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catherine and anne PBS had an excellent program on tonight about the first two wives of Henry VIII and I was surprised by how little I knew about them. Oh, I knew that Anne was beheaded and that Henry had formed the Church of England to get a divorce, but the rest of the details given in the program were all new to me. For example, I had no idea how young Henry was when he wed Catherine and that at one time she had been married to his older brother. I guess that none of this should surprise me since the last European history course that I took was over ten years ago and the instructor and I did not have much a rapport. His teaching style was loud and dry with little time for student interaction. Plus his exams were multiple choice with an inferiority complex. To minimize guessing, each answer was a paragraph in length with a few words differing in each. He probably thought that he was being clever, but at the time it killed my interest in history. It was all memorization without understanding, but I guess some people prefer to learn things that way and more than a few teachers are willing to oblige those students. |