[Ansteorra] Fwd: World History in High School

[Richard Threlkeld]

<Snip, snip>

>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.

That may be a part of it. I have seen some really good teachers and some 
really bad teachers in my education and that of my kids. The really good 
ones are unbelievably motivating. The bad ones are unbelievably
demotivating. 
Stories of bad ones won't really help this discussion, so I won't share 
the worst, but throughout my history education and that of my sons, we 
were uniformly tested primarily on dates and the names of places and people.

I did not find anything interesting in history until I got to the University

and they were talking about the personalities of the players and what their 
motivations were in pushing for or accomplishing this or that.  They talked 
about how the invention of this led to the possibilities of that. How too 
many artisans with skill X in one place made it possible to economically 
produce Y and that led to Z. It was a revelation and history was suddenly 
interesting!

>--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... )

Mine was 40 years ago, but my sons were in the last 10 years.

Caelin