Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Teacher resurrecting the past to give our students a future

Teaching History

Steve Marcus

High school history teacher Jeffrey Hinton is dressed for his part during a simulation in class at the Northwest Career and Technical Academy February 8, 2011. The class was studying about the consolidation and urbanization in the U.S. in the early 1900’s.

Teaching History

High school history teacher Jeffrey Hinton is shown in a period costume between classes at the Northwest Career and Technical Academy February 8, 2011. Launch slideshow »

Jeffrey Hinton wants his high school American history students to get a visceral sense for what it must have been like to be a sweatshop worker at the beginning of the 20th century.

Click to enlarge photo

J. Patrick Coolican

He splits the class into two “assembly lines” for the students to make garments, until the two “companies” merge. A loud ambient noise bellows out of his amplifier to simulate the mania-inducing hum of a factory, and a fan blows hot air on the workers.

“Managers, if you need to fire them, fire them,” he says to a few designated student-supervisors. “They’ve got no rights.”

Soon, there’s a new sound effect — fire, which also appears on his projector screen.

The students run for the door, but when they get there, they can’t open it; a few minutes before, Hinton sent a student out to barricade the exit.

This isn’t just fun simulation, Hinton says. This is the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 100 years ago, nearly to the day, which killed 146, many of them women as young as 15.

The owners were acquitted of wrongdoing (naturally), and settled civil claims for $75 per life lost.

In the face of this outrage, which was happening on a smaller scale nationwide, the labor movement gathered momentum for its long march for better wages and working conditions and prohibitions against child labor, despite the protests of rich industrialists who cried (naturally) “Socialism!”

But I’ve gotten a little far afield: Let’s get back to our teacher, Jeffrey Hinton of the Northwest Career and Technical Academy and the students in his American history honors class.

“I want them to develop a passion for history,” says Hinton, who has master’s degrees in education and American history from UNLV and has been teaching for eight years. He dresses up as 20 or 25 historical figures during a given school year and likes to make history tactile, as he has on this morning with the factory fire.

Some free-spirit teacher filling these kids with liberal ideas, right? Not exactly. Hinton comes from a family of Marines and enlisted in 1990. He was in boot camp during the brief Desert Storm in Iraq. Last year his students interviewed veterans for an oral history project called, “Voices of Our Veterans.”

This isn’t how I learned history, and it may not be how you learned history. I memorized dates and names and events and then learned how to think and write about key concepts, such as, say, the economic causes of the Civil War.

So I was skeptical when I went into Hinton’s classroom. But it’s clear that Hinton will impart that passion for history in at least some of these students, even in the face of all the junk media distractions he’s competing with. And if standardized test scores are more your thing, Hinton is succeeding there, too. Last year was his first teaching Advanced Placement American history, after which the students take a rigorous test that, if they pass, entitles them to college credit. More than 60 percent of his students passed, compared with the national average of 43 percent. He says now that he has one under his belt, he expects an even higher pass rate this year.

And Hinton keeps driving himself harder. He’s brought in $15,000 in grant money the past two years, been a Gilder Lehrman Scholar and winner of the James Madison Fellowship, prestigious national honors given to a selective group of history teachers. A certificate on his wall notes perfect attendance in 2009.

The average Clark County School District teacher makes about $52,000 per year; Hinton makes a little bit more — although not much more — because of his experience and degrees.

You know what Hinton clearly needs now? A 5 percent pay cut!

That’s according to Gov. Brian Sandoval’s budget of “shared sacrifice,” which is notable for all the ways in which some people will share in the sacrifice, such as teachers and professors and their students, while for others there won’t be any sacrifice at all. Like, say, shareholders and executives of Wal-Mart and other corporations based in faraway places such as Bentonville, Ark., which make piles of money here but pay no corporate income tax, unlike nearly every state in the union. As an extra bonus, by running down our beleaguered education system, Sandoval will be helping the richly deserving descendants of Sam Walton by flooding the labor market with uneducated workers and thus pushing down wages for low-skill jobs.

To the people of Bentonville, Ark., and your bankers and shareholders in New York and London: You are very welcome. Now please, come to Las Vegas and get bottle service at one of the clubs.

To be fair, Sandoval has proposed giving performance bonuses to the best teachers, and obviously Hinton would qualify.

This is a good idea. Sandoval released pieces of his education reform plan Monday, and we all eagerly await more details. In his State of the State speech, he proposed spending $20 million in merit pay for the best among the state’s 27,000 strong teacher corps, or $740 per teacher.

That $20 million is a bit more than 1 percent of what we spend on K-12 education in a given year.

Thankfully, Jeffrey Hinton is clearly not in it for the money.

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