WARNING: After the break this thing pretty much becomes a history lecture! Some people might appreciate this, others will not be able to get through it. In case of tl;dr please consider at least reading the final paragraph and the post-script since they are the point I was driving at the entire time.
Tonight my copy of A Dance with Dragons (Which I am about 1/5 through) was sitting behind me. I read a book (USING THE COMPUTER) by Bashford Dean (written in 1920) about body armor and helmets in the Great War and into the future (based on his expertise in the field of medieval and renaissance armor) instead.
My God, this is ridiculous. I really like A Song of Ice and Fire but I guess it just can't compare to compelling historical information from a contemporary source. Maybe I'm a child and it's really just because Helmets and Body Armor in Modern Warfare has pictures. Or maybe it's because of the relating of accounts of guys in plate and mail going up against guns, which I'm obviously not getting with George R.R. Martin. Dragons? Phhbt, I wanna read about battles from a different point of view than standard history classes with an eye to how technologies actually interacted with each other instead of just how certain technologies (e.g. gunpowder, machine guns, airplanes) came to dominance.
I think this is the problem a lot of people have with history. For some reason educators feel this need to make everything as dry and boring as possible, up to the point where the only time anybody is actually awake in a history class is when they look up and see "Diet of Worms" on the board. Some clown says some stupid thing about eating worms, and then the teacher dryly informs everyone that in this case "diet" rhymes with "nyet" and just means "meeting" and then finishes the shutting down of their students mind by going over the same boring facts about Martin Luther and his reformation that we all forget as soon as we pass a test about it. They could have pointed out that one of the wars caused by this, the 30 Years War (the only part of which just about anybody knows about is the Treaty of Westphalia, and that just as a sort of basic twinge of recognition at that phrase), was a major turning point in the use of heavy armor of the sort that your typical "Knight in Shining Armor" wears, having very little to do with gunpowder, the typical reason given for the decline of armor. Mostly it was because that war was fought over wide areas of land (read: all of Europe) instead of the previous norm of siege warfare, and it was simply too much weight to wear during a long, fast march, and a rush to the supply convoy and a search for each individual's armament wasn't exactly conducive to combat readiness.
The glossing over of technological changes and just what they were doing and when is another thing that can lead to a major disconnect with students: It's odd to go from the heavily armed and armored knights of the crusades straight to the conquistadors wearing breastplates and steel wide-brimmed caps and then suddenly to no armor at all in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The biggest problem with this isn't even that it doesn't give an explanation of the changes that were occurring in the three hundred year gaps between these events, it's that apparently there is nothing worth teaching a class of highschoolers about in those three hundred year gaps, or at least nothing that will be recalled easily later. Oh, right, and it's inaccurate. It's not as if the year 1492 rolled around and everybody suddenly decided to wear a stylish breastplate and light helmet. In fact, the heaviest plate and mail hadn't even come on the scene yet. Plate and mail wasn't really on a sharp decline until the mid-to-late 1600s, and it wouldn't disappear entirely until after the American Revolution, where it saw limited use by officers.
Obviously, going into a lot of detail on technological changes is essentially impossible in a classroom setting, and obviously a lot of the "boring stuff" like the Diet of Worms is incredibly important historically and ought to be taught. But I don't think it would kill teachers to occasionally mention interesting events and facts that might actually get a classroom to sit up. Probably the only reason I enjoy history so much today is the happy coincidence that I had a lot of teachers who were really interested in contemporary accounts and the more amusing or "cool" anecdotes. Having history unfold as a story instead of as a list of events and people makes a huge difference.
Finally, instead of having homework test kids' knowledge of the material (which I'm pretty sure is what tests are for) by making time-lines and charts, maybe give them an assignment like "find an interesting fact about x time period to share with the class." Sure, it's less labor intensive, but learning is rarely (if ever) a question of labor. By having students look on the internet for fun facts, you'll give them all a chance to get personally involved in history for no other reason than history being fun. And that's what we really want to get out of this: A new generation of kids who won't immediately dismiss history as "boring" or "dead."
PS: Also, I appreciate the irony in how dry a lot of the information I presented might seem to other people. That's the reason I got the idea of the interesting fact homework: No matter how cool something might seem to a teacher, there's practically no chance that all of their students will appreciate it, but by telling kids to go find something that they think is cool, you increase the odds of them finding something that draws them into at least one segment of history exponentially.
