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Dan Kegley/Jeff Robinson in his classroom.

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Chilhowie history teacher earns spot in Presidential Academy

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

“It all started with this brochure in my school mailbox. I get them all the time, but this one caught my eye.”
A tone of amazement lingers in Jeff Robinson’s voice as he talks about a statewide honor and the trip of a lifetime that ended a little more than two weeks ago.
Robinson teaches history at Chilhowie High School and coaches baseball there. One day last winter, a brochure with Abraham Lincoln’s picture on it arrived at the school. The brochure was from the Presidential Academy for American History and Civics, and it encouraged him to apply to become the Virginia educator in an expenses-paid program that accepts one teacher from each state, the District of Columbia and a U.S. territory.
“Participating teachers will spend five days in Philadelphia, six days in Gettysburg and six days in Washington, D.C., studying the American Revolution and Founding, the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement, respectively,” program literature said. “The Academy will thereby expose participants to the ideas and arguments that shaped these three great American eras, the documents that make up our history and the places where the history was made. During their stay in each of these cities, participants will be surrounded by the streets and halls, the battlefields, public places and private lodgings where the history they are studying took place.”
“My three favorite areas of history are the founding, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights movement,” Robinson said in his classroom Wednesday as United States presidents watched from their small oval-framed portraits on a calendar. “This program covered all three.”
He knew his chances of getting into the program were slim (according to program literature, 573 teachers applied) but over Christmas break, he completed the online application and wrote an essay about why he wanted to take the trip and how it would help him teach history.
“Then I forgot about it,” Robinson said.
Winter greened into spring, and from somewhere else across the warming commonwealth, the academy picked another teacher to go. Robinson was chosen, however, as an alternate.
Two months later came a telephone call from the academy making good on the reason it selects alternates.
“The guy from Virginia was unable to take [the trip] and they offered it to me,” Robinson said. “It didn’t take me long to say yes,” just a conversation with his wife. With an infant in the house, he would be gone a long 17 days, July 13-31.
The days would be long in another way. An instructor told the participants when the program began that it would be “an intellectual boot camp,” an apt description, according to Robinson.
“It was intensive,” he said.
His schedule showed days starting at 6:30 and continuing until 10 p.m. in the evenings, with a full menu of lectures and tours between those hours.
Gettysburg and Philadelphia were new to Robinson, but he had been to the nation’s capital before, on his high school senior trip. There was born the desire that made him eligible for this summer’s experience.
“If I had to pick one moment that when I knew I wanted to teach history, that was it,” he said. “The city is filled with history, the historic symbolism of the monuments.”
On his return visit as a Presidential Academy scholar, the city impressed him even more “because I knew more about that history this time around.”
The academy scholars, he said, were treated like dignitaries, as guests of the two senators whose bill created the grant that funds the program, now in its third year: Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.
According to Robinson, it was Wicker who came up with the idea for the academy.
“Roger likes to talk to classes,” Robinson said. “In one government class, he was trying to start a dialogue about the founding fathers, but couldn’t. It was at that point he decided he would try to get something passed to help teach the founding better.”
As former national secretary of education and president of the University of Tennessee, Alexander was a natural co-sponsor for a bill. “Roger knew he would help support it.”
The Senate and House united behind their bill. “Any bill passed by both houses is an amazing thing,” Robinson said.
Ashland University in Kentucky administers the grants, he said.
The best part of his trip was the three days spent on the Gettysburg battlefield, arranged to follow the chronology of the fighting July 1-3, 1863.
“I’ve read books but to see the hills and stand there where it happened… it was pretty emotional,” he said.
In Washington, they got to stand on the floors of the House and Senate. “You don’t get to do that on the regular tour,” he said.
In Philadelphia, Independence Hall could be seen out the window of their classroom, he said.
Robinson said he learned new things and expanded his prior knowledge of the founding, the Civil War and Civil Rights and their three central documents, the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
“They all kind of relate to each other, the Declaration and the founding, Lincoln expanded it and what it means to be an American, and the Dream, the fulfillment of that.”
The scholars received 30 books to read before leaving on the trip with, mercifully, sections highlighted in a syllabus indicating portions that had to be read. They had to take the books with them on the trip, and they got to keep the books after the program was over.
For Robinson, the trip was a welcome break from the routine discussion of history he’s all too accustomed to.
“When we meet as history teachers, it’s about [Standards of Learning] testing,” he said. “It was very refreshing not to talk about that but about the creative part of teaching.”
Robinson said the academy would influence his teaching. In fact, participants were required to develop two lesson plans and send them in for evaluation.
“I have always emphasized the use of first-hand documents like the Declaration,” he said, and the academy gave him some ideas for new ways to use them. “You don’t get from reading about a document what you get from the document itself.”
The trip, he said, was “first class.” As guests of senators Alexander and Wicker, “we didn’t have to stand in any lines.”