Question for highschool students about Vietnam

These developments in general interests are not common in the US only. I see it daily on the job. Have you ever tried to teach one of these subjects to 25 desinterested teens...... it's quite a field-trip!
 
Have you ever seen two Army recruits verbally beat the :cen: out of the other 28 kids in the class because they won't stfu while we were tyring to discuss Vietnam?

That was fun.
 
These developments in general interests are not common in the US only. I see it daily on the job. Have you ever tried to teach one of these subjects to 25 desinterested teens...... it's quite a field-trip!
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Yes it is, thats why A/P US history is the way to go, the standard history classes arent worth a dam. Kids dont know were China is, kids dont know who we fought in the reveloutinary war. The state of education in America is just sad.
 
A lot of that is the fault of the Education System. Very little importance is placed upon history and geography, so you can get through school w/o actually needing to be interested in such things. The other part of the problem is that many history teachers don't know how to make it terribly interesting to their students, though there are going to be a lot of students that just can't be convinced to show any interest.
 
I found AP World History to be far easier than 20th Century American History because there were not nearly as many distractions.

I would also like to note that my 20th Century American History teacher graduated with a major in physical education and a minor in..... sports injuries I think.
 
godofthunder9010 said:
The other part of the problem is that many history teachers don't know how to make it terribly interesting to their students, though there are going to be a lot of students that just can't be convinced to show any interest.
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Something I've noticed now that my best friend is a history major and we're both in our 3rd year of college...

Ever notice how war is conveniently left out of most history classes? Of course it varries from teacher to teacher but most history classes and "no child left behind" test questions deal with what happened before and after wars but never what happened durring them.

Insane that the most interesting and most IMPORTANT part of history seems to be completely left out of the American system.

Almost as if good always wins wars therefore winning a war doesn't matter because the good side automatically wins every time. duh! So why learn about what happens durring war?!?! Paying absolutely no attention to the addage of "history is written by the victors"
 
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Dude, wars aren't that important, except the Holocaust, every student has to have those images burned into their :cen: eyes because that is our fault. Notice I said the Holocaust, not WWII, that was not a mistake.

I argued with my AP World History teacher about this (and many other things) once (a day). I asked her why we needed to know who invented Geometry when that person was killed by someone wielding a spear that was 40,000 years old. I even put it into dialogue for the whole class: "What did your people do?" (asking politely) "We invented Geometry, what did your people do?" (said with scorn.) "We killed your people and stole your Geometry." (said with smug satisfaction.)

I didn't get much of a response.

Later, during the AP tests we had two, count them TWO, questions involving warfare, both were in regards to Hannibal's tyrate through Rome.

That's another thing that angered me, we spent so much time on Islam it was ridiculous, The class was broken down into two time periods. Neo-Lithic to 600 CE (can't say A.D. for fear of offending someone, I will continue to say AD though) and 600 CE to Present (Holocaust). 600AD was chosen because supposedly Islam spreading throughout the Middle East is the single most important event in world history. I personally think that the birth of Jesus, whether you are Christian or not, is the single biggest event in regards to world history. The New World was not discovered by Muslims, the Muslims were not the first to round the tip of Africa. There seems to be a pattern in the Islamic World, the Muslims control a resource/luxury and they hold the West hostage, we figure out a way around them and they decend into chaos for 300 years.

And the whole Rome thing, never happened. We talked about the Han Dynasty in China which existed at the same time and Rome as an afterthough, even though Rome had a far more lasting effect on world history.

I will not attempt to recreate a timeline of my AP World History Class on the events as we learned them.

Pre-history to 600 AD: Nothing happened.
600 AD: Islam started to expand outwards from Arabia.
1939-1945: Holocaust
1946 to Present: All white men in America should be castrated.



Charlemegne, Genghis, Attila, Julius Caesar, and Alexander never existed, just a myth made up by the Zionists.

Obviously I exaggerated in my rather small rant, but that was to show just how much contempt I hold for how the schools are handling history. Only two AP History classes which means only two AP History classes where you can actually learn. There is a reason why I felt that AP World History was easier than 20th Century American History.
 
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Ted said:
I have been walking around with this question for quite while now, wondering whether or not to post it. After seeing We were soldiers recently, I decide to do so. But let it be clear beyond doubt that it is not to disrespect the servicemen who served there or to question their motives. It is not meant to pass judgement but I can't figure this one out.

I just wonder what you are taught in Highschool with regards to Vietnam's wishes to souvereignty. Are you still taught that because of the Domino Theory and the communist threat that their wish for self rule should be contained? How can it be that Indonesian wish to decolonisation in '49 was seen as nationalism and stimulated by the Americans and Ho Chi Minh's wishes were seen as communism and not nationalism? Soekarno was more affiliated with the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) then Ho to the Vietnamese version?
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It's been 5 years since the Vietnam War was a topic in history class. From what I remember, we were told that the USA had a policy of containment of communism (the Truman doctrine), which meant it would not allow communist systems to arise in other countries. I think my teacher and the book also used the term domino-effect not as a reality but as something feared by the U.S.-leadership.

In the last 4 years of high-school, the history curriculum was something like this:

1. Bronze & Iron age: mainly Greeks and Romans
2. Medieval Ages: mainly Europe, but also the Middle East and Northern Africa
3.Post-medieval, yet pre-industrial age: Europe, America, colonization
4. Industrial age up to WW2
5. ~1939-2001

deerslayer said:
Which explains why I am ill-adapted for school, if not society.
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Haha, same here :D

deerslayer said:
Your "cogs in the machine" statement illustrates perfectly that we are a society which casts away the undesired elements, leaving perfectly good careers and men (John R. Boyd comes readily to mind) to waste. As a side note, Boyd's theories form the basis for much of the work I do.
WD, my bio teacher can't pronounce "menstruation", and she's a woman. My highest quality of education has come from the knowledge of the self-educated and from my own education.
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Why doesn't she say "period", as in "Hey do you wanna skip 3rd menstruation?" "Sure, but I need to be back by5th menstruation".


Autodidactics is the way forward for sure!
 
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Wow, my last four years went like this:

Year, Class, Description
1.) Civics, studying the laws that govern our land.
2.) More civics
3.) 20th Century American History, Civil War to WWI, skip WWI, Great Depression, skip WWII and Korea, study Johnson's "Great Society", mention Vietnam, and umm, yep, that's it.
3.) Modern History, Start with the discovery of the New World, went at a good pace before stopping at WWI.
3.) Government, studying the laws that govern our land, and point out that the laws western society lives by are all derived from the Bible so to say that a (Western) nation wasn't founded on Jewish or Christian beliefs is rather incorrect.
4.) AP World History, Well, let's see, started with paleolithic era, I believe, studied Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China and we ended with a six week project on the Holocaust, somehow skipping over every single war between the dawn of man and WWII, err, Holocaust.
 
Damien435 said:
Wow, my last four years went like this:

Year, Class, Description
1.) Civics, studying the laws that govern our land.
2.) More civics
3.) 20th Century American History, Civil War to WWI, skip WWI, Great Depression, skip WWII and Korea, study Johnson's "Great Society", mention Vietnam, and umm, yep, that's it.
3.) Modern History, Start with the discovery of the New World, went at a good pace before stopping at WWI.
3.) Government, studying the laws that govern our land, and point out that the laws western society lives by are all derived from the Bible so to say that a (Western) nation wasn't founded on Jewish or Christian beliefs is rather incorrect.
4.) AP World History, Well, let's see, started with paleolithic era, I believe, studied Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China and we ended with a six week project on the Holocaust, somehow skipping over every single war between the dawn of man and WWII, err, Holocaust.
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OMG! So they actually WANT history class to be boring by leaving out all the good bits?! That's insanity.

I read a book once called "The very bloody history of Britain (Without the boring bits)", which did only focus on wars and intrigues.
 
On the AP World History test we took for college credits there were two questions regarding warfare, both were related to the Pelliponesian Wars (butchered that).

And my AP World History teacher said that China could arm 500,000,000 men and send endless human waves that would overwhelm any enemy and that any country, including, no, especially the US would be unable to defend against Chinese attacks. I tried to explain to her a little about the logistics of such a thing but she said I was misguided.
 
You might want to explain a little something to your teacher about bringing a knife to a gunfight.

I don't give a d*mn how many people you line up to make an attack ... if the other side resorts to nuclear tactics then no matter how many people are lined up - just one weapon can take such a bite out of the wave that they won't stand a chance.

Idiots who DON'T understand real tactics should leave fighting and the planning for battle to those who know what the sam h*ll they're doing.

Evidently your teacher is one of those who don't know their b*nghole from a hole in the ground.
 
That's the thing about some teachers. They seem to have a "my way or the highway mentality" regardless of the truth. I remember one of my son's high school teachers saying that the state of Rhode Island had the longest coastline of any state in the country! I had my son look it up and then politely ask the teacher about what he'd found. The next day my son came home and told me that the teacher got a bit upset and refused to admit his error. I had to go in and have a face to face with that teacher. He changed his mind and apologized. BTW, he no longer teaches at that school, coincidence? :)
 
lmao!

In the teacher's own defense though, Rhode Island does have a longer coastline than my state, South Dakota.
 
My teacher skips the "unimportant parts of history" like wars, we covered WWI without major battle names, or anything of that sort; the only thing that came out of the war era was the political dession to go into WWI and the economic history.
 
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