A decade in a month: Political news deluge has teachers itching for class to start

Late night host Stephen Colbert joked last week that future generations of American students will spend whole semesters studying the first half of July 2024.

History teachers say he wasn’t too far off base.

“It’s been about a decade within one month, it seems,” said Betsy Newmark, who has taught at a high school in Raleigh, North Carolina, for over two decades.

Newmark is among many instructors around the country itching to get back into the classroom to debrief their students on the blur of textbook-worthy events that transpired this month.

Former President Donald Trump narrowly avoided an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13. Eight days later, his successor, President Joe Biden, dropped his bid for a second term – a choice no incumbent president has made in more than half a century . Biden immediately endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, who would become the first woman of color to take the top job if elected.

Teenagers are paying attention – if only to the memes – as educators eagerly prep new material. A history teacher in Vermont said her students have been texting her nonstop. Another in California said she's keeping a notepad next to her bed to write down ideas for lesson plans that come to her in the middle of the night.

“I’m not going to do any in-depth analysis of coconut trees,” said Benjamin Schulz, a social studies teacher in Chattanooga, Tennessee. (Schulz was referencing a clip – in which the vice president recalls an expression of her mother's – that spread like wildfire online in recent weeks.)

As they prepare to return to campus for the fall semester, educators have mixed feelings about tackling the onslaught of front-page developments. Many are news junkies, excited to delve into debates with their students. Some think the proliferation of political memes on social media will facilitate more engagement with students in the classroom.

Others are wary. The specter of a divisive presidential election has heightened their resolve to keep their personal views to themselves. Whether they will have the time and resources to talk about current events depends on local and regional constraints – a dynamic that reflects broader debates in American schools about the merits of standardized testing and having a flexible curriculum.

Back in Raleigh, Newmark has had to familiarize herself with the pop singer Charli XCX after the Harris campaign embraced a social media trend casting the candidate in the color scheme and font of one of the artist’s albums. Much of Newmark's students’ news consumption stems from posts online, she said, something she called the "memeification of politics."

The deluge of recent news-making moments has triggered flashbacks to her own high school years. In the 1970s, Newmark and her friends avidly tracked developments in the Watergate scandal, a major saga in American history that eventually prompted the resignation of former President Richard Nixon.

Nixon stepped down the day before she left for college at George Washington University, a private school in the nation’s capital. A politics nerd at heart, Newmark wanted to be right in the center of the action.

“One of the things I love about teaching is I want kids to understand the founders’ vision when they created government,” she said. “I want them to see what it should be, and how it isn’t.”

Carol Green Dennis, who started teaching government classes at her San Jose high school in August 2015, said a lot has changed in the past decade.

Ten years ago, she said, “the government ran a lot more like the textbook said it did.”

But making sense of rare and unprecedented events is energizing, and her students crave that context.

"What is the greater story? If we’re there to help provide them with the tools to look further, they absolutely will," she said.

Standardized testing versus current events?

In the modern educational landscape, it can be a challenge to incorporate current events into the curriculum. As college has become more costly, students and their families increasingly value popular classes geared toward standardized tests. High marks on those exams often translate directly into college credit. A handful of states also still require high school exit exams , although the number has declined dramatically.

For some teachers, straying from their rigidly prepared plans can be risky, especially amid the nationwide movement of conservative parents pushing to have more control over what their children learn at school.

Jeremy Kaplan, a high school history teacher and assistant principal in New York City, said an overly strict curriculum is the opposite of what teaching civics is all about. For decades, New York required high schoolers to pass a standardized test known as the Regents exam to graduate. In June, state officials unveiled a much-anticipated plan to make the assessment optional.

Loosening those mandates gives students a more dynamic learning experience, he said.

“When these big events happen, it’s an entry point for kids,” he said. “They’re probably going to want to know more about it. They’re probably going to want to talk about it.”

In Tennessee, Schulz doesn't feel as constrained by standardized tests in the senior history classes he teaches at the Chattanooga School for the Arts & Sciences. High schoolers in his state only have to take (but not pass) the SAT or ACT to earn their diplomas.

That freedom allows him to take 10 or 15 minutes at the beginning of class to discuss what’s making news. He's anticipating a lot of questions about Kamala Harris memes this fall. And he looks forward to them. But as often as he can, he tries to remind his students that the more important political news happens not in the nation's capital, but in their own backyards.

“Voting for presidents and senators, that’s all sexy,” he often tells them. But “your life is more affected by garbage pickup and policemen than people in Washington.”

Zachary Schermele covers education and breaking news for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at zschermele@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele .

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: A decade in a month: Political news deluge has teachers itching for class to start