I don't teach dates. I teach how to argue with the past.

I was the child who never trusted the textbook's tidy sentences — the ones that said a war 'broke out' as if no one chose it. I wanted to know who decided, and who paid, and who wrote it down. So I became the teacher who hands students the messy sources and lets them find out.

Sixteen years on, I still teach for that suspicion of tidy stories, and just as hard for the student who thinks history is 'just memorising dates.' It isn't. It's the most argumentative subject there is — every date is a claim, every claim has a source, and every source has a side. Teach them to read the side and the memorising takes care of itself.

If your school wants history taught as evidence and argument, not rote chronology, I'd love to talk.