Blue jays & American history
By: Aliya Bhatia
Tags: Education, History, Civil Rights, Behavioral Insight

Elementary School

Last weekend while making breakfast, I saw a blue jay out the window as it landed on the driveway. A tape instantly started playing in my head. “Blue jays are bad. Bluebirds are good. Always make the opening to a bluebird birdhouse small enough to make sure bigger birds like blue jays can’t get inside.”

It turns out that when I was in elementary school, whenever our teachers were out, we had a few substitutes who rotated through our classes. One of them was a middle-aged woman who we affectionately called Bird Lady.

Bird Lady loved bluebirds. She taught us the difference between bluebirds and blue jays and how to protect bluebirds from predators. She did this almost every time she substituted for class throughout our elementary school.

The funny thing about this flashback is that I have a terrible memory. In high school, I used to rederive math formulas in the corners of my tests because I had so much trouble memorizing them. If I couldn’t make sense of it, usually in multiple formats, it didn’t stick.

But Bird Lady appeared almost every year. She had props — photo books and example birdhouses — to make her case real. It stuck. I’ll forever know a blue jay from a bluebird.

A Fellowship Retreat in 2017

That same weekend, I caught up for a virtual happy hour with a group of colleagues who have done a lot of work on how to incorporate racial equity into organizations and into America more broadly. While this is a topic that I am adamant about, I also can barely recall some of the most critical building blocks of American history that led us to the point we are at today. That is not for lack of trying — my Kindle, my graduate school activities, and my choices of work all point to a desire (albeit imperfect) to reckon with that history, even if its nuts-and-bolts facts repel my memory like water droplets on wax paper.

During the happy hour, one of my favorite photographers shared the Zinn Education Project. She shared how she used these lessons to teach the many children she has mentored over the years. I felt a combination of excitement to dig in and also a pang of shame — as someone who has spent the better part of my career in education and frequently struggled with my own grasp of our history, I felt upset that I had not discovered this resource earlier in my work.

Digging through the Zinn Education Project’s website, it suddenly struck me: Why didn’t Bird Lady teach about Reconstruction? If every year, we talked about the nuances of the post-Civil War moment, the coalitions that were built and weren’t built, and the decisions that followed, what type of person would I be today?

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice

By temperament, I land up being a “systems first” person. The system has to change. The history curriculum needs an overhaul. Our classrooms should reflect the diversity of our country. That is how we fix America.

But what if there are smaller moments, intentional wobbles in existing systems, that pave the road to broader change? What if there were more Reconstruction Ladies and Civil Rights Gents and a whole repertoire of elders who ooze the same type of passion for reshaping our national narratives that Bird Lady held for bluebirds? And what if their talents went to good use in one of the biggest nuisances of education, the days when a teacher can’t make it to their (virtual or physical) classroom? I share this not as an idea — as I suspect many before me have had similar ones — but as a personal change of heart around the leverage points for change.

2020 has been an exercise in working within constraints. History education desperately needs to change. And, so does my own willingness to explore the smaller hacks that can start us on the longer journey.

Bird Lady’s story may present an unexpected personal lesson in using small opportunities to yield bigger, transformative change.