Kids don't know enough to 'do history' like historians
- Joanne Jacobs
- Oct 22
- 1 min read
Consultants want history teachers to introduce students to primary sources, write Jon Bassett and Gary Shiffman on the Knowledge Matters Campaign site. But students can be overloaded with too many documents with too little context.
Historians have lots of content knowledge and practice in inquiry and analysis, they write. Students can't "do history" like historians, because they're novices.
In one widely available curriculum, "a typical lesson requires middle school students to read and interpret five nineteenth century documents — in 20 minutes!," they write. "In another curriculum, students are expected to compare and contrast five documents from the 17th and 18th centuries in a single class period."
They developed 4QM Teaching, called the Four Question Method, to help students understand history, and have just introduced a U.S. history (1492-1877) curriculum.
Students start by asking: What happened?
Then they focus on the key people and ask: What were they thinking?
"Teachers dedicate an entire class period to helping students closely read and skillfully interpret a single primary source," they write. Students struggle to understand the point of view of historical characters. It takes time.
My experience is that AI makes this worse. I long for an AI system which is domain specific. If asking about real, historical events, AI should first focus on primary sources. Instead, it takes the general feelz of the internet. So, where the general consensus of thinking is wrong, or where a large group of sites on the internet are pushing a wrong idea, that floats to the top in AI searches.
My test is always Crispus Attucks, who was killed at the Boston Massacre. There are only 2 primary sources about his life: an ad when he ran away from slavery, and his death at the massacre. Yet, books have been written about his life, how he was a…
National History Day is a good way to get kids actually doing historical research, BUT -- 1. It's like 6-7 months of work, easily. 2. They expect kids to read a bunch of secondary sources as they plan their project and want a mix of secondary and primary sources in the bibliography.
It runs from 4th-12th grade, and the kids take several years to really get the process down.
They expect a good project to look at remote causes, immediate causes, the event itself, immediate aftereffects and longterm effects. Which means they have to be able to contextualize their primary sources.
Many of these in class exercises are an attempt to prep kids for the DBQ questions on APUSH and AP Euro,…
Same damage they did in English lit. The teachers push students to what they had to do in college, but students know it is BS