Twenty five years ago today, the Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch and I learned a valuable lesson that has improved my teaching ever since.

On 28 January 1986, I was a 28 year old graduate student teaching a composition class at Michigan State University. We had a television in our classroom and spent the period watching the news concerning the Challenger explosion and discussing this tragic event.

As part of the discussion, I hypothesized that people would remember the Challenger in the same way that “we” remember Kennedy’s assassination. When I used the term we, it was not the divine we of royalty which was meant to separate myself from my subjects or to link myself to God. I used we because I desired to include everyone in the classroom.

At that point, a student responded, “I was born on the day Kennedy was assassinated. That is why my parents named me Jonathan.” This was the first time that I had consciously encountered a situation where all adults did not share all of my memories; the first time that I experienced the generation gap. However, had this realization only caused me to take more care in choosing examples, the lesson taken from 1986 would be trivial.

Not only am I now aware that students do not share all of my memories, they do not share all of my interests. For example, I am currently reading academic essays concerning King Ashoka and have developed a module in ancient world history where students are introduced to him. However, I do not expect the same fascination from my students as I have for this historical figure. That allows me to joke about my research interests while keeping to the heart of the main topics that I am really teaching in the Ashoka module: critical thinking skills required by an historian, credibility of evidence, development of historical knowledge, avoiding ethnocentrism,and so forth.

But compassion for students is more than helping to make Ashoka or other seemingly “dull” material accessible to them. Compassion requires that I not forget that the concepts I am teaching are new to my students. It takes students time to see the connections that are easy for me to grasp. An assignment to “come up with a contemporary issue involving civil religion and/or denominational religion so that it can be used as a starting point to discuss national identity in the context of its early American roots” is not so tough for someone who has more than 30 years experience in addressing such issues. But such a request could be overwhelming for my students even though they have already read Bellah and Berg and have spent three class days investigating these concepts.

Yesterday, I had two students tell me that they still have no idea about how to begin the civil religion assignment. Someone who did not learn the lessons I did twenty five years ago might have simply told them to reread Bellah’s “Civil Religion in America,” a text I did not tackle until graduate school. However, because I am so keenly aware that not everyone has my background, I do not necessarily expect students to learn anything immediately after I “teach” it. Their learning, like mine, is a process that requires repetition and new challenges. Therefore, I gave these students another approach to the material that I believe will help them choose a topic. I also told them that if the new approach doesn’t work, that we will try something else on Monday.

Christa McAuliffe did not begin life as a rocket scientist. She did not even begin life as a teacher. As a youth, Ronald E. McNair, the boy who would grow up to receive a PhD in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was initially told by a white librarian that he would not be allowed to check out any books. Michael J. Smith, Ellison S. Onizuka, Judith A. Resnik, Dick Scobee, and Gregory B. Jarvis did not begin life with the wisdom or education to become Challenger astronauts. They only had the capacity.

If I am to honor the memory of the seven astronauts whom my class and I watched die 25 years ago today, I must remember Jonathan’s words: “That is why my parents named me Jonathan.” I must continue to incorporate the lesson he taught me as I approach my students today.

–Steven L. Berg, PhD