BeepCollege core: you sit in the class for attendance then go home and teach yourself
HootinNHollerinI was failing engineering probability and statistics until i stopped going to class and just read the book. Then i got an A. Professor was just horrible.
I didn’t like history, until I just sort of discovered it on my own. After that, I wondered why EVERY history teacher I ever had before or after, was so terrible at it. It’s the most fascinating subject, just stories of interesting people doing interesting things, how can you fuck that up?
And yet somehow History has to be taught in the most mind-numbingly way possible.
“fun” little historical factoid on that. WAY back when the idea of national standards was being developed around 1992ish all the various disciplines started working on their stuff. A lot of them had agreed standards by 1994 or shortly thereafter. History/Social Studies took almost 10+ years to get that far because they were arguing over if dates/actions were more important or trends/impacts were more important. As it was explained to me at the time (2006ish) the issue was just stating facts or making them meaningful.
Disclaimer: I’m not claiming the above is scientific fact. That is what was relayed to me when taking a non-history course 20 years ago. Still, a fun thought experiment on what is truly important in learning.
I had one history prof in college who told us in the opening moments of his first class, that he didn’t really care about actual dates, and he’d never ask a date question on a test, which caused an audible sigh of relief in the room. He felt that knowing the CHRONOLOGY of events was better than the actual dates. It was one of the few insightful things I ever learned from a History professor.
Just yesterday there was a Jeopardy question about history, and I didn’t know the answer, but they gave a person’s name, and with that I was able to eliminate guesses that were after that person’s time. I didn’t know the exact dates of those eliminations, but I knew in general that they were after that person. That only left me with a few options left, and I wasn’t sure about one, so I guessed the other, and was right. It was an example of just knowing chronology was good enough.
Besides, if you need to lock down a strict fact like a date, we have a super computer in our pocket holding the entirety of human knowledge. Google it.
MinnesotaGoddammy history professor friend thought that if you could cork board and yarn it together, who cared if you got the dates slightly wrong. you had the tapestry and the big picture. you could get the letters and the individual stories. that’s history
Yeah, sometimes a date is important, and you end up remembering a lot of them anyway, but generally, just knowing the story is all you need, and that’s the fun part anyway.
Date Anxiety has kept more people from enjoying history than anything else.
woof tell me about it the hot chick in the front row in history 204?
PEPE SILVIA YES i haven’t seen her in a while but she loved this meme