[Ansteorra] Fwd: World History in High School

[D Barr]

Please forgive me for my long-windedness. :)



I am in agreement with Caelin on Andrede about the *relative*
importance of *exact* dates in history, compared to what happened, why
it happened, how it affected the happenings/people around it and that
came after it.

I am also in agreement with Patrick R. about reflective thinking.
This is a new term to me, but I believe it is how my history teacher
taught us.

I had an amazing/outstanding history/geography teacher in high school,
but we never focused on memorizing dates.  (I'm terrible with the
dates, anyway.)  We had "Social Studies" (for us, the study of
history, geography, and a little bit of culture) from 6th to 12th
grade (all year, every year).  Even so, I saw the list of dates posted
by al AERYN, and knew less than half of them, and of those, I figured
out half by deduction or application of knowledge acquired recently.

To me, a date is merely a reference point for discussion and
comparison. :)  I've come to appreciate them more recently, now that
I'm getting deeper than a broad overview of everything from ancient
man to WWII, but in high school, all most kids get is a broad
overview.  This is simply because there is A LOT of history to learn,
and very little time during the year to learn it.  Then they add rules
and regulations and curriculums, and it becomes very hard to get a
decent coverage/breadth and depth of subjects.  I, for one, have never
had a formal history class dealing with anything after the American
Civil War, except for a bit of state history (Wyoming, Old West), and
the World Wars; and we didn't go into much depth of the middle ages,
either. (Our class was caught in a transition between what subjects
were taught in junior vs senior high.)

Mistress Rhiannon's description of the Texas history curriculum
requirements fits what I went through in high school pretty well,
except that we didn't have the AP History classes (no certified
teachers).  We did have a year focused on American Government.  I
don't remember what the other class was.  Most schools don't force
kids through a 4x4 curriculum* though, which means all they get is
those first to years of broad overview. (*Math, Science, Social
Studies, English; A minimum of one each for all 4 years.)

Hehe - and all this is *before* we remember that most students do a
"memory dump" after every test, and again at graduation. ;)

My point:
I would rather have a teacher who goes into depth about some few
subjects, even at the expense of other pieces of history, but tells us
that the others are out there for us to learn about; than to memorize
dates and event descriptions, or to try to cover everything at the
expense of the whys and wherefores.

In response to Ld. Griffin: I grew up with those kids.  They learn
just as well as anyone else, when the subject is interesting.
Memorizing things is not interesting, but reflective thinking can be
very much so.

Unfortunately, this all takes a good teacher, and we don't have enough
of those, nor are they paid deservingly of the work they need to do to
be good teachers, IMHO.

--Debbie

PS  I only graduated HS 9 years ago, so while my memory of it is
foggy, it's not so bad yet. ;) (9 years! Cue zen hum: not too old, not
too young, not too old, not too young... )