erinfinnegan: Holy sh*t this podcast is awesome!

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erinfinnegan) wrote,
@ 2008-04-30 15:20:00

Holy sh*t this podcast is awesome!
Episode 12 "Steppe Stories" of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast just totally blew my mind.

Due to some hideous mistake in my primary and secondary schools, I only really learned American history over and over again each year, and sometimes we covered some Geography. You know what's not very interesting and not very long? American history.

A lot of kids in class grades 1-12 would complain, "Why do we have to learn this?" but I never had a teacher who answered, "Because this is awesome!" I just learned a lot about Mongolia and it was totally awesome!

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	goawayplease 2008-04-30 08:08 pm UTC (link)
	> I only really learned American history over and over again each year Yes! It was the same thing over and over. I liked history, and I could remember crap from year to year -- it's like they didn't trust us to do that or something. (Reply to this)(Thread)

erinfinnegan
2008-04-30 08:24 pm UTC (link)

Also the history skipped from a unit on Newfoundland to Columbus, then the colonies, and from there to the end of WWII. It was a good year if we covered the end of the war.

I never once learned about Vietnam in school, outside of a 10th grade geography map quiz that the majority of my class failed over and over again. Maybe if we had learned something about the history of the region a map would have some meaning.

We talked about the Persian Gulf only during the first Gulf War, and only in Current Events class.

Edited at 2008-04-30 08:26 pm UTC

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	eliza420 2008-04-30 08:35 pm UTC (link)
	you had a current events class in high school? damn i give HH credit, i think only the journalism class counted as current events in northwest because i sure don't remember that as a choice! (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	erinfinnegan 2008-04-30 09:33 pm UTC (link)
	Welll.... By "Current Events" I mean, "As part of a Social Studies class in 8th grade we brought in newspaper articles because the war was going on at the time." There was not a current events course in high school... (Reply to this)(Parent)

goawayplease
2008-04-30 09:03 pm UTC (link)

We had "social studies" lessons for years, and I can't for the life of me remember what went on in that class. We usually got through the book, but it was often in a pretty perfunctory way. It got a little better in 7th and 8th grade when we made the rounds through several different teachers each day, but in elementary school it was all grammar rules and multiplication tables. I remember very clearly in 3rd grade writing a descriptive paragraph about a picture of a paleolithic drawing and really enjoying it and how it turned out, but most of school was pretty much dreck. When I sped through my homework, they'd often give me assignments from old textbooks, and I enjoyed the old illustrations, even when I didn't enjoy the actual work. I wonder if we were given so much grammar because kids in Kentucky sucked at it, or if we sucked at it because it was so deadly boring. I know that for my French + Spanish lessons, we're advised to read more kid's books, since that'll help you understand grammar better when you do your lessons.

When I hit high school it got better, but considering that my high school wasn't exactly cheap, you'd hope I'd learn a little something. We also started talking about things that the adults would mention without explaining, like the atomic bomb and Vietnam or "Ford to City: Drop Dead". I also never wrote an essay 'til I hit high school, and all the people who went to serious middle schools were used to writing more than a paragraph whipped through things while I got stuck halfway down a page... I felt like I was really bored for most of school and wished that we'd do something a little more interesting. I was in the gifted and talented classes and they were better, but really all kids should be interested in class.

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erinfinnegan
2008-04-30 09:43 pm UTC (link)

I wish all kids were interested in class... or that class was interesting enough for kids.

In any case, I've made a couple other comments about "Social Studies" in this entry - be sure to check.

In 4th grade we used a set of seriously mangled 10-year-old text books soon-to-be-replaced covering the history of the state of Michigan. I found it goddamn fascinating, because we had never studied our state before and never did again!

In 11th or 12th grade my classmates and I were reminiscing and I recalled the History of Michigan textbooks, and I was surprised to find that many of my classmates could not remember the books at all, they couldn't even remember that we had studied the history of Michigan. One girl couldn't remember anything before 5th grade, which annoyed the shit out of me since we had been good friends in 3rd grade.

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	goawayplease 2008-04-30 09:58 pm UTC (link)
	We had these really old Kentucky history textbooks that we learned from in 4th grade. They were probably from the mid-60s, but they were actually really interesting and I learned all sorts of weird things from them. We also had a lot of frontier history, so we learned about Daniel Boone and also read a few stories about people in Appalachia. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	paulfear 2008-05-01 01:26 am UTC (link)
	ah. the joys of kentucky education. i remember we had to take field trips to boonesboro and the like. it always made me wonder who dreamed of growing up to be the actors and tour guides there. i liked the natural stuff we had better like natural bridge, mammoth cave, land between the lakes, and carter caves. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	goawayplease 2008-05-01 01:40 am UTC (link)
	Where are you from? I grew up in Paducah... We didn't do too many field trips, just to Frankfort once [I think in 4th grade] and to LBL a few times with science classes and girl scout groups... Did you learn to shoot a gun in 3rd grade science class too? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	paulfear 2008-05-01 01:57 am UTC (link)
	i'm from louisville. tried to move elsewhere a few times but ended back up here. i remember one year we did like a week long bus tour of kentucky. it would have been better had i gotten along with any of my classmates. no, just a bow and arrow. i learned how to make and shoot a potato cannon though and make a hover craft out of a couple vacuum cleaner motors. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

goawayplease
2008-05-01 02:09 am UTC (link)

We never learned archery, but in 3rd grade we had this unit in our science class where a guy from LBL came in to teach us about conservation and hunting safety. At the end of a few weeks, he set up a plastic deer statue with a paper target on it and had each one of us shoot the poor thing with a BB gun. At lot of the girls didn't even know how to hold a gun, much less shoot it.

I left Kentucky schools for boarding school around when KERA-cel was going on. My mom heard that they were going to drop AP classes from our curriculum, so she was happy to let me go.

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paulfear
2008-05-01 02:14 am UTC (link)

if they had done that up here i think we would have started to shoot other students with the bb gun.

kera, yeah, that shit got worse. we had to have fucking portfolio shit for classes, it got worse after i graduated. i wish i would have just graduated early since i only took art classes my senior year. i used to get updates on how stupid everything was getting from my parents who were both high school teachers. they finally had enough of disrespectful dumb kids and stupid education mandates and retired.

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paulfear
2008-04-30 09:13 pm UTC (link)

i was in high school during the break up of the soviet union and so we did a lot about the cold war and the former warsaw pact countries. we also did a bunch of stuff on the cradles of civilization.

my dad is a history nerd so i guess i would have learned about shit like that outside of school anyway since we always traveled the country visiting historic sites.

i tend to get a little less interested in history once gunpowder became so important in warfare.

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erinfinnegan
2008-04-30 09:38 pm UTC (link)

I was in junior high during the break-up of the Soviet Union, and our Social Studies text for the year was "The Eastern Hemisphere". Instead of studying what was going on or doing a single unit on the U.S.S.R, Mrs. Anderson decided the text book had become irrelevant.

Mrs. Anderson had just returned from a vacation to Australia, and much class time was wasted asking the teacher to talk about said vacation. And I really do mean it was a waste of time - we could have been studying all of Eastern Europe and what the Wall was and why it came down, but instead we talked about one woman's Australian vacation (not even like, the history of the place).

A few years later Mrs. Anderson vacationed in China, so I hope subsequent classes learned something relevant to the world scene.

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	paulfear 2008-05-01 01:28 am UTC (link)
	i had some bad teachers too, one i always ended up correcting. i usually just tuned them out and read the book instead. my history professor in college always did sabbaticals in russia so we got lots of cool insights on that whenever our subject matter drifted to eastern europe. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	mightyplatypus 2008-05-01 03:23 am UTC (link)
	My World History teacher apparently felt that it was much more important that we know all about his numerous divorces than world history. By the end of the class, I knew all about alimony and child custody, but not so much about, say, ancient Rome, Greece, Europe, Asia, or any kind of history that wasn't related to his legal history. (Reply to this)(Parent)

mightyplatypus
2008-05-01 03:21 am UTC (link)

You know what's not very interesting and not very long? American history.

?!?!?!? Not true! US History can be fascinating- the problem is that most teachers suck all of the life out of it, by not addressing the real reasons behind almost anything and whitewashing those events they do discuss. One of my main jobs these days is tutoring US History and I'm always amazed both by how little my students know and how surprised they are when I start telling them about all the cool stuff that happened in our country.

I do agree that our educational systems complete neglect of anything approaching real world history is shameful, however. Recently I took a World History test designed for high school kids. I was horrified not only by how much I've forgotten, but by how much I never learned. I am definitely planning to check out this podcast, since I would love to remedy that.

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ltsk
2008-05-02 01:22 pm UTC (link)

When I lived in Maryland, our schools covered pretty much the same set of ideas about what happened in American history over and over and over and over and over and over again, until I wanted to throw any book I saw about, say, Harriet Tubman (on whom I was assigned to present a report four Februarys in a row) out a window. I had one teacher in seventh grade who was a world traveller, complete eccentric, filthy rich, and whose husband was a high-ranking local government official, so she just threw that semester's curriculum out the window and taught us about the peoples of central and south America, using slides from her trips there to illustrate her lectures. No textbooks. It was the best class I had the entire time I lived there. Apparently, she frequently took months off to travel in, like, Peru, so I was lucky she was there at the time.

When I moved to Connecticut and started tenth grade, I was initially sorely disappointed that we had to cover American history again. However, the first semester was about analyzing history, looking into the different perspectives historians can have on the same events, which meant that we looked deeper into certain aspects of American history than I ever had in my years of schooling in Maryland. The next semester was Current Events, which meant I finally learned something about what happened after 1946. I don't know why Maryland schools never covered the Cold War or McCarthyism or Korea or the Bay of Pigs or Vietnam or Watergate, but they didn't. We barely even covered the Revolution, WWI or WWII, which is frustrating, as those are the more interesting periods in American history. (The Civil War was covered ad naseum, and I hated that period of American history with a passion until Ken Burns showed me it didn't have to be a giant pile of Confederate-glorifying boring suck.) Everything I knew up to that point about the latter half of the twentieth century I'd learned from my parents, who were frustrated that this stuff was never covered in school, even though it all affected in one way or another everything that was happening at that moment in America. (Yes, that's right: Current Events covered stuff that had happened decades before I was born. "Current" my left cheek.)

The Current Events teacher was frustrated by the lack of time to cover everything and the limits of what he was allowed to say, as the local board of ed, being staunch Republicans, refused to allow certain bits of recent history to be taught in Current Events, which meant anyone whose parents didn't tell them outside of class what happened in the `60s had no freaking clue. (They didn't cover Kent State, for example, which would be a great time, I should think, to present the several perspectives on what happened that day and how sketchy history, even recent history, can be.) Our teacher got into trouble for going "beyond parameters" when covering Watergate. All he did was tell us about the break-in and the tapes. Insane! And covering the Reagan era was ...interesting (Iran-Contra didn't happen according to the curriculum set by the BoE).

Then, Glory be! in eleventh and twelfth grades, we got to choose our own subject! There was more in-depth American (hells no!), European (hooray!), Chinese (hooray!), etc., split into first semester and second semester, the first being up to maybe the 16th century (also insane), and the second semester covering everything after that. It was awesome, and I didn't pick up another book about American history for a class again until I took that awesome course on the Civil Rights Movement at UAlbany.

I'd sign up for the Hardcore History podcast, except I never get around to listening to the podcasts to which I'm currently subscribed anymore, so adding yet another to the list would be just depressing.

Edited at 2008-05-02 01:46 pm UTC

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