MINNEAPOLIS — Watching an insurrection unfold on live TV was not in anyone's plan, but it did make it into Mark Westpfahl's lesson plan last year.
"I can't do my regular scheduled lesson tomorrow with the kids," Westpfahl recalls telling his principal on Jan. 6, 2021. "I was gonna be talking about Minnesota treaties with my sixth graders. I can't do that. I don't know what my lesson's gonna look like tomorrow, but it's about this. It has to be."
As a humanities teacher at the South St Paul School District, Mr. Westie — as the kids call him — couldn't ignore history happening.
In fact, he says leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, he and the class had been talking about all the things that added context.
"We recapped the elections, the first couple of days after the election," he said. "As states were certifying the election we were talking about what that meant, and what legal challenges that could come up, the timeline for what was coming. There was a lot of context already of what was happening, and I felt like I could because we had that context, an understanding of what the process was."
With that, he says he felt comfortable talking about it in class last year.
This year though, he's decided it won't be a part of the curriculum because it wasn't something he felt he could cover in a single day's lesson.
"When you're in the midst of a pandemic, things have been shortened and squeezed to begin with; you spend more time in the beginning of the year building up that relationship the content gets pushed back further and further," he said. "I'm usually not overly concerned that I'm not gonna get through the content, because social studies teachers never do, but that was one of the considerations this year. If I push it back another three, four days, what else am I taking out from the content that we need to be studying that's going to set them up for success in seventh-grade American history?"
Plus, he says he knows he has administrators on his side when it comes to teaching this, but is also aware not every teacher has the freedom to explore.
"Previous district I worked in, we would regularly get the email updates either from our principal or the district about, 'Do not cover this, do not talk about it,'" he added. "When Trump was elected in 2016, we were specifically told by our principal, 'You will not talk about this election at all.'"
That being said, he says he's open to working in Jan. 6 as a part of his class in the future.
He says in the end, the most important thing is that students learn to ask the right questions.
"If they can ultimately get to those questions either with their friends, with themselves, parents, neighbors, or even five to 10 years later when they're out in the real world," he said. "If they can connect those pieces and say what are we missing and be willing to say, I don't know everything."
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