History and My Story

I’ve said that you could spend 2 months on the French Revolution, but this guy does a great job summarizing the events in a matter of minutes.  Do you think his approach is helpful?  When I was in high school and my classmates would complain about the purpose for studying a particular topic our teachers would routinely reply that some day the subject would come up at a cocktail party and we would be viewed as ignorant if we couldn’t converse on the particular subject we were questioning.  I wonder if over at the boys’ school their teachers were telling them the topic would come up when sitting around a bar. 

As you can see this would not really be appropriate to show in class because of the location of his lecture And for the record, history topics come up all the time at the cocktail parties I attend…but only after people find out I’m a history teacher and people ask me to explain things they wished they had paid attention to when they were in high school!