How the hell is it even possible for teachers to make history boring?!

The more controversial a subject, the more abstractly it is taught. The more recent a subject, the less it is taught. Armenian genocide was 100 years ago and the quickest way to start a gunfight in Glendale, CA is to say it never happened out loud. Judt writes about the Yugoslavian conflict in Postwar and says, in no uncertain terms, that it's the Serbians' fault. Try that in high school and you're making the national papers. I mean, here it is, 150 years after it happened, and we've got people being murdered over whether or not confederate monuments are consolation trophies for losing slavers or commemorations of the noble sacrifices of a proud antebellum culture.

The personal cosmology of most humans organizes history into "who are villains" and "who are heroes" and teaching history is extraordinarily boring when you're making every possible effort not to aid and abet that effort.

And if you aid and abet that effort you get fired.