Are you smarter than Mrs. B's students?

I'm sure many of us had the same problem, but I never had a class that made it into the 20th century of American history. Start in August with the colonial times and maybe, if you're lucky, you've made it to World War I by May.

I will say I had a fantastic seventh-grade teacher for state history, but we only got one year of that.

 

See?

The American education system at work.

 

It seemed like my classes always cut off about Vietnam, but I agree with your general point. They'd do better to divide the classes up a little more -- have pre-Revolutionary War up to the Civil War as one class, Civil War to present as another, etc. I know this happens in college a lot, but it should be a lot more common in high school as well.

 

I remember spending weeks on reconstruction and 15 minutes on wwII.

 

Wow. That's a poor job by the teacher. Again, the system is failing the students in these cases.

 

They'd do better if they didn't try to shear history off from every other subject, or from politics. And if "history" class wasn't actually military history class.

Rote recitation of names and dates doesn't matter, even if you get to all of it.

Students should learn history in English, in math, in science, in every class. When you put it in a box and say "This is a bunch of random stuff that happened," yeah, students get bored.

 

I agree with that, Zeke, but what always got my attention in history class was when we started talking about WHY an event mattered.
They issued the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Great. But let's talk about what that meant -- how a bunch of guys got together and formed a new country, with entirely new concepts, and risked their lives to do so. That is interesting to me.

 

But that's not a question on the test ... :

 

The fear of explaining to people that politics matters -- that it mattered in history, that it matters today -- keeps history dull as hell.

But if you taught history the way it should be taught -- with a stated way of taking it apart at the beginning -- you'd have riots.

Students would learn more if they were forced to examine history through the prism of who benefitted economically from world events, for instance. But can you imagine the school board meeting?

And, as buckdub says, how are you going to write the national standardized test? :

 

"Wait a minute! You didn't hear how World War II ended. We WON!"
<kids> "Yeah! U-S-A! U-S-A!"

Great Simpsons episode.

 

Nothing pisses me off more than students who ask, "Which of this stuff will be on the test?" It was one thing when it happened in high school, but I can't believe how much I've seen it in college with people who are actually history majors. Kids are too concerned with getting good grades than actually learning stuff. Although, there's so many things I feel are wrong with how my generation is being taught that it would take me days to rant about it all.

 

Hard to fault the kids for having that attitude when it's been instilled in them their entire academic lives.

I blame baby boomers; more specifically, baby boomer parents. Too many parents who want to change the system -- and have succeeded -- because they can't accept that their precious kids are the ones having trouble. Blame the teachers, blame the administrators, blame the textbooks, blame the tests, blame the politicians, blame public schools, blame everything ... except them, and their kids.

"We don't care how our kid gets that 3.0 GPA, as long as he does. And it's your job to give it to him."

Left unsaid, of course, is this: "... And we'll do anything to see that he gets it."