Passion for the Past: a Rant

“Go to the gym!"

It was no wonder that when I graduated from high school I could not tell you a single historical fact that I had not already learned in elementary school: I heard the phrase “go to the gym” more often than any actual historical information in my high school history classes. Our teacher hadn’t gone to the trouble of establishing discipline in his classes, and so the students saw them as a joke.

Often he would release us to go run our energy off instead of trying to shout us down. On the days he actually did feel like teaching a lesson, we would get screamed at until we sat down, bewildered, and were forced to take notes. The next day we would be back to talking to our friends, hurriedly finishing math homework for later (just try to cross the math teacher), or joshing around with the teacher.

Sometimes he would try to get us involved in taking notes by asking one of the students to write them up on the board for the others as he read them. My brother tells a story of one such instance, where instead of helping, he rambunctiously scribbled gibberish on the board for half the class before the brownnoser in the class spoke up, “Mr. Bell, Jason’s not writing anything!” after which the class was sent to the gym.

I have no idea how he got away with teaching for so long; the only explanation I have is that he lacked the passion for history to inspire it in his students and we were content to learn nothing if it meant we could have one more hour of the day to use as a study hall or to play basketball. The only year I learned anything in history class is the year we spent watching Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary.

I was dazzled when I sat down for the first lecture of my Western Civilization class at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Facts were being presented to me, but it was in such a way that I didn’t mind scribbling them all down. I also spent just as much time taking notes as I did recording hilarious things the professor would say, from pithy rhymes to help us remember dates to Monty Python quotes. I had no idea that a history lesson could be so much fun. Shortly thereafter, I skipped down to the Arts & Sciences office to declare a major, vaguely wondering why I had always hated history class in high school.

In the years that followed I found that not every history professor was the same. Some gave you the facts without any embellishment. Those lectures were pretty boring, but I still learned. One professor added so much about her trips to the country she was an expert in that I never knew what to take notes on and what to listen to while politely nodding. This was torturous, and what was even worse was having to take the class again after I failed it the first time.

The best professors were definitely the ones with the passion for history that you could actually see in their eyes: when Dr. Gorman talked about Caesar, when Dr. Levin prattled on about Elizabeth I, and when Dr. Witte ranted about the injustices inflicted on the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by the Belgians.

It makes me so sad that I could have been loving history all through high school, but instead I was in the gym, sitting on the bleachers gossiping with my friends.

So thank you, Dr. Gorman, for stimulating my interest in Ancient Greece and Rome. Thank you, Dr. Levin, for reminding me why I love being a history major. And thank you, Dr. Witte, for inspiring me to become a history major in the first place.

And if anybody sees Mr. Bell, tell him I’ve got a punch reserved for his face that’s about 15 years overdue.