Advanced US History, a class taught by history teacher Bryan Looker, has been beloved by students since its very beginning. After twelve years of being a part of the curriculum at LHS, next semester will be the last time Looker will be teaching the subject.
The Higher Learning Commission (HLC) is made up of a combination of eleven Midwestern states and determines whether or not high-school instructors have the ability to teach dual-credit classes.
“They’ve recently said that if you didn’t have a master’s degree, you had to go back and get it in that content area. Or if you had a master’s degree in a different area, say education, you had to go back to get those 18 extra hours in content,” Looker said. “For me, it would be history. I chose not to continue after taking a few classes.”
US History got off to a rocky start. Looker’s first year of teaching was primarily dedicated to experimenting, though he had a hard time trying to figure out what he was doing.
“Even though I knew everything in my head that I wanted to get out, I wasn’t really the best of trying to get it out and get it to the students,” Looker said. “I still apologize to my oldest son because he was in my first year.”
He quickly found out that standing at a podium and not writing anything on the board wasn’t a very effective way of teaching a class of high school students.
“I was trying to do it exactly the way I got it in college 22, 23 years before that,” Looker said. “It didn’t take very long for me to find out the students had changed a lot in 25 years, and they weren’t 19 years old. You know, being 16, 17, they just weren’t quite ready for certain types of things.”
Looker has too many fond memories of teaching ACP to choose as his favorite, but there are always a couple of students each year that tend to stand out to him.
“I don’t really think I have a favorite memory,” Looker said. “But, I have a handful of students every year that make class very entertaining.”
One of the very first students who stood out to Looker had him during his first year of teaching, Brooke Bundy. Every time he would ask the class a question, she would raise her hand and answer with Millard Fillmore.
“I decided to dedicate a day telling frivolous, completely made-up stories about Miller Fillmore in honor of her,” Looker said.
In the future, Looker will begin exclusively teaching Geography. Though the way they process information may be different, when it comes to interacting with his students in the classroom, he doesn’t see much of a difference between the two subjects.
“Geography is a regular course, and ACP is for college credit,” Looker said. “So, there’s quite a bit of a, you know, a step up to ACP. I would say the students are a little bit more receptive to taking in information. They’re able to work with the information and analyze it a little bit more than Geography students.”
Though Looker isn’t entirely leaving the halls of LHS, he can’t help but reminisce about the memories he’s made whilst teaching US History.
“It’s a little bittersweet,” Looker said. “I’m gonna miss the types of interactions I have with ACP students going forward because those will be gone. Whatever I’m teaching will be a different subject, and it’ll have different types of experiences.”
