Quote:
Originally Posted by thesloppy
There's so many similarly interesting stories through history that it really makes me marvel at how poorly they teach history at a high school level. I was never engaged in history class, and I always remember history texts being particularly dense and flavorless....like 3 columns of tiny type, per page, restricted to only the briefest, most boring and flavorless reports of history that could be imagined. I'm sure plenty of folks had teachers who were able to work around those restrictions and make things engaging, but none of them were at my high school.
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Yep. I've always had an interest in history, and picked Ancient History as a class in my final two years of school. Our teacher was a woman obsessed with Hatshepsut, and we spent literally 2 years on her alone, having to cram the entire Peloponnesian War into two weeks (including a weekend cram session at the teacher's house), and it soured me on history for years, right up until I read my mum's copy of Shogun.
Reading through Susan Wise Bauer's really excellent History of the Ancient World years later, there are so many fascinating (and rather sick/depraved - yes, I'm looking at you, Atreus) real/semi-mythical events that would have completely hooked me in back when I was 16 or 17 and maybe led me down a different path.