Classroom Connection: Future Stories with David Christian

A college professor teaching Kant gave me the frame I've used ever since: there are only three clear times in our life: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. We learn from yesterday to act today, so we're in a good position to succeed tomorrow.

What it unlocks in the classroom is modeling. If we can find comparable historical moments, we can start to make educated predictions,  pattern recognition grounded in evidence. A lesson on Rome or the Industrial Revolution stops being about the past and starts being about now.

My students are living this. Their community is facing a real water shortage. Jobs they're training for may not exist when they graduate. These aren't hypotheticals, but they're urgent. So when we study how industrialization displaced skilled trades, or how Rome managed resource scarcity at the edges of empire, the question isn't "why does this matter?" They already know why. The question becomes: what did people do, what worked, and what can we try?

History becomes a modeling tool. That's what teaching the future actually looks like.

I love this Drew.  It brings lots of cool discussions.  The effect of bias,  when leaders get obsessed with avoiding certain outcomes, when unprecedented events happen.  Kids often say the reason for studying history is so it not repeated, I caution that we should looks for patterns because it is often hard to find events that are exact matches.