Via Kevin Drum comes the story of a Nebraska high school teacher who was ousted after he showed his class the critically acclaimed documentary, Baghdad ER. Supporters of Michael Baker suggest that his decision to show the graphic film--which has won praise from across the political spectrum--simply provided the school district the excuse it needed to remove a teacher who had long rubbed them the wrong way.

Baker, it seems, had an innovative approach to teaching history--he taught backwards, helping students work their way from a present that is instantly relevant to them to a past that becomes relevant when studied in the context of the present that it has helped to bring about:

Baker has clashed with administrators before. In 2005, they objected to his innovative approach to teaching history, which was to start at the present and work backwards, an approach he'd been using for four years.

But then, the school district forbade him from teaching that way any longer. The school's consultant said it was "not logical, does not contribute to effective teaching or monitoring of progress, and puts students at a disadvantage" with newly instituted statewide tests, according to a paper on the subject by Professor Nancy Patterson of Bowling Green. Baker appealed but lost, and was eventually
"prohibited from teaching U.S. history," Patterson writes.

"I think they wanted me to become so disenchanted that I would leave," he told Patterson in an interview in December, according to her paper, entitled "History That Is Made in Our Time: The Backwards Tale of One History Teacher's Experiences with Reverse Chronology." He added in that interview: "They are trying to make my life miserable, and they are succeeding."

He said/she said aside, Baker's story does raise disturbing questions about how educational bureaucracies in the era of NCLB can interfere with the kinds of creative and innovative teaching that we clearly need in this country. Teaching history backwards is a potentially masterful solution to the perennial problem teachers face when trying to make the past come alive for young students. With very little history themselves, teens and even young adults frequently just do not have the life experience they need to grasp the more profound, elemental aspects of history: the notion of a past that is distinct from the present while at the same time connected to it, a sense of how complicated and unpredictable and thorough change is, an abilty to imagine minds and cultures and ideas and worlds beyond their own, an understanding that the events of the past were made by flawed, fascinating, human people and did not simply create themselves abstractly and dully. That's a huge part of the challenge of teaching high school history, and, for that matter, English.

Teaching backwards, if it's done well, without a vulgar prevailing idea that the past only becomes meaningful insofar as it reflects our narcissistic contemporary selves, can help overcome that difficulty. Often the past is a boring undifferentiated blur for students; beginning at the beginning does not always help mitigate students' sense that history is very far from meaningful, let alone alive. Teaching backwards can be one way of getting around these problems. If a teacher approaching the material this way gets results, there's nothing to argue with. Or there shouldn't be.