Welcome back to Doodle Caboodle, the series where we sit down with the people who shape everyday life at Nysmith. This episode features Mr. Baselice, who teaches sixth and eighth grade social studies along with two history electives, and who has spent about a dozen years making the past feel like something students can step into.
Ask Mr. Baselice about his favorite part of teaching, and he points to eighth grade social studies. By that point, students have years of knowledge built up, and it shows when they're reading historical documents together.
"They'll be reading something, and suddenly it's, wait a minute, I remember this from sixth grade."
Students study thinkers like Machiavelli in sixth grade, an author many students don't meet until college. By eighth grade, they're connecting those ideas to what they're reading now. For Mr. Baselice, those moments are the point.
He's also convinced students can handle more than adults expect, including in sixth grade.
"If you can break it down in a way they can understand, they have a greater understanding than many adults give them credit for."
Just as important, he makes it clear that being wrong is part of the process. When a student asks a question, he'll often say he doesn't know and suggest looking it up together. Sometimes he'll give a wrong answer on purpose and ask the class to check him. "We're all here to help each other learn," he said.
Mr. Baselice's love of history started with his dad, a history buff who showed him Civil War and World War II movies growing up. That led to reading about the stories behind them, and then to trips to battlefields and museums. School, he said, didn't match that excitement.
He never pictured himself teaching younger students. He expected to teach college, and did for a time. Then he heard about Nysmith, came to give it a shot, and realized he could apply the ideas he'd always wanted to see in education. That was about twelve years ago.
Mr. Baselice's electives are where his simulation-based teaching shows up most.
Fall: Conflict. Students study how countries use conflict as part of foreign policy, and how nations develop their identities. Then they create their own country: a government, a people, and a flag. They interact with one another in a simulated world, with few restrictions on what they can do as leaders. The only rule is that they're guided by the consequences, good and bad, of their actions. Decisions play out with a Dungeons and Dragons style roll of the dice to see whether they work out or backfire. Units along the way have covered countries like Japan, Russia, and Nigeria, and in some years students build a United Nations of their own.
"They're essentially creating the world that they want to see through their countries."
Spring: Empires. Humans have spent most of their history living in empires, so students look at why, and at how empires are built and how they fall. Instead of creating their own, they take part in a series of simulations where they play a role in an empire's success or collapse. They might help hold the Mongol Empire together, play a cog in the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire, or join the Thirty Years' War, when the seventh and eighth grade classes work together. Every couple of weeks, they're on to something new.
Along the way, students learn how historians piece together the past. One early exercise has them read Hammurabi's Code and ask what its laws say about the society that wrote them. Plenty of laws about agriculture, one student might notice, so maybe it was an agricultural society.
"We're trying to create world citizens who don't just blindly follow whatever social media tells them."
The timing sometimes helps. When we spoke, his sixth graders were working through Machiavelli just ahead of the midterm elections. He doesn't have to draw the connection for students. They make it themselves.
Asked what superpower he brings to Nysmith, Mr. Baselice wasn't sure he had one. His answer was making children feel comfortable in the classroom, whether that means sharing a thought out loud, speaking in front of others, or taking on a reading that feels too hard. "When you give them that kind of support and encouragement, they go really, really far," he said.
The payoff comes later, when former students stop by to tell him how high school is going. He recently had lunch with a former student now at Stanford, and remembers him as a sixth grader. "That's some of the greatest stuff to hear as a teacher," he said.
"Even if I'm a little tired, when they show the excitement, it wakes you up. I don't need coffee. I just need the kids in the room."
More stories from the Nysmith community are coming in future episodes of Doodle Caboodle. But nothing tells the story quite like seeing it in person. We invite you to schedule a tour and experience the Nysmith difference for yourself.