Being a History Student

What is your job as a History student?

If you’re anything like me when I was your age, you might start thinking that History is all about memorising lots of useless facts and dates, and then vomiting them onto the page during your quizzes and exams. Why? Because the teacher says so, that’s why. And the teacher is the one who writes your report cards!

But of course, this being a video that your History teacher made you watch, that’s not true at all. Here are two different objects to illustrate my point:

This is a smartphone. The first smartphone that you might recognise came out less than 20 years ago, and they’re only getting smarter. You know what they do very, very well, something that you’ll never be able to beat them at?

Giving data and facts.

A smartphone will be able to vomit up more facts than you ever will in ten lifetimes. We don’t need you as a student, who costs way more time and attention than a smartphone, to memorise things. And we sure wouldn’t be doing our jobs as teachers if we’re training you to do a job that a hunk of plastic could do ten times better. So no, your job as a History student is not to memorise facts, dates, and data.

Or not just to memorise those things.

This is a set of dinosaur bones. Think of historical facts and data like bones. Do you need them? Absolutely, yes. So unfortunately that means you do have to memorise stuff.

But you don’t just stop there — otherwise you just have a pile of bones sitting there, looking kinda impressive but also kinda awkward, and nobody really knows what to make of it. How do we make the dinosaur come to life? You need to slap on some meat, muscle, skin. That’s where you come in. We give you the data, and we get you to think about it. Give it meaning. What do you make of these facts and dates? What do they mean? What do you think they point to? What patterns can you draw from them? What can you conclude from them?

This is your job as a History student. You must know the facts as a bare minimum. Just as how dinosaur bones are the bare minimum for a dinosaur. But if you just stop at the bones, you have something lifeless. We need you to comment on what you see, give it meaning, give it life. This is what we call interpretation — it is your job as a History student to develop a sense of interpretation that gets more and more mature over the years, more and more sensible, more and more sophisticated. We want some meat and muscles and skin on those bones. We want that dinosaur.

And your powers of interpretation are something that no smartphone will ever be able to replace. Those powers of interpretation will help us make sense of a world full of ever new, ever weirder, ever more dangerous things — by looking at the past world full of old but also weird and dangerous things. 

That is what we History teachers want for you as History students.