Seeking up

How do I feel about history?

As I have been digging more into history lately, with the reality that I might actually become a teacher setting in, I’ve realized something; I need to do a better job of forming my historical opinions.

Why? What does that mean?

Well, most historians don’t just write books about facts, then go home for the day. They research, look at both sides of a debate, then make conclusions for people who might not have thought/realized them. They aren’t tell you what to believe, but they are telling you what both of them believed, and they might even take a stand based on what they learned.Basically, learning history is pointless if we do not learn anything from it. A recent example of this was when I realized that during the Cuban missile crisis, we(America) had more nuclear missiles pointed at Moscow in countries like Turkey, Italy and Britain. While, the fact that the USSR built silos in Cuba is scary, it’s not the whole story. We had already taken the lead in pointing nukes at Russia. Of course in America it is remembered as them provoking us. When in reality, we had provoked them. A scary situation, but from some digging, we realize that there is a lot of finger pointing that can be done at ourselves.

I think that this is also becoming lost in a lot of HIstory classrooms. Teachers come in with the lesson plan they wrote 15 years ago and drone on till the end of the period. Students who might care about history with a bit of interaction, are lost in waves of boredom as they listen to what they know is a recited speech about an event or time period. A lot fo what I aim to do here is to regurgitate what I read, so that it will stick in my mind, and that I will be able to pull out interesting bits that we should learn from, and that I can learn to use in the classroom.