Teaching Beyond the Textbook

My students walk past Lexington Green every day. For them, it's just a park—a nice one, sure, with monuments and cannons, but fundamentally the place they cut through on the way to get pizza.

My job is to make them see it differently.

I don't start with the heroic version. I start with questions. Who isn't in the story we usually tell? What about the people who watched from windows? What about Prince Estabrook, an enslaved man who was wounded fighting for someone else's liberty? What about the Loyalists who thought their neighbors had gone mad?

History isn't about memorizing who won. It's about understanding that people in the past faced difficult choices just like we do—and that the choices they made shaped the world we inherited. When my students stand on the Green and really think about what happened there, they're not just learning about 1775. They're learning how to think about their own moment.

Some years, a student will ask: "Would I have stood there?" That's when I know I've done my job. Not because I can answer that question for them, but because they're finally asking it.

The past isn't dead here. That's what I want them to understand. It's still asking us things.