A huge part of growing up in my family was stories. My mom and dad always had a captive audience and my three brothers and I would sit and listen to them tell us stories about our past, our family history. Since my dad is Korean and oral story-telling is a big part of our culture, we heard many stories about where we came from. My mom, too, had stories about our ancestors and our past. However, my mom’s version of the past always included information about other things that were going on while my ancestors were alive. To me, history was a part of growing up. My brothers and I had instilled in us, from a very young age, the importance of remembering those who came before you and what they did. We were always told to learn from the past, to honor the lessons that had been taught and to never repeat the same mistakes that someone else had already made.
As I have grown older, this attitude s still influencing me because it influences the way that *I think about my discipline: history. I still see history as stories about people who have affected me. History, to me, is very personal, even if the people died thousands of years ago and they didn’t have any immediate relationships with my family. I see history as a series of stories with morals that teach lessons, although some of those lessons have not been very well learned. I know that for many of my students, it will be a struggle to see how these people that they don’t know are shaping their lives today. As a teacher, I think that this will influence my teaching because I will want to help them see how personal history is and how it affects them. I want for history to become, like it is for me, the story of who they are and how they got to be that way.
I hope to draw from students’ own backgrounds to connect them with my discipline. I want each of the students in my class to be able to tell their own stories by understanding the stories of those who came before them. Although I know that not every student will have ancestors who fought in the American Revolution or who sailed across on the Mayflower, I know that secondary school is a time of great identity crisis for many students. By getting to know my students on an individual level, I hope to be able to draw on their knowledge of things that they like and things that they dislike in order to show them where they came from and who they are, just as my parents, the first historians I knew, showed me.
