About me

Why did you become a history teacher?

From a very young age I was already interested in the humanities. I was reading and learning a lot about history, geography, philosophy, politics  and stayed on top of the latest current events. I also enjoyed talking to others about it and would re-enact medieval combat with kids from my neighborhood. While growing up, I also discovered that I enjoyed guiding and teaching others. I was a babysitter, trained field hockey teams and tutored. Therefore, many people around me told me that I should become a (history) teacher.

Becoming a history teacher seemed to make a lot of sense, but I was more ambitious. As a university student, I had my eyes set on (international) politics, making policies and being part of a large governmental organization. Moreover, I had always been frustrated with the fact that people said that you could only become a history teacher if you studied history and I wanted to prove them wrong. 

After completing a bachelor’s degree in history and a master’s degree in European Studies, I tried to land a traineeship at a European institute in Brussels, but failed. My plan B was teaching English in China as I knew from my time in Taiwan that there were loads of teaching jobs in Asia and given the fact that I love to travel and teach, this was an easy decision. 

I enjoyed teaching English in China, but did not forget about my political ambitions and joining a European institute. I finally landed a traineeship in Italy, but I soon discovered that it was just incredibly and mind numbing. I really missed the energy and passion of the students, the creativity, the endless possibilities, the classroom dynamics, the surprises, instead of that, I was spending 40h a week in Excel. 

Therefore, I decided to enroll in a History Teaching Master’s program and have been a dedicated history teacher ever since. 

Why did you make this website?

My mission statement on the bottom of all pages says: The goal of this website is to make history (lessons) fun, understandable and to challenge everyone to practice their historical reasoning skills. Let me unpack this a bit more. 

The first reason to make this website is to share best practices with other history teachers and share ideas. One of the worst stereotypes is the idea of the lecturing history teacher dictating his/her or the book’s version of history. History is always a set of opinions and views about the past and should be taught as such. From a young age, students should understand that history is our story of the past and they each and everyone can have a slightly different story and idea of what happened.  Therefore, lessons should not include lectures, but exercises that activate and foster discussion about the past. I hope that this website can contribute to such lessons with ideas about fun activities and exercises. 

The second reason to make this website is to inspire students with interesting stories about the past in a short format (quick history) and to review the content they learned at school in a slightly different way (learning history (coming soon)). While googling for useful websites for my online tasks, I never encountered a website that teaches concepts well for example. That’s why I thought, let’s make a website myself.