The Current
Teacher brings history to life with trips and visitors
By Linda Lombardi
Wednesday March 31, 2010
The middle-schoolers spilling out of Ben's Chili Bowl on a recent Wednesday weren't just waiting for a chili dog and cheese fries. They were there because not every historic site in D.C. is a marble-clad monument.
"When I was a kid, there was never a line at Ben's," said their teacher, Julian Hipkins, as the students waited on the street full of new shops, with a tour group taking pictures at the end of the line. "I told them that when I was a kid, the only thing here was Ben's - everything else was dark."
Hipkins wants his students at Capital City Public Charter School in Columbia Heights to connect with history, not just read about it, and for a lesson on the civil rights movement, this was the perfect spot. Ben's is one of the few shops left from before 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination spurred riots in the neighborhood, and the story of its rise and fall - and rise again - illustrates the historical changes both national and local that have affected its community.
The students learned about the period - and studied the menu - beforehand. Now, sitting in the old red-vinyl chairs at the formica- topped tables, they watched a film about the 50th anniversary of the restaurant, which included a news clip featuring one of the men who just served them lunch. After the film, Marshall Brown, the official historian for Ben's (and father of at- large D.C. Council member Kwame Brown), talked about the time of the riots, when Ben's was allowed to stay open despite a curfew.
"Thousands of people were in line," Brown said. "Young and old, who didn't get along. White and black, who didn't get along. Upper class, lower class, middle class and no class. They all had to get along."
The trip to Ben's is only one of the ways that Hipkins has worked to bring his students together with people and places from recent history. When his students were studying World War II, veterans came to class and shared their experiences.
Via a live videoconference from Japan, they heard a survivor speak about the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. "It was very powerful," said Hipkins.
"The high point was when one of the students was asking a question, and he said, ‘You remind me of my sister,'" who had died that day.
Hipkins is an exceptional person in some ways - statistically, for instance, he is a part of the only 2 percent of teachers nationwide who are black men. He also lived in Japan for eight years teaching English. But he wants his students to feel that anyone can do what he has done. When asked how he set up the conversation with the atomic bomb survivor, his answer is simply, "I sent an e-mail.
"The students are all, ‘How did you do that?'" he said. "I say, I asked. It's not magic, it's just effort. I wrote a letter, I called people. Anybody can do those things."
The story of how he ended up in Japan exemplifies this same "just do it" attitude. It wasn't the result of some lifelong study of the country; he'd heard someone talk about friends who'd done it, saw an ad in the paper, and decided to apply. "I didn't know how to use chopsticks, I didn't speak any Japanese," he said. "I learned chopsticks first, because I had to eat."
He says his Japanese didn't really start to improve until he began taking martial arts classes and none of his teachers spoke English. "When they gave instructions, if I didn't understand, I might get hit in the face," he said, laughing. "The eating, and not getting hit. That made me think, I need to study a little bit harder now."
Going to Japan might seem like a round-about way to end up teaching school essentially back in your own hometown - Hipkins grew up in Silver Spring - but he learned about Capital City from someone he met in Asia, and he says it was his experience overseas that inspired him to go into teaching. He felt that many of the Americans he met abroad "didn't have a good global awareness," he said. "I realized a lot of that had to do with the educational system in America - we're not teaching our children to be global citizens."
Hipkins hopes to convey that kind of awareness to his students, and he says it's also important to him that he can be a positive male role model for African-American boys. "I remember how special it was for me when I had my first African-American male teacher," he said. But his perspective and example are valuable to all students. "When I tell them things I've done, it's already breaking stereotypes."