teaching history

Students consider history to be dry. By that I mean that history is filled with stories, dates, conflicts and resolutions which seem detached from the student. When teachers can make a personal connection to the subject, students become more engaged and have more fun. So, one teacher I knew found many silly and serious songs to help kids memorize dates and or names (In the year 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue). Kids can make up their own songs and perform them, or research a specific person involved with an historical event. And, when teachers are most successful at connecting the dots from 1492 through to the present, students are also most engaged.

Most high school students are far too busy studying one another to appreciate the value of History. They are focused on the future, and the past appears irrelevant.

To compound matters, we insist that students acquire a grasp of around 7000 years of world history in under 200 class hours spread over only a couple of years. This means that the curriculum must leave out everything but the most important highlights. In the U.S., Asian history is hardly touched on, and the history of Africa seems to have only begun in the late 19th century. What are the important features, personalities and events that absolutely must be touched upon? At one time those were old dead white men and the dates of wars. These days textbooks are filled with personalities that earlier mighty not have rated a footnote, and sociological/political theory gets equal weight with the rise and fall of empires. Political Correctness and fear of not acknowledging the importance of one minority or another makes any coherent course more difficult.

In order to achieve the impossibility of actually teaching students something about history, textbooks are prepared by corporate salesmen to appeal to the greatest number of school boards. One must wonder how many first rate historians are involved in writing high school history text books. The choice of which text to buy is being made by folks whose own historical education stopped somewhere around grade 12, thirty or more years ago. In fact, modern history text books are riddled with errors and editorial judgments that seriously undermine the value of the material.

Teachers shouldn't necessarily be blamed for the failure of their students, but they often are, and with good reason. Who teaches high school history classes? The assistant football coach, junior faculty pressed into duty when no other teacher can be found? I'm sure that most high school history teachers are properly certified to teach history to adolescents, but I think we should regard those certifications with some doubt. Even so, there are some extremely good and inspiring history teachers in the system, but they are the exception and not the rule.

We've opted to set national standards for high school students and we measure their "education" by a series of standardized tests. When a school doesn't do well on the tests, they get a lot of negative attention. To avoid that unpleasantness, I'm afraid that many class have shifted their focus from teaching history to test preparation. "OK class, listen up! These are the most likely questions on the test, and they are all multiple choice. Here's a good strategy for doing well .... ". The tests are prepared by the same idiots who prepared the crummy text books in the first place, but now they cater to the politician instead of the buyers of textbooks. Nonsense, and almost guaranteed to sour any reasonably intelligent and diligent student on the whole system.

Well that's enough venting for this morning on this topic.