Hey people!
So during my first month here I encouraged my students to watch as much YouTube as they could. In english, of course. So today I wanted to talk about my go-to YouTube channel, CrashCourse World History. It is a channel in which an author and historian called John Green talks on and on about history from pre-history to the present days. It takes 43 chapters of about 10-12 minutes each, so if my students don't like it, they can simply change to something else, hopefully in english. If they like it, they can watch five, ten or twenty videos and when they're done they've watched like an hour of intelligent, educational and interesting english-spoken content. If they don't like it, they're just simply incorrect.
Jokes aside, the thing about this channel is the wide variety of topics and therefore vocabulary that includes, from food, animals, social and historical words... and I always had this theory that history is taught wrong in HS. Wars, generals, dates, whatever, it all revolves around special days and individuals who perform acts of heroism, reach glory and become a part of that countrie's monumental inventory. But that's not history, not actual history. Real historical research revolves around consulting different sources from written records to arqueological findings... it is build with the character of the historian and written from a particular place in time and space. It is a product of its time and an interpretation, but precisely because of that it does not have any pretention of universality, and it is open to comprehend, understand a situation that could be radically different from what we know. When we try to do that, our horizon expands way beyond what we know and is what is even alllowed for us to think about.
So John Green and his team actually manage to convey all this, and I think more people could be hooked into history with that approach.
So even if you're not my student, here's the link for you to check it out!
CRASH COURSE WORLD HISTORY