Karen Olsen waxes poetic over the dingy, faded map held together with yellowing tape.
“It’s so old, it’s exciting,” she tells her fifth-grade students at McCornack Elementary School in southwest Eugene. “This map shows the age of discovery.”
It’s a tribute to her skill that for an entire hour this week, Olsen’s stories about Italian explorer Christopher Columbus brought that old map alive — with its travel routes of the early explorers. Students stayed with her the whole way, asking questions and then volunteering answers in a give-and-take about European exploration of the Americas.
Olson was honored recently as Oregon’s history teacher of the year, an award sponsored by the nonprofit Gilder Lehrman Institute of America and the History Channel.
To sit in her class is to be reminded how teaching works.
“She’s got tremendous passion,” says Becky Casado, a fellow McCornack teacher who has known Olsen for at least 13 years. “She oozes history. And she’s a world traveler. She’s an awesome photographer and she has this wonderful storytelling skill that brings it alive.”
That’s the key with history, Olsen says. It’s not about names and dates. It’s about the telling detail.
On Thursday, Olsen described a rattletrap fleet of three ships with sailors taken from prisons because Spain’s king and queen, who financed the trip, weren’t about to invest their best ships and crews in an unknown venture.
Olsen asks her students to imagine the immensity of the task.
“He shoots out into the Atlantic,” she says, “and there’s ocean and ocean and ocean, and his goal is the East Indies and if he goes in this direction” — her finger traces the line on the old map — “he’s going to be famous.”
She talks about the prizes that sailors were offered for being the first to spot land from up in the ships’ crows nests, and has students imagine the rocking motion of the ocean transferred to the top of a ship’s mast.
And there is no white-washing the story, either. Columbus’ discovery of the Bahamas was anything but good for the inhabitants of those islands, Olsen says.
People were kidnapped and taken back to Spain so Columbus could prove he’d been successful. He left sailors behind and they were violent.
“It was an unhappy combination of events,” she says.
Columbus, for all his fame, did not come to a good end. After his fourth voyage, he was returned to Spain in chains over a falling-out with the royals. He died convinced that he had found a route to the East Indies and did not believe he had in fact discovered a previously unknown continent.
Olsen wraps up the hour with an introduction to Ferdinand Magellan, the Portugese explorer who was the first European to sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean through what became known as the Strait of Magellan.
That story she enhances with slides from her own trip through the strait: pictures of dramatic peaks, icebergs, glaciers and even Magellanic penguins from Olsen’s recent travels working as backdrop to her tale of Magellan’s perilous journey.
Olsen doesn’t limit her teaching to the classroom, but takes her students on field trips throughout Oregon where the history of Native Americans figures prominently. And once a year she leads students and their parents on a trip back East with a focus on the American Revolution.
That dedication is what prompted Robert Young, a retired educator and a local author of children’s history books, to nominate Olsen for the award.
“I’ve been in her classroom and seen her interact with kids,” Young says. “She’s just so creative.”
Federal regulations requiring that students meet testing benchmarks in reading and math mean that subjects like history get short shrift, Young says.
That’s a shame because history — especially the way Olsen teaches it — helps students develop critical thinking skills, he says.
Olsen asks her students to ask questions about what they’re learning.
She introduces them to primary sources — letters and documents written at the time — rather than merely relying on history books for their understanding.
Young describes a project Olsen supervised where she asked students to figure out who fired the first shot in Lexington at the beginning of the U.S. Revolution.
“There were things the soldiers wrote down and things the citizens wrote down. The answers change as you unearth more information. (History) can be dynamic if it’s taught that way,” Young says.
While Olsen is lively and dynamic with her students, she blushes and clams up when asked how it feels to be recognized as Oregon’s best history teacher.
It’s not about her, she says. In fact, Young had to prod her for three years before she agreed to allow him to nominate her.
“I was proud to represent the history teachers in our state,” she says.