by Sarah Sanderson, teacher, Oregon

Recently in class, I showed my students a video about Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce’s tragic march. As I clicked the video off, one of my 8th grade U.S. history students cried, “Why do we have to learn about sad things?”

I nodded. “It is sad, isn’t it?”

And I moved on to the next thing. But my student’s question stayed with me. So I posed the question to Twitter:

I half-feared the post might get swamped with responses from anti-CRT activists, the ones calling for teachers to wear microphones so they can be monitored for introducing “discomfort” into their classrooms.

But that wasn’t the response I got at all. Instead, hundreds of people gave powerful answers about the importance of learning the truth. A few people commended my student. And a couple of people commended me, for setting up a classroom in which the sadness could be recognized (you can read some of those tweets below).

So many answers to this question. Deserves so much discussion throughout the school year. I think the one my students that age found most compelling is that we learn about sad things so we can recognize them when they're happening now and try to stop them. -- @lindstorian

For that, I thank Storypath, a curriculum I first learned about 20 years ago in a whirlwind graduate program designed to get us into classrooms in just 12 months. It was thoughtful and rigorous, but between student teaching and classroom management and all the rest of it, the content-specific curriculum was necessarily a bit brief. For the social studies component, the director of the program, Dr. Margit McGuire, introduced us to the curriculum series she’d written, Storypath.

And that was the only way I knew how to teach social studies. In the years since I graduated, I’ve shifted from full-time elementary school teaching to part-time work as a writing teacher. So when my administrator asked me if I could take over the 8th grade U.S. history class, just for this year, I said I could only do it if she would let me teach Storypath.

Because one of the things we have to teach you is to know sad things, face them and try to figure out what to do about them, without letting the sadness just overwhelm you. It is a really hard thing to learn! Every adult I know is still working on it. -- @ewrigleyfield

In a Storypath unit, students learn about the setting of the “story” they’ll immerse themselves in, and then they create a paper mural of that place. They learn about the people who lived there and work as a community throughout the lesson.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure if it would work with eighth graders. Would they be too cool to draw pictures? Too old to imagine characters responding to history?

It turns out, they love it. They love our “art days,” when we set up a new place and new people. They love discussing the events as a team. It’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure book come to life.

For this latest unit, I decided to tweak the existing Storypath curriculum. Instead of learning generally about the indigenous tribes who lived up and down the West Coast, I focused on the people who lived right where our school was built. I frequently gestured from the mural toward the window. We were learning about here .

Why does it have to be gentle? It wasn’t a gentle act. The repercussions aren’t going to be gentle. @_rockinmrmagic

I teach in Oregon City, the town known as the end of the Oregon Trail. Most of my students learned in elementary school about life as a pioneer on the Oregon Trail. Very few had ever been urged to consider what it would have been like to be a member of the Clackamas Tribe, one of the people living here when the settlers arrived.

Gradually, as historical events unfolded, my students began to empathize deeply with the people they were studying. On the day I brought an offer of a treaty from the United States government, they hotly debated its merits and pitfalls. One stayed inside during our “mask break” so she could calculate how much the land would be worth in today’s prices. When I informed the class that the U.S. government had never actually paid the Clackamas people any of the promised money at all, their righteous indignation was immediate and intense. “We’ve been scammed!”

Because sad things happen, and ignoring them is ignoring the people who experienced it and what they went through. -- @munson_jo

The remnant of the Clackamas Tribe remaining in Oregon City in 1856 when that order was made did go to the reservation, and I made sure the class understood that. But I knew some of them would suggest fighting, or fleeing, and that’s why I showed the video about Chief Joseph, so they would know what had happened to some of the tribes who’d made different decisions.

Has the whole unit induced “discomfort”? Yes. Have my students learned something true about history, and empathy? I hope so. Is this the kind of teaching those anti-CRT activists hope to quash? I don’t know.

But I do know, after reading all of the responses to my Twitter post, I’m going start future classes by asking my students to think more about why we have to learn sad things.

Sarah Sanderson teaches writing, public speaking and U.S. history at a K-12 charter school in Oregon. Her book about grappling with the racism of our nation’s past is due out next fall. Find her on Twitter @S_L_Sanderson or at www.sarahlsanderson.com .