Christropher Colombus

3 Pages 653 Words

Critique of “Columbus in the Classroom”

Bill Bigelow, a history teacher at Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon, in “Columbus in the Classroom”, argues that it is time to replace the legends that one might learn in school and in textbooks with a more accurate representation of the truth, and that people shouldn’t just consider what they read to be true. Bigelow in one of his classes, tries to convey to his students that throughout their school lives they have been studying an idea, at the time, they thought was true, but might consider now that the story might have a different meaning after all the facts are known. Bigelow explains to his students that when learning about something, all facts about the subject you learned about should be known, so you could come up with your own understanding of the story.
The article starts out with Bigelow giving an example of one of the activities that he did in class. With the person’s permission, he claimed to his class that he had a purse and the belonging inside. Then he asked the class to prove that it was not his. The students gave many responses to the reason of it not being his, and then Bigelow brought a point of him discovering it. His students shrugged him off. Therefore, he responded,” So, why do we say that Columbus discovered America”. Bigelow goes onto explain to his class the flaws in what they learned in their early life.
Bigelow’s main reason for arguing is a need to inform others about the things they did not learn about Columbus in the past. After the students in Bigelow’s class learnt about Columbus negatively, the students and Bigelow perform a role-play that expresses Bigelow’s views of Columbus. In this article, either the reader agrees with one side of the argument or the other. There is not a middle ground were the reader can agree with parts of the two different agreements.
Until the point that I learned, Christopher Columbus w...