Arch Bryant`s third-floor room at Evanston Township High School looks like a typical American history classroom-a poster with oval portraits of the presidents on one wall and colored maps of the U.S. in various stages of development on others.
But up front, propped against the blackboard, is a purple touring bike. It`s his.
”One of the good things about living and teaching in the same community is that I get to bike to work,” says Bryant, 46. ”The other is that I do see the kids outside school, just around town or at the beach.”
When the students assigned to Bryant`s classes first walk into his room, they might be surprised by the bicycle-unless an older brother or sister has been in his class. And that`s likely: Bryant begins his 21st year at the school in September.
They might be more startled, however, to begin their study of U.S. history in 1929.
”I want to give them something they can relate to right away,” Bryant says. ”So we start with the stock market crash, the Depression, the Roosevelt era. That`s when we developed an active government. That set the stage for the next half century.”
This approach helps students see how one event leads to the next, he says. ”They can see the pattern of chronological history as a way to look at the past because they saw it in the present.
”Some kids do go into culture shock in November, when we go back to 1607,” he says with a grin. (That`s when the English settled Jamestown, Va.) Bryant uses this approach with the students in his Advanced Placement classes. Near the end of the school year, those students take the AP test, a comprehensive exam given by the College Board of the Educational Testing Service, Princeton, N.J. Students who do well can receive college credit.
American history is offered at four ability levels-level one, level two, honors and AP, with the last being the most demanding. Bryant also teaches level-one classes and an American studies course for level-two and honors students. American studies, which lasts for two periods every day,
incorporates history and English. He handles the history segment and Anny Heydemann from the English department teaches the literature portion.
”When Arch covers the Civil War, I have the kids read `The Red Badge of Courage` so they see how literature and history complement each other,”
Heydemann says. ”Arch and I have taught this course together two years. He`s very bright, very thorough, very enthusiastic-and also very kind. He really wants very much for his students to succeed. That`s fun.”
Almost all the students are juniors, and Bryant has one hope for all:
”That they`ll come out thinking clearly and be able to demonstrate that . . . by writing articulately. And I want them to take away an awareness of how important it is to pay attention to the government and to world affairs.” He is happy to oblige a request of his American studies students: They want to talk about the alarming events in Beijing.
”You`re not going to say anything-just let us start?” asks Jason Turner, 17. Bryant nods. Only after Turner, with interjections from several classmates, puts together a remarkably complete summary of the events does Bryant join in.
”For most of this century, China has been in political chaos,” he begins. For the next few minutes, he fills in the gaps in the kids` discussion of the current situation, then takes the class on a journey through the 20th Century, from the Boxer Rebellion to the ”normalization” that began after President Richard Nixon`s 1972.
”Mr. B.`s a wonderful teacher,” Jason says. ”It`s never just the facts. We talk about the whys.”
Melissa Pollack, 16, says: ”I found history difficult and boring-before this class.”
Students from all Bryant`s classes like his approach to his students and his subject. ”We get to act like ourselves, so we learn more,” says Enoch Jones, 17, who is in a level-one class.
Josh Kaufmann, 17, an AP student, observes: ”Our class discussions can get bogged down easily, but he doesn`t cut in. We have to learn to back up our position, to present our thesis and use facts to support it.”
Bryant is described as ”a thinking historian” by John Weil, chairman of the 22-person history and social science department: ”He knows, understands, questions. He`s constantly looking for new understandings of the past. And his teaching meets the needs of a lot of kids.”
Bryant has won three grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to pursue, on his own, the following studies:
– He participated in a summer seminar on Karl Marx in 1984 at Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pa.
– The next summer he read books on Vietnam published since 1975 as an independent study. ”I was interested in pulling together the opinions and positions so I can teach better what happened with this war,” he says.
– He did research in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in 1986 as part of his summer seminar on the New Deal at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. (The library is near the college.)
Each year, beginning six years ago, he also has spent a week at Trenton State College in Princeton, N.J., reading and grading Advanced Placement examinations. ”When I was asked the first year I agreed because I thought I ought to do it for my students-that I`d learn something to help them,” Bryant says. ”There are 170 teachers who read now, and it`s just so much fun talking about the different ways we do things.”
Bryant graduated in 1965 from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, with a bachelor`s degree in history, and went on to Vanderbilt University, Nashville, where he received a master`s degree in history and teaching in 1967. After teaching a year each at Libertyville High School and Glenbrook South High School in Glenview, he joined Evanston`s faculty in 1969.
”I wanted to teach at an integrated school. I grew up in the 1960s-in Washington, D.C. I still believe in an integrated society, though I don`t think integrated schools will end all our problems,” says Bryant, referring to what went on in the capital during the peak years of the civil rights movement.
He has wanted to teach for as long as he remembers. ”I just liked school,” he says.
He has seen improvement in black students` achievements in his years at Evanston, and he hears students talking about race as an issue, he says.
”Years ago we`d act as if it weren`t an issue, and the subject would never come up.”
Since its founding in 1883, the high school has been integrated. The core of the present red-brick building was built in 1924 at 1600 Dodge Ave.; four massive wings were added in 1967.
Of the school`s 3,021 students in 1988-89, 51 percent were white, 42 percent black, 4 percent Hispanic and 3 percent Asian. Thirty-two languages-including Arabic and Vietnamese-were represented among the 278 students whose native tongue was not English. Classes in English as A Second language for those who speak Spanish and Haitian French; other students are tutored individually.
The school offers 325 courses in academic areas and has an extensive vocational education program that offers 42 courses, including programs that provide work experience.
Sixty-five percent of the class of 1988 enrolled in four-year colleges, with an additional 10 percent at two-year schools.
The school is the only one in District 202. Supt. Robert Goldman says his goal when he became superintendent in 1985 ”paralleled the general goal of Evanston-to make a diverse community successful. We want each child to work for the best that they can do, and that is not always easy.”
Goldman initiated two programs: one for chronic truants and one for advanced students. The 2-year-old truant program, called Students in Transition, provides four classrooms for up to 13 students (there are about 50 in the program). ”We go back into the elementary school framework,” he says. ”We give the kids a chance to work through their frustrations with school.”
The other program, called Steps Toward Academic Excellence, is aimed at incoming freshman who have been identified as having the potential to handle honors courses even though their test scores are not high enough for such placement.
The students are invited to take an intensive summer school course in math, English or both before enrolling in the honors courses, and they also receive tutoring during the year. The program began four years ago with 30 students; 80 from the incoming freshman class are expected to participate.
When Goldman arrived, he recalls, ”the school board said a goal was to increase minority student enrollment in honors courses. We worked this out together.” About half the students in the program are minority. The program also offers college planning for students and their parents.
Also new is Bravo Arts, a two-day festival of music, theater and the visual arts. It was first held in 1988, and the second festival will be held in February. It`s an attempt ”to open the world of the arts and all its possibilities to the students,” says planner and parent Cammy Laing. She adds that it`s also an attempt to overcome ”cultural illiteracy.”
That has also been one of Bryant`s longtime goals. He regularly takes students on field trips to the Chicago`s Lyric Opera.
The opera is a natural destination for Bryant, who spends at least four nights a week rehearsing and performing as a supernumerary, or extra, on Lyric`s stage from September through February. He calls this six-year stint
”a nice hobby” and a good change from the classroom, though he admits he sometimes grades papers in the wings.
Bryant likes the stage at the high school, too. He has performed in several faculty productions.
”Arch has a wonderful sense of humor,” says Bill Ditton, chairman of the speech and theater department and director of the faculty plays. ”And he`s in there all the time, keeping up spirits.”
Bryant and his wife, Eugenia, a librarian at Washington National Insurance Co. in Evanston, have three children. This fall the youngest, Claire, 16, will begin her junior year at the high school; Megan, 19, will be a junior at Grinnell College in Iowa; and Peter, 20, a senior at the University of Chicago.
”They all dealt differently with having me at school,” Bryant says.
”Claire brings her friends to meet me. Megan persuaded her friends to sign a petition demanding that I buy her a new coat. (He didn`t.) And Peter turned away when he saw me coming.”
Bryant went to Europe for the first time this summer. He planned to travel for two weeks with his wife and another couple, and then take a two-week biking trip through Holland alone.
”It`s flat,” he says, grinning. ”And they speak English there.”
