesapeake (not to say that coverage is the same as adequately teaching something).

After the exam, I asked a few of these students why they didn’t hazard a guess. Most of those I asked admitted that they were too embarrassed to try, and at least a couple told me that they just weren’t good at making sense of maps.

I realized that I had made a basic teaching mistake: I had assumed mastery of set of prior skills by my students. While I knew many students didn’t know much specific geographical content, I had assumed a basic knowledge in reading a map, a baseline that would make it relatively simple to add content to.

I am used to figuring out students levels of preparation in history. However, the line between history and other subjects blur, since history deals with the human past and all the types of evidence that past leaves behind. For example, think about each of the distinct academic disciplines that bleed into a course on colonial history: geography, religious studies, economics, psychology, anthropology, environmental science, political science, literary studies, and statistics. I am sure this list is far from complete. Each one of these subjects has a separate list of rudimentary knowledge or skills necessary to before one can engage critically with them.

I am of two minds about how to address these connected yet distinct subjects in class. On the one hand, I tend to be pretty skeptical about what can be accomplished in one semester of teaching, or what even what as a history instructor I am qualified to teach. For me, economics is a big example of this dubious level of qualification. Every time that I have taught or led a discussion on the Great Depression, I feel a little bit like a fraud. For something like the causes of the Depression, I can lay out the main economic theories, but I am pretty limited in my ability to evaluate the data. My own background is in political history. Even though my research is in the 19^th century, I am fairly confident that if I spent more time with political sources of the 1930s, most of the same historical skills would come into play. On the other hand, I know that I don’t have the technical expertise to evaluate 1920s monetary policy.

I am very willing to tell my students that I don’t know something. Tara wrote recently about the need to create an environment where students are willing to take risks, and an instructor admitting when they are unsure seems critical to that. I would like my students to come away from a history survey thinking that history is connected to many different fields, and that asking historical questions can lead to a bunch of different rabbit holes.

Still, trying to develop a basic skill in a subject is not the same thing as claiming to be an expert. I am not geographer, but I want to make sure my students have basic geographic knowledge. I think one way to do this would be to assign a map activity at the beginning of the semester. I see the assignment being broken up into two sets of questions, the first set being a check in of basic map skills and the second set asking the student to draw historical inferences or questions for discussion. The layered nature of the assignment would make sure that students who already had some geographic knowledge would get something out of the assignment. Doing this early in the semester would help the instructor get a better sense of where the class is. Obviously, this type of assignment has to vary the general level of preparedness of a class.

A geography assignment like this would be most useful in a introduction class that will making a lot of use of maps as pieces of evidence. For other classes or setups, an assignment focusing on statistics or some other subject might be more useful. Spending time on something like this might seem to some like handholding or doing the work someone else should have taken care of in elementary school. To me, this attitude is connected to the type of anti-intellectualism toward tackling pedagogy as a serious subject that Ben has written about. What I suggest here may not be the best way to do it, but we need to find ways to meet students where they are, not where we assume they should be.

Have other people noticed students struggling in a history class partly because of their lack of mastery of other subjects? How have people dealt with these problems?

Credit for this post’s title goes to my better-read colleague Michael Crowder.