History

I have very few fond memories of high school (boredom was never really my thing) and yet the ones that stand out, the ones that had the most impact are the ones involving the class that most people hated and found extremely boring. History. Right from the begining of high school I was blessed with a history teacher who believed that you learnt through enjoying a class and made the class fun. We did crazy things like debate how we would have fought everything from the Boer war to the battle of Waterloo and who the Germans would have bombed if they had, had the "bomb" first. We studied the Russian Revolution to the haunting Lara's theme and rewrote Dr Zhivago to give us the happy ending we thought it should have had. We planned the Von Trapp's escape with milatary precision and then watched how they did it. We relived historic moments on a Friday when we spent the hour analysing political cartoons, historic and current and watching the weeks news worthy moments from CNN that we had no idea would be historic and taught to the students after us. I remember crying as we watched the Challenger explode, I remember heated arguments about the student uprisings and what they expected to achieve here only to watch a similar event unfold thousands of kilometers away as chinese students protested for the freedoms they wanted, things that even our student protestors had and took for granted. It's funny how by just having a teacher who turns a subject into something you look forward to, it becomes an abiding and life long interest. I may remember that DNA stands for Deoxyribonucleic acid (ok it's the only thing I remember but then I hated Biology almost as much as I hated the teacher) but I would much rather explore the world of Elizabeth Tudor, Willim Cecil and Robert Dudley or the myths of Greece, Rome and the Norse countries and see just how far we haven't come. . . . . . . . . .

"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it's mistakes"