3 out of the 5 history classes I took in middle and high school were explicitly American history classes. I don't think I had to analyze a primary source in any of them until my 11th grade American history class (at which point we read the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, which was really good, if I might so add.)
My biggest issue was that they were really poorly structured. In the two-year world history class I took, we spent just as much (maybe more) time covering the Neolithic Revolution as we did the entire Middle Ages.
out of interest what exactly did you learn about the neolithic revolution?
"People went from hunter-gatherer societies to settled agricultural ones. This allowed day-to-day life to become stable enough for early nations to arise in the Middle East and India." Admittedly, it's been a while, so I've forgotten the exact details of what was taught in the class, but they spent forever drilling this into our heads. When we got to the Middle Ages, they spent a couple weeks telling us over and over what feudalism was in Europe and Japan before we moved on to the Renaissance, and I think we might have spent a day or two reading about Charlemagne without really talking about what exactly he did. Oh, and we watched half an hour of a documentary about the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain.
What was really weird was that although the class was clearly made for the specific purpose of helping us pass the standardized test administrated at the end of the year, we also spent like 3 or 4 classes watching a documentary on Mansa Musa, who, although fascinating, never actually came up on the test and had rarely, if ever, been on it in the past.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14979206 times)