This may seem over-precious, but I am a little sorry for dd, who has always had history as one of her main interests but is getting very fed up with the way it is taught in Year 7. This is the only subject that doesn't seem to be taught in a serious way. They are doing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Her complaints so far are:
much (not to say most) of the factual information given is quite simply incorrect. She brings back some new wild statement from her teacher virtually every week. They are not encouraged to question the teacher, so dd has to decide whether to lose marks by writing down what she knows is right or learn what is incorrect (and both dd and I have read enough to tell the difference)
in other subjects (geography, science etc) they are taught out of serious textbooks; in history, the main textbook is Horrible Histories. Noone has told the students that this is in fact a joke book. It is treated as a proper textbook.
you don't need to be a professional historian to understand that medieval monasticism taught out of Horrible Histories is hardly going to give you a very accurate idea of what life was actually like in monastic communities.
their latest project was to write a short essay on how medicine and witchcraft had changed between 1066 and 1450. For this, they were told that they had to use the sources provided by the teacher.
for the witchcraft part of the project, all the sources provided were very evidently from the great witchhunts of the 17th century (extract from King James's Daemonologie, print of witch hanging from 1589, print of ducking-stool from 1600s).
There is obviously no way these sources can be used to show changes between 1066 and 1450, or indeed anything about 1450. I suggested dd should do it using contemporary sources, but she says she is fed up with losing marks because she does extra work and adds more sources- apparently you get marks docked if you don't use the teacher's sources.
I told her to go and speak to the teacher, but she came back reporting that the class is going to be taken by a trainee teacher until after Easter and that she will be marking the project. The trainee teacher seems to know even less about history than her current teacher.
The latest task has just been announced: they are going to work in class to decide Who was the most Terrible Tudor.
No point in complaining or trying to get dd into a different set btw; the history teacher is head of humanities so sets the history work for all the year.
Is this the norm in history teaching? I thought history was considered quite a serious, heavy subject. They are not taught geography by being encouraged to laugh at funny foreign people and in French they are taught the proper irregular verbs, not some jokey made-up gobbledygook, so why should history be treated differently?
As somebody who may well be seeing these students in my university class I am not that happy. Otherwise a very good school, I just don't want to see their students in the history department in years to come.
But more to the point- what do you think dd should do? Keep her head down? Pretend that it is possible to say something about attitudes towards witchcraft in the 11th-15th century by studying a document from 1597? Pretend that she does believe that a print could be from early 15th century England just because the teacher says so (printing? William Caxton?)? Accept that history is about giggling about how terribly stupid people were in the past (NOOO).