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Greg laughs, his head falling back as he seemingly thinks something over in his head. Then he looks at me, clearly ready to impart his words of wisdom.
“Come to work every day and tell yourself it will be worth it in the end.”
Chuckling, I can’t help but ask, “And is it really? Worth it in the end?”
He shrugs. “Don’t know—haven’t gotten to the end yet.”
I thank Greg for his thoughts and head back to my classroom, opening up my calendar and lesson plan to go over everything one more time before my students arrive in about twenty minutes.
The thing about history that I remember hating in high school was the obsession with dates. It’s basically all memorization, which is frustrating if you’re a kid who doesn’t have a great memory for things like names and dates.
That was me.
I was horrible at it, or so I thought, and I always had mediocre grades in high school because my focus was on baseball. But when I got to college, there was a minimum GPA I had to keep in order to stay on the team, and I had a graduate student who tutored me so I could keep up with the subjects I struggled the most in: history and math.
The reason I was able to pass those history classes? The reason I ended up falling in love with history when I had despised it so much growing up?
Movies.
And no, I don’t mean I watched the movie instead of reading the book.
I mean I had a tutor who talked about history the way someone would explain a movie to me.
It wasn’t just one rambling story with no beginning and no end, like what history class always felt like when I was in high school. The numbers and dates and ages and names and battles all blended together because history goes on forever. It has no beginning. It has no end.
But my history tutor, Sherry, would pick a single topic or battle or whatever it was we were talking about, and she would give me a bit of exposition, introducing the characters, telling me the things I needed to know in order to care about what I was being told, things like the historical significance or why it’s relevant today, and then she’d slowly build it up, giving me conflict and action and climax until she wrapped it all up with the resolution.
It was incredible, and I’ve always admired the way she took her time explaining things to me.
Eventually, I declared history as a major, surprising my entire family, and I went on to get a master’s and teach at the college level.
Now, I’ll need to take the things Sherry taught me, the unique way she taught me to care about history, and do the same for these kids.
As they all begin to funnel into the room just a few minutes before the bell, I can tell I have my work cut out for me.
***
“How was it?”
I groan into the phone as I head out to my car, tired and talked out at the end of my first day.
“That great, huh?”
“Yeah, well, I have many more days to figure out how to get these kids to love history. Hopefully at least one of those days is a good one.”
“God, that sounds depressing as hell.”
I roll my eyes.
“Can I help you with something or are you just calling to bust my balls?”
August chuckles, but then it tapers off and his voice turns serious.
“Just checking in to see if Emily ever told you what was going on.”
I click the unlock button and tug my car door open, chucking my bag onto the passenger seat and dropping into the driver’s side.
“What do you mean?”
