I believe that many of the problems we see today in the US stem from an overall ignorance of history and civics. There is a true lack of knowledge of historical documents like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, to name a couple. Many do not understand at all how our government works or know anything about our founding fathers. Having attended high school in California, I don’t recall learning very much about US History and the founding of this country.
One of my clients, Secret Agent Teach strives to bridge this gap in knowledge by offering educator-tested, student-approved teaching resources to teachers (and parents) at a cheap price on his store. For the past 3-4 years, I have learned more about US History than I ever learned in California public school as I have built Secret Agent Teach’s online storefront.
We had 250-300 teaching resources available on our storefront on Teachers Pay Teachers. It wasn’t going to make us billionaires, but it was an easy 30-50 dollars extra passive income each month. That’s enough to help out with groceries, school supplies, whatever.
Beginning in October 2020, Teachers Pay Teachers started picking at Secret Agent Teach’s store. First, Secret Agent Teach was told he could not post any lessons that mentioned Christopher Columbus. Then Secret Agent Teach was told to remove any lessons that had any “sensitive” content in them. Sensitive content was any lesson or activity that had role-playing in it because it might be upsetting to the students. Finally, after all of the offending documents were removed from the storefront, Teachers Pay Teachers came at Secret Agent Teach with accusations of “copyright infringement”.
These emails were never very clear, and did not provide much guidance. Secret Agent Teach believed he had done everything that was asked of him in order to bring his storefront into compliance, as he did not hear back after he followed the cryptic instructions in the email received. Secret Agent Teach complied, and thought he was in good standing once again.
Imagine Secret Agent Teach’s surprise when in November 2021, Teachers Pay Teachers took his entire storefront down. Unceremoniously, without notice, all of Secret Agent Teach’s hard work vanished. A few years of work, gone!
When appeals were made, Teachers Pay Teachers simply ignored Secret Agent Teach’s requests and refused to submit the final counter-offer that Secret Agent Teach had asked them to submit.
The worksheets and presentations, reading activities – they were all just straight history, no commentary, no agenda. Just simply a way to teach US History to middle-school kids.
Well, I have some good news. Secret Agent Teach is back online! Secret Agent Teach’s new, smaller storefront can be found at https://www.etsy.com/shop/secretagentteach.
If you know of any teachers who used Secret Agent Teach’s documents to teach US History to their middle-schoolers, please let them know! Secret Agent Teach was a big hit and helped hundreds of teachers do their difficult job, even during COVID shutdowns.
Additionally, if you believe in teaching history without an agenda, if you are not afraid of history because it might be “upsetting”, please support this store! Please tell any educators you know- home schooling parents included- about this resource. Let’s make learning and teaching easier, not harder.