Some of the posters on the wall of Amy Zinn’s classroom: a flowchart for the process of being elected as president of the United States, a list of 76 analytical verbs from “acknowledges” to “vilifies,” and the message “Hope Is Greater than Fear.” She’s in her 24th year in the History Department of the Upper School and her 23rd year of advising Student Council, the student government body. She’s made a specialty of encouraging students to engage with representative government, on campus and off, even taking 18-year-olds to the polls to vote for the first time. And she’ll use any tool she can to help her classes get a handle on the structures of American government. “I have two options today to review Supreme Court cases,” she informs her AP Government class with a grin. “There’s a bingo game and a word-cloud game.”  

What historical topic regularly blows the minds of curious students?

Anything where they think they know an era, but you throw in something that they’ve never heard before. With my AP Government students, my favorite thing is when whatever happened yesterday in the news fits with where we are in the course at the time. With current events and court rulings, how the government works is always changing — which means that I’m not just changing my curriculum over the summer, I’m changing it as we go. That’s stressful but fun. The AP exam is our focus, but I want the class to spark my students’ desire to stay informed and be involved. My hope is that when they leave Latin, they will be voting, participating citizens.

When did you know that you wanted to be a teacher?

Not for a long time. I was a political science major in college with a business minor — because my roommate was a political science major and I really liked the classes she was taking. So after college, I got an internship in DC with a congressman from Delaware. And then I worked in DC for a program called the Close Up Foundation, which brings in high school kids from all over the country to do workshops and use Washington as a classroom. I was an instructor: it was like a school where we had lessons and discussions without grades or a dress code. Then I moved to Memphis and got a job at a tiny independent school — there were only 46 kids in the graduating class. I was hired as their government and econ teacher, but I was also the varsity volleyball coach, the JV volleyball coach, and one of the faculty sponsors for the grade. I didn’t have a lot of background in how to manage a classroom, so having small classes in a small school was a good way to start.

How are you a better teacher now than when you started?

I don’t know that my students would say that I’m chill, but compared to my 25-year-old self, I’m much more chill. I don’t know if that’s because of experience or because of having my own kids. I’ve learned a lot — I’ve tried to stay on top of the brain science of adolescents and teens. And I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about grading equity.

What does that mean?

Grading for Equity [by Joe Feldman] is a book that was summer reading for the faculty a few years ago. He talks about how when kids leave your classroom, none of them have the same experience. A hundred years ago, we expected schools to prepare kids to be good worker bees. But now our sophomores, we’re training them to enter the workplace in six years, getting jobs that don’t even exist yet. When I started, it felt like most of my students would end up in banking, but I’ve become much more open-minded about what could be a job.

So my focus is less on memorizing names and dates and more about meaning and connections. We follow five themes through our world history class: leadership, call of freedom, technology, identity, and memory. If they learn critical thinking from that, then they’ll be able to think about what they’re reading: Is it true? Is it not true? Is it a version of the truth? How do you get the information? That’s all forced me to change my approach to teaching in a way that I didn’t have the experience or depth to do when I started.

What were you like as a teenager?

Oh, I was a rule-follower. But I did spend an entire summer in Bali, Indonesia, when I was 14 years old. My dad was a professor of music, mostly non-Western music. He went to Bali to study Indonesian orchestras, which are called gamelans, and then founded one at the University of Delaware. I used to play in it.

On the beach in Bali, I met an Australian girl, Angie, who was on vacation with her family. We became friends and we kept in touch via actual paper mail. For two years, I saved up my money for a plane ticket and then I lived with her and her family for a summer, spending three months in Darwin, Australia, just before my senior year in high school. So that was also me as a teenager: I knew what I wanted and what I had to do to get it.

How much does Student Council change from year to year?

Sometimes the kids who are in charge want to take on a lot of stuff, and sometimes they are willing to fly on autopilot. It’s a student-led organization, so we try to give them leeway to do what they feel comfortable doing. We’re the guardrails: sometimes we’ll remind them, “Do you want to plan what you’re going to say at the meeting that you have to lead later this week?” We had a great couple of groups come through at one point who did a whole constitutional convention, and we changed a whole bunch of stuff in the StuCo constitution. Recently we’ve been looking at changing how our elections are run, which last got changed back in 2014 or 2015.

How do you know when you’re doing your job well?

You can see when kids are listening to each other. But sometimes I will just ask. If I come up with a new way to look at something, like an infographic or a mind map, I will ask at the end of class, “Did you like what we did today? Was it helpful?” Because it’s not about me: I want to help them do what they need to do.

What’s the best advice anyone ever gave you?

You don’t always have to be right — you just have to do what’s right.