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Teach history the RIGHT way! Backwards!

I almost mentioned James Burke's Connections series in an earlier post. It's a great presentation of the way that things lead to other things, which lead to subsequently other things.

Highly recommended. He very recently did a fourth series. He was interviewed about it on The Skeptics Guide to the Universe about it recently. Steve is a fan.
 
marting said:
There's an old TV series I found fascinating called "connections" It traced how discoveries/inventions led to others. Now that's history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series)
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arthwollipot said:
I almost mentioned James Burke's Connections series in an earlier post. It's a great presentation of the way that things lead to other things, which lead to subsequently other things.

Highly recommended. He very recently did a fourth series. He was interviewed about it on The Skeptics Guide to the Universe about it recently. Steve is a fan.
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Yeah, Connections was awesome. Definitely a unique, interesting, and engaging approach to teaching history and I think it works well.

He also had a similar series call, I think, The Day the Universe Changed, which was also excellent.
 
I think that actually the main problem with teaching history at a pre-academy level is that it's reduced to a rote memorization of names and dates, with no real insight as to why or how. Which even I found boring as all hell, much as later I became interested in it. But as it was taught in school, by the elder gods, it was even more boring than geography, which i could at least visualize on a map. And believe me, that says a lot. I hated geography.

In that aspect, yeah, you could probably teach it front to back, back to front, or in random order, and it would be just as boring and pointless.

And yeah, there is nothing to learn from that that would apply to the modern day or teach you how to avoid repeating it. Because it doesn't go into why that happened, for what reason, or what false judgment went into making that decision.

Once you get past that level though, and you start learning the HOW and WHY, yeah, it kinda matters to know what happened before, because it's the premise for that how and why.
 
arthwollipot said:
I almost mentioned James Burke's Connections series in an earlier post. It's a great presentation of the way that things lead to other things, which lead to subsequently other things.

Highly recommended. He very recently did a fourth series. He was interviewed about it on The Skeptics Guide to the Universe about it recently. Steve is a fan.
Click to expand...

Loved that show as a kid and I thought of it too, its not quite teaching history backwards but kind of. It very much influenced my love of both history and science.

I've tried watching it as an adult, doesn't hold up in my opinion. Very dated, lotta connections made that are pretty tenuous. I think he's currently producing a the follow up series.

https://arstechnica.com/science/202...ic-sci-doc-series-returns-with-original-host/

Edit, never mind, looks like its out.
 
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gabeygoat said:
What about Social Studies class?
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Parents' job. Schools should just teach the 3 r's. And no socializing - except on the playground, where they learn to accept their place in the pecking order.

New Zealand has the right idea. The new government is banning the use of cellphones in schools, and primary and intermediate schools will have to teach an hour of reading, writing and maths per day. And none of that 'new math' crap either!
 
ahhell said:
Loved that show as a kid and I thought of it too, its not quite teaching history backwards but kind of. It very much influenced my love of both history and science.

I've tried watching it as an adult, doesn't hold up in my opinion. Very dated, lotta connections made that are pretty tenuous. I think he's currently producing a the follow up series.

https://arstechnica.com/science/202...ic-sci-doc-series-returns-with-original-host/

Edit, never mind, looks like its out.
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A reason "Connections" connected with me is that in grade school I was the laggard in the classroom. Didn't remember my arithmetic tables etc. and had to stay during recess to go over the stuff I was supposed to know. I hate apparently mindless memorization.

Then, in the 6th grade, I discovered shortcuts. The abacus, Trachtenburg methods, and the magic of the sliderule which led to logarithms. Then I got interested in chemistry and physics. Wow! So that's what math's for. By the 8th grade I was several years ahead of my classmates and no longer learning squat Most of my learning was books from the library or the Boston Museum of Science's library. I'd flick from physics to math to chemistry. Each would provide incentive to lean more and move to the next.

This worked great until encountering quantum mechanics and associated math second year in college. I was used to having already had the background and would skip class figuring I'd do fine on the exams. Oops. Flunked everything except a grad level EE class with a great prof I actually went to and loved. Got an A+ in it. Repeated and passed the flunked classes and graduated. During the wait to repeat, I got some great work experience at Analog Devices as a tech. Invaluable, as it turned out. I wouldn't change a thing in hindsight.

I have a really hard time memorizing stuff. But once a connection is established with something else, it's locked in. And suddenly things make sense and remembering them is automatic.

Probably why I liked the show so much.
 
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I took a current events class in high school that taught me more about history than any history class I took. We would talk about the front page stories of the day and it was fascinating. I think part of what made it work was our teacher’s dogged preparation, but also I was taking other history classes. So, the framework was there, even if it wasn’t properly filled out. We would have guest teachers when there was a story that our teacher knew could be more fully described by another teacher, and that was really weird. A Spanish teacher who was a bit boring while discussing grammar lit up when talking about a story in South America near where he had lived for a dozen years.

I also took a property law course that started with the latest Supreme Court case on property law and then went backwards from there to feudal lords. It was much more structured and I loved the professor, but I found it harder to follow than the other first year classes I was taking at the time, like criminal law or civil procedure. Learning the law is a bit more like math than history. Learn to add before you integrate. Learn what property is before worrying about takings clause issues.

I think it is good to teach subjects in a variety of ways so that every learner has a class that clicks for them. But I’m not a teacher or an education researcher, so I’ll leave it to them.
 
Graham2001 said:
Or you can go to a museum and learn how certain objects have 'power' and need to be treated with 'respect' here is a paper on just what has to be done published by the American Museum of Natural History in 2021...

https://www.culturalheritage.org/do...--tjiong-paulson-beatty.pdf?sfvrsn=a83a1420_9
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Fascinating.

Here's another object which is said to be very powerful. Just looks like an old piece of paper with funny writing on it to me. I hear Trump used it for toilet paper, and why not? Not much else a moldy old founders' document is good for. They had funny beliefs too - best forget about those guys and concentrate on the 3 R's!
 
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