"Come on, George, tell us what you did in New York City!"
"It was the weirdest experience of my entire adult life," says George Henry.The exuberant advanced placement students at Highland High School, who are being introduced to a multicultured nation by their charismatic history teacher, are anxious to hear all the details about his trip to New York. He went to consult with the Educational Testing Service about an advanced placement course model he is developing.
But Henry does not dwell on the academic side of things. His students want to know what he did in the evenings, and so he talks about his visit to the Roxy disco, where he was shocked by what he saw. "And I am fairly liberal, by Utah standards." It was St. Patrick's Day and "one guy wore only a shamrock."
The students immediately want to know what Henry was wearing. When he quickly replies, "Levi's and a plaid shirt," they joke that his dress was more inappropriate than the shamrock. Then Henry moves easily from the Roxy to Carnegie Hall and the memorable musical performances of two black artists, Jesse Norman and Kathleen Battle. He enumerates other famous people he saw there - Cicely Tyson, Bill Cosby and Marian Anderson.
Like the people he saw at Carnegie Hall, George Henry is black. His students are almost all white. But race plays no role in their strong identification with the man they see as a gifted teacher who likes them as much as they like him. The students in his fifth-period AP history class freely express their admiration for him as a "high-quality person" who treats them as equals. One student is grateful that he teaches them how to write. Another talks about his unfailing willingness to spend time with them after class. A shy student expresses gratitude for his refusal to pressure her into group discussion. "He is patient with me and lets me progress at my own rate."
Because of this strong mutual respect, George Henry has no trouble either maintaining discipline or igniting class discussion. At least 80 percent of the students freely interact, asking questions, disagreeing with the teacher. Henry, who teaches without notes, presides easily with marked self-assurance but without egotism. It is a lively, intellectually stimulating atmosphere.
Of the 2,200 students at Highland, only 14 are black. Henry tries to soften their minority experience, while broadening the racial experiences of the white students. Highland, says Henry, is composed of students who are, he says, "sophisticated but not worldly," whereas South High School, where he taught for 13 years before coming to Highland two years ago, was made up of students who were "streetwise but naive."
Many Highland students, he says, come from excellent families who have given their children opportunities to travel to interesting places. But few of them have lived anywhere besides Utah, whereas at South, many students had lived elsewhere but had very few opportunities to travel.
This is a challenge he relishes - to help the more sophisticated students at Highland broaden their understanding of the world. This is consistent with the advanced placement curriculum, which demands a higher level of study in return for college credit.
Henry, an impeccably dressed and remarkably youthful 38, is the right man to do it. He grew up in Salt Lake City, as "a Central City kid," was educated at South High School and the University of Utah, and became a Woodrow Wilson scholar at Princeton. He remembers his youth as very positive, with parents determined that he would be well educated and unaware of racial handicaps. Growing up, he did not feel discriminated against, and his impressive teachers "demanded the same things of me that they did of everyone else."
Since his father was a jazz pianist, Henry learned the piano too, beginning at the age of 7. "Here was this little black kid playing Debussy and Bach." Although his parents hoped he would be a professional musician, he says he was bascially undisciplined and became discouraged by realizing that thousands of great pianists had no job. So his musical satisfaction now comes from his position as musical director and organist at the First Baptist Church.
He has lived comfortably in the Mormon culture his whole life without being pressured to change faiths. He considers LDS people wonderful and respects them the same as he does all faiths. One reason, he says jokingly, that he may not have pursued the LDS faith is that Mormon singing is not vigorous enough - he likes a little more fire in his religion. "I like to praise the Lord at a half-decent tempo."
He went on to study history at the U., where he got a master's degree, with an emphasis in American constitutional history. He is fascinated by Supreme Court decisions. He thought his education would not stop until he had a Ph.D., and so he became certified to teach high school only as a way to help him achieve his goal. He intended to teach for only one year.
"I stayed the second year, because I'd done such a lousy job the first year. Then I fell in love with the kids."
Not only does he play a prominent role in advising the national college board's advanced placement program, but he teaches budding history teachers at the U. how to teach. In History 534, his on-hands experience teaching real high school students serves him well.
His own methods have changed over the years. He believes "kids in Utah have never been forced to think." He remembers one girl telling him after a class, "Your lectures were so good that I didn't have to read the book." That statement, as complimentary as it sounds, disturbed him, because he wanted his students to read, ponder and become intellectually balanced.
So he gave up lecturing and made a complete transition to a questioning technique. "I let the students do most of the talking." And he asks specific questions of all the students to test their knowledge of the reading. "They have to do their reading. They can't come to class unprepared." He is careful to discuss the reading AFTER they have read it, so "the students won't sound like me."
He wants them to learn how to learn, to learn thinking skills and to develop their own opinions, based on the facts. He also wants to help to eradicate prejudices and narrow-mindedness.
Recently, he took 84 white students to the Calvary Baptist Church to give them an experience they had never had. They had been talking in class about religious revivals in American history, and they didn't know what a revival was. Most did not know there was a black church in Salt Lake City, and they came enthusiastically to this evening service, outside of school time.
"I would love to take them to Carnegie Hall," he says wistfully. But if he can't take them physically to Carnegie Hall, he will use every ounce of energy he has to teach them to think - to give them not only that vision, but an expanded view of the world. That is George Henry's mission.
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(Additional information)
Advanced Placement offers college credit
The Advanced Placement program, sponsored by the College Board and administered by the Educational Testing Service, enables high school students to take college-level courses at their high schools to receive credit and placement in courses at colleges throughout the country by achieving a high grade on an advanced placement examination.
According to George Henry, the number of minority students taking AP courses and examinations - and doing well - is increasing. "There is a wasteland," he says, "between what minority students are capable of doing and what they are asked to do."
In his own AP U.S. history course, he applies critical thinking to issues within the historiography of the United States. "We spend time helping them develop a historical perspective and understand how historians do their work. The analysis of historical facts and documents is an important part of the curriculum."
He conducts an aggressive recruiting campaign for all his AP courses. He asks teachers of 10th-grade courses to recommend students capable of advanced study, and he then extends a personal invitation to them to join. He is also careful to reserve space for minority students.
The presence of AP courses can also raise the level of the entire curriculum. Ninth- and 10th-grade history teachers at Highland High School tend to place more emphasis on historical writing, so that students will be more prepared to do this type of work if they take an AP history course.
Henry thinks "secondary school at the lower grade levels is too easy. There is too much rote work and not enough critical thinking or analysis. In our system, there is now talk of starting more rigorous written and analytical work in the seventh or eighth grades."
Advanced placement exams are currently available in 29 subjects covering 15 academic fields.