There are plenty of good reasons for becoming a teacher, and I feel lucky to have some of them as motivating factors in my decision to start in this profession. There are some other reasons which, while quite worthwhile, are hard to describe without at least a bit of bile.
Many years ago, from grades 6 until my 10th grade classes in high school I never had any history class which got even remotely close to the end of the period of history to which it was supposed to cover. I’ll give you an example…I had a semester class in 10th grade covering American history from the Reconstruction to the present… As it turned out, we just barely got a chance to look at the Korean War. I am not THAT old and these events were far from the boundaries defining the edges between history and current events.
Luckily for me, I have always loved studying history, and as a consequence these little peccadilloes in sloppy teaching had little if any real impact upon me, other than a sense of amusement that increased every year. I did, however, think (at the time) that this was still a fundamental disservice to the majority of students in these classes.
Nowadays these sorts of things don’t happen (as far as I know…), and there are a lot of ways to compensate for these possibilities for teachers such as more from a strict chronological coverage of history to a variety of ‘themes’ which allow students to ‘dig deeper’. I think that in high school classes this methodology is great, but when this is conducted in some earlier grades I only see students who will never get the chance to learn about more that ‘themes’.
As with reading and math, there is sadly quite a lot of value in getting the fundamentals covered, and this means some work (i.e. defined as toil; e.g. reading many pages, writing, and discussing topics which may not make as much sense at first…). I guess you only have to watch some late night TV to see how few people know about even some of the most obvious points in American History (e.g. “who was US President during the Civil War?”) to see that there is a need, if only to maintain some sense of continuity in our culture for most citizens to know their history…all of it.
