History Was not Boring

Your Teacher Was

Regan Barr with The Lukeion Project

Recently I was speaking to a friend who admitted she is still trying to overcome a lifelong hatred of history. She related a story that I have heard dozens of times: all her "formal" history education was nothing more than memorizing faceless lists of names and dates. She is still bitter. I had some awful history class experiences, as well.
For example, I remember taking state history in junior high...I do not remember any state history, I just remember TAKING state history. And I remember the room clearly. The powers-that-be called these things “portable classrooms,” but the students called them “trailers.” They were rectangular boxes made of corrugated metal that had been strategically placed at the farthest corner of a black-topped parking lot. The Oklahoma summer sun blazed down on that parking lot in late August heating it up to at least four hundred degrees. Crossing from the main building to the trailer for history was dangerous business. The furnace blast would hit you and you could feel your skin melting. Your only hope was to make it to the trailer before your blood began to boil. When we finally stumbled up the rickety wooden steps and into the air-conditioned coolness of that trailer, we collapsed into a dehydrated heap and gasped for air. As we paused to admire our own survival skills, it would hit us. “Oh, man!! They have done it to us again. They tricked us into coming to history.”
The state history teacher was young, just out of college, and he had flaming red hair. He was a wrestling coach who had been forced to teach state history. He must have done something awful in college because he was being punished in this assignment. History was as torturous for him as it was for us. He was easily flustered and when he became angry or frustrated, he turned bright red in the face. Some classmates decided that evoking this reaction from our uninspired and unmotivated instructor was a lot more interesting than any old boring state history. Those students smelled fear, and when their pack instincts kicked in, the poor man had no chance. He was like a wildebeest separated from the herd and the lions were intent on bringing him down. He would get louder, redder, and more animated the angrier they made him. To his credit, he never acted upon those thoughts of violence that surely filled his head. That class took years off his life.
Now some might be under the naïve impression that teachers should spend time learning the subject matter they will be teaching, but I think in teachers’ colleges today you get right to the crowd control training. It is a rare junior high that has an excited and knowledgeable state history teacher, so any poor fool who gets stuck in that classroom better have some crowd control training – some riot gear might help, too. No experienced teachers ever made that blistering journey across the blacktop to see how things were going out in the “state history trailer.” He was on his own!
That is the sum of my memories of history prior to college. I cannot even recall what gender my high school history teacher was, though I am certain I took some history in high school. Is it any surprise that I hated history? I remember my civics teacher because he had some funny mannerisms that were more interesting than civics. I remember my kindergarten teacher because she mispronounced my name for half the school year. I remember…or rather feared…my fourth-grade teacher because she was a large, gray-haired gal who thought her students’ idea of a fun time was skipping the lunchroom pizza crowd to eat vegetable soup (!) with her in the classroom. The image of her brandishing a yardstick as she attempted to chase down some miscreant on the playground is emblazoned in my memory.
I remember those teachers, but not the history I was supposed to learn. Why? Because of the interesting details. My teachers, classmates, and classrooms were swirling vortexes of interesting details, but history itself was not. Today I understand that it is the details that make history fascinating – the sort of details I remember about angry teachers or the walk through the inferno to the “state history trailer” – not the sorts of details you find on a timeline.
By the time it got to me, history had been scoured clean of all the interesting details and only drudgery was left. History does not occur in expansive decades, centuries, and millennia. It does not even happen in timeline tick marks. It happens the same way that life does: one moment at a time, one blistering step at a time. History is not the story of enormous hordes of faceless automatons. It is the story of unique people like you and me. They sometimes cooperate, sometimes get into fights, and sometimes act with dignity and reason, but quite often act in silly, dangerous, or unpredictable ways. It was not until I got to college that I had instructors who loved what they were teaching and filled their history lessons with little-known facts and engaging anecdotes. Guess what?? History is about real people! History cannot be boring unless life itself is boring. But sometimes we stand so far away that we cannot see any of the interesting bits.

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