Introducing Javier Ergueta, the 2018 Delaware History Teacher of the Year

Javier Ergueta

Delaware History Teacher of the Year 

Since 2004, 749 exemplary American history teachers from elementary, middle, and high schools in all fifty states, Department of Defense schools, Washington DC, and US territories have been named State History Teacher of the Year. The National History Teacher of the Year is named in the fall. 2018 State History Teachers of the Year were asked to answer informal interview questions by the Gilder Lehrman Institute. 

Do you have a favorite/funny moment from teaching?

Historical debates are a big part of my classes. One favorite moment recently saw students assigned to defend Robespierre’s radical republicanism take out cardboard pikes with the heads of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette and lead the rest of the class in parading around the room.

Tell us one fun historical fact about the town you live in or grew up in. 

I was born and spent my early childhood in La Paz, the capital of the country of Bolivia, located high in the South American Andes. At 12,000 feet up, the air’s oxygen content is about 1/3 less than at sea level. Fires are so much harder to sustain that a city fire department was not created until 1959, 411 years after the city’s founding!

What was the last great history book you read?

Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind takes on the history of our species. This puts the focus on what all humans have shared for 200,000 years, and Harari argues the main thing has been storytelling: creating fictions, some of which turned out to be extraordinarily productive and powerful, like the fictions of money, the nation-state, and religions. 

What is your favorite historical site or museum?

The city of Florence, which in its entirety preserves and communicates the Renaissance values of humanism and individualism. 

If you could travel back in time and meet any historical figure, who would it be and why?

Mohammed. Any list of the most influential figures in history puts him among the top five, as religious founder, ruler, and conqueror, but historical specifics about him are astoundingly elusive. Although we have 200,000 hadith, or traditions about his life, Muslim scholars long ago concluded that most of these were at best tenuous in their connection to Mohammed.

What is your favorite historical film or series?

Fall of Eagles, a 1970s series by the BBC about the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century decline and fall of the ruling dynasties of Russia, Germany, and Austro-Hungary. 

Do your students have a favorite historical topic or era?

World War II is a favorite topic. Students find fascinating how Americans, Brits, Russians, Chinese—every nation today cites a different list of “most important battles,” because all see the war through their national experiences. 

What advice would you give to young people, in high school or college, who may be considering a career in education but are unsure?

As a society and as individuals, we should not consider teaching just a job; the only way to be effective, for ourselves and for our community, is to be fired with passion about imparting the best of the past to prepare young people for a most uncertain future. 

Click here to nominate a teacher for the 2019 state and national awards.