Thank you Sal for great videos! You are inspiring me to study maths.
I have a Ba in history and agree with the criticism raised in the article, however I also think it is a problem that many people dont even have a basic scaffold of world events.
History is about making choices, what to say and what not to say, and the way to say it, it is not merely about being familiar with major world events. What is a major world event? Lets go with WW2 , then when you dig into WW2, what would you say is a major event? Fall of France, D-Day, Fall of Yugoslavia, or Stalingrad? Whatever you choose you exclude another event, your choices influences the further storytelling. You have to make choices.
The solution for this problem is very difficult, since you have to begin somewhere in your story-telling, and even when choosing where to begin you take a side. And that side is with you for the rest of the story telling.
History is not merely about events it is also about connecting dots, you can begin by choosing any event and really digging into it until you begin to see the wider picture. Going the other way around is far more difficult, when you attempt to give an overview of the wider picture. You get exactly what you would if you picked 2m wide brushes to draw on a wall.
My suggestion instead is to pick really small pencils and draw thinner lines, introduce the students to any event in world history and work out from there. Only then the students could enjoy seeing (and make themselves) the wider connections.
A teacher in a classroom faces the same problems as you (and more, imagine 20 teenagers), so dont worry about it. :)
I try to do both. The way my brain works, I need to see where something fits into the bigger picture (both in time and space) before I can engage in the nuance. The beauty of this form-factor is that we can keep adding more videos to add more color and context since we aren't limited by the time of the classroom or state-mandated curricula.
I think the breadth first approach is very important, it allows you to see the overall structure and focus your attention on what your interested in. Much like a levels of detail on a map - first you need to know the big geography - where are the oceans/land, or in our case what are the most important events/people/locations/traditions, and then we can zoom until eventually we can see the details.
I have a Ba in history and agree with the criticism raised in the article, however I also think it is a problem that many people dont even have a basic scaffold of world events.
History is about making choices, what to say and what not to say, and the way to say it, it is not merely about being familiar with major world events. What is a major world event? Lets go with WW2 , then when you dig into WW2, what would you say is a major event? Fall of France, D-Day, Fall of Yugoslavia, or Stalingrad? Whatever you choose you exclude another event, your choices influences the further storytelling. You have to make choices.
The solution for this problem is very difficult, since you have to begin somewhere in your story-telling, and even when choosing where to begin you take a side. And that side is with you for the rest of the story telling.
History is not merely about events it is also about connecting dots, you can begin by choosing any event and really digging into it until you begin to see the wider picture. Going the other way around is far more difficult, when you attempt to give an overview of the wider picture. You get exactly what you would if you picked 2m wide brushes to draw on a wall.
My suggestion instead is to pick really small pencils and draw thinner lines, introduce the students to any event in world history and work out from there. Only then the students could enjoy seeing (and make themselves) the wider connections.
A teacher in a classroom faces the same problems as you (and more, imagine 20 teenagers), so dont worry about it. :)