Shortly after Kamala Harris announced she’d picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate Tuesday — yes, it was just Tuesday! — the Washington Post published a glowing story about future-we-hope Second Lady Gwen Walz (gift link) who like Tim Walz was also a career high school teacher; they met in the early 1990s while he was teaching social studies and she was teaching English at Alliance High School in Alliance, Nebraska.
“Tim and I even shared a classroom, with a divider right down the middle,” Gwen told Minnesota Public Radio in 2019. “In Minnesota, we taught at the same school.”
A 2019 article by the Minneapolis Star Tribune described Gwen overhearing how engaged her future husband’s students sounded with his lessons. The couple’s first date was to see the 1993 Michael Douglas dark dramedy “Falling Down,” followed by a meal at Hardee’s, according to the Star-Tribune.
Apart from the content of that freaky White Rage movie, that’s about as wholesome a meet-cute story as any couple can ever hope to tell.
So here’s the thing: From everything we’ve seen, both Walzes were the kind of super teachers that many of us lucky kids had in high school (Hi, Mrs. Foster! Hi, Mr. Wallace! Your English and Social Studies classes shaped who I am today!), or that we dreamed of having because people made movies and TV shows about them.
When the two moved to Minnesota after they got married in 1994, they both taught at Mankato West High School. Tim Walz was honored as “Most inspiring teacher” and Gwen Walz won a shelf full of state teaching awards. He coached winning football teams, she coached winning debate teams year after year.
They spent their honeymoon leading American high schoolers on a “study abroad” tour in China — and hell no, that doesn’t make Walz a “Manchurian Candidate”; if anything, Tim Walz’s most well-known class, which got him a writeup in the New York Times in 2008 (gift link), should make clear that his teaching warned students against governments that oppress their people.
That story, written after Walz had been elected to Congress, discusses a 1993 global geography class Walz taught at Alliance High in Nebraska, in which he taught a nine-week unit on genocide, having his students study the Nazi Holocaust, Turkey’s slaughter of Armenians, and the Khmer Rouge’s Maoist terror in Cambodia, and to determine what factors make it possible for human beings to engage in politically motivated mass killing.
The class went well beyond what many states expect when they require that students learn about the Holocaust. Walz explained to the Times why he approached the topic as he did:
“The Holocaust is taught too often purely as a historical event, an anomaly, a moment in time,” Mr. Walz said in a recent interview, recalling his approach. “Students understood what had happened and that it was terrible and that the people who did this were monsters.
“The problem is,” he continued, “that relieves us of responsibility. Obviously, the mastermind was sociopathic, but on the scale for it to happen, there had to be a lot of people in the country who chose to go down that path. You have to make the intellectual leap to figure out the reasons why.”
That’s teaching, by Crom.
The students did their own research, but in 1993 there was no Twitter to tell them that genocides mostly happen when countries don’t have a Second Amendment. Instead, with Walz facilitating, not lecturing,
the class pored over data about economics, natural resources and ethnic composition. They read about civil war, colonialism and totalitarian ideology. They worked with reference books and scholarly reports, long before conducting research took place instantly online.
To cap off the unit, Walz didn’t waste time with a multiple choice test or even an essay exam. He had the students use what they’d learned, naming a bunch of nations in turmoil at the time, like Yugoslavia, Congo, former Soviet republics, and others, then
asked the class as a whole to decide which was at the greatest risk of sliding into genocide.
Their answer was: Rwanda. The evidence was the ethnic divide between Hutus and Tutsis, the favoritism toward Tutsis shown by the Belgian colonial regime, and the previous outbreaks of tribal violence. Mr. Walz awarded high marks.
A year later, that’s exactly what happened, with propaganda and disinformation fueling the murders of some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus by radicalized, militant Hutus.
“It was terribly chilling,” Lanae Merwin, now 31, of Hastings, Neb., recalled in a recent interview. “But, to us, it wasn’t totally surprising. We’d discussed it in class and it was happening. Though you don’t want a prediction like that to come true.”
The point here isn’t that Walz created a protocol for how high school students can predict a genocide; it would have been every bit as valuable a class if the students had predicted mass killings elsewhere. What matters is that they looked deeply at a topic and got to know it well enough to draw conclusions that they could support with evidence. No rote memorization of names and dates, no whitewashing of ugly realities about how institutions can be corrupted and used for oppression.
Rightwing crap-slinging aside, we’re betting Walz never punctuated the discussions with “Except for China. Everything China does is wonderful.”
Reading that article, I could only think of how differently some communities might react today: Why weren’t the students being taught that communism and socialism are the greatest evil and the source of all war crimes? OK, sure, there’s the minor detail that communism had nothing to do with Rwanda, the Armenian genocide, or the Holocaust — no matter how hard some idiots incorrectly insist that Nazis were “socialists.”
And it was all so depressing! Why can’t teachers just focus on all the unqualified good America has done, instead of being a bummer and, worse, telling teens to draw their own conclusions, which might lead them to doubt God?
But wait! Let’s get back to the other side of the Walz education juggernaut: As Tim kept teaching, Gwen eventually became an administrator with the Mankato school district, leaving education only in 2019 when Tim was sworn in as governor. As Minnesota’s first lady, Ms. Walz advocated for restoring felons’ voting rights after they completed their terms, and for improving educational opportunities for incarcerated people, or as she sometime calls them, students. How’s that for radical?
According to her biography at the Minnesota Governor’s office site, she emphasizes that
“corrections must be an inclusive component of our education system, and by expanding opportunity, our state can dramatically reduce recidivism rates and most importantly, transform lives.”
Well hell, have the wingnuts started accusing her of coddling murderers yet? Eh, fuck ‘em if they do.
[WaPo (gift link) / NYT (2008, gift link) / Matt Seybold on Twitter / Star-Tribune / Photo (digitally straightened by Wonkette) via Distractify]
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