![]() ![]() I even ended up crying in one of them, about freed slaves I was biking and I had to pull into the bus lane for a second til he was done. Every lecture has this ‘you’ll never guess what I found out today!’ tone, it’s infectious. Before Blight’s course, I thought of it like the Napoleonic Wars: Macro important, but micro-boring.īut it turns out I was totally wrong! Blight is such a fucking groupie for everyone, right and wrong, slave and white, victor and defeated, he tells you about each person and episode and argument like he’s just learned them. I’m not from a part of the country where its legacy is super-proximate none of my family members were involved the geography, demography, economics, they’re all a long time ago and far far away. ![]() I know this is American Heresy, but the Civil War was never a topic I was particularly fascinated by. One of the best ones I found is David Blight’s Civil War course. So then I started looking for courses with good teachers, subject matter be damned. Am I only interested in European history because I had a good teacher at it in high school and I’ve been coasting on that ever since? After awhile I started to question if I was even into this shit. Meandering speeches, no notes, unclear structure, too many asides. Topic after topic, I found my interest extinguished by bad lecturers. The only thing that mattered, I eventually realized, was how good the lecturer was. ![]() The more I listened, though, the more I realized that the subject matter was almost irrelevant to whether or not I enjoyed the course. International development, European history, Seattle trivia. When I first started checking out these courses, I thought they would be a way to dive into topics I was already interested in. Courses are the best, they kill time just like a book, but leave your hands and eyes free to keep you from bumping into stuff. I’m reminded of this all the time because over the last few years I’ve become totally obsessed with iTunes U (and, more recently, Coursera), and I listen to course lectures whenever I ride my bike, take a walk, wait in a line, use public transport, fly on an airplane or generally live my life. not me) are working on ways to replace America’s crappy teachers with better ones. This is a profound effect, and people who know stuff about elementary education (i.e. A good teacher can apparently give kids 1.5 years of learning in a school year, while a bad teacher can give as little as half a year. In the endless debate over how to improve American schools, you often hear people bring up the issue of teacher quality. ![]()
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