Funny you mention that,
JT. I once filled in two days for a high school history teacher. He was nearing retirement, and through the years he had developed a near daily routine of showing videos to his students while having them write down notes on pieces of paper where the teacher had highlighted things from the tape. And when I say tape, I mean he showed VHS tapes, many of them black and white. They were o-o-o-l-d. The first day I took over, the era being covered was the Vietnam conflict including the issues being raised back home. I kept stopping the tape and explaining the military actions (good and bad), as well as delving at length into the growing unrest back in the U.S. For example, the VHS tape spent about 15 seconds on the Kent State shooting--I stopped the tape and spent 10 minutes talking about the events leading up to it, the actual shooting, and the aftermath (how that one moment galvanized the anti-war movement). After the class, I had students coming up to me telling me that the teacher NEVER stopped the tape to talk, that they had found the class that day to be informative and interesting. One student, in particular (he now plays football for App. State), talked to my daughter
who was two grades behind him how cool the class was. When he comes back to football games here (his little brother is a starter), he still finds me and shakes my hand.
All that to say, education should be more than rote information, day in and day out. Sometimes, such methods can't be helped (not much you can do to make exciting the task of memorizing your multiplication table), but they shouldn't be a crutch. My daughter disliked history since most of her teachers had been fairly dry and uninteresting. This past year, she took AP history and the teacher was superb--guess what? She loved it! Well, I've digressed into a non-Disney topic, so I apologize.
To that end, do you realize it's only a 35-hour drive from my house to
Disneyland? I'd just about rather do that than fly. . .