That's not what my Lakota friends say...
Still, history was much easier to teach when you could take the kids to the playground and show them a Sarsen stone that is believed to mark the route the stones took to get to Stonehenge from the quarry in Wales.
In Wales, history hangs heavy on us and darkness holds the thrum of arrows and the cry of death from ambush. As R.S. Thomas said, we are a people gnawing on the carcass of an old song. Where I taught history, my own school when I was a kid, the population was very static and I could hook the kids in to their history, histories that I could trace back to the 1700s for some of them.
We had the grandchildren of men who fought in Korea, the great-grandchildren of men that fell in Flanders and one girl was related to Dic Penderryn, a man executed for rioting to demand suffrage for all adult males in the Merthyr riots.
Once you've hooked the kids with their stories, it's easy to delve deeper. Like one kid said, "It's not HIS story is it, Sir, it's our story."
Damn, I miss teaching history.
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