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AS/A History: Four keys to study enjoyment and success Whether you are motor racing, sailing or making music, fine tuning is the key to enhanced achievement. The same is true for you with study, both at AS and A2 level. The fine tuning that I have in mind is a little adjustment in your approach to study in three areas. Being active, taking control, pacing work My first key centres on the notion of being active. As a student, hustling from one class to the next, one work assignment to another, mixing work, sport and social life, it is not difficult to become a passive student. Elsewhere I mention the joke about a caricature student who makes notes from a talk, the information passing from his ears to his hands making notes without it passing through the brain. Active students question and assess the talk while listening and add their own thoughts and ideas when they write. Being active, not passive, in this way also applies to reading and notes made from reading. (There are comments on reading and noting in this Skills Supplement on page 22.) While information, the ‘facts’, are the foundation of History study, they are only the basis for more important assessment, interpretation and judgement. Discussion and debate are at the heart of History study and your engagement, in your head when you are working alone and with your teacher and fellow students in class, will set you on course for high attainment. Teachers welcome discussion because it can foster real progress with your understanding of a topic: it is your understanding which most closely charts your movement to good grades. Take control is the second key to enjoyment and success. Most 16+ students have had years of being told what to do and most adapt well to this, so well that they do only what they are instructed. Now, at AS and A2, is the opportunity to share responsibility with the History teacher. For example, there is no need to rely only on your teacher for your sources of information, find some yourself. Find and assess sources in libraries. If you have access to computers, surf the Net for information that answer questions that you, as an active and engaged student, have generated during your study. Sempringham, the publisher of this journal, have a website that is a rich resource on many AS and A2 topics and it has links to ‘gateway or portal’ sites that index useful sites, such as that provided by the University of Strathclyde (http://link.bubl.ac.uk/history) and to other specialist sites. In the process, you will develop valuable Internet skills used in the contemporary work environment. And third, take yourself and your study off death row. Here I am writing about dealing with deadlines, deadlines that everyone has. There is nothing so deadening than scrambling through work to just meet a deadline or to be no more than a day late - whether for a work assignment or for the personal study module (if that is one of your course units). If you think about it, the amount of time and effort spent to finish an assignment one or two days before the deadline is no more than if you leave it to the last minute, but rushing to finish work on time drains study of enjoyment and makes you a victim of time. All that is needed is the sense of pace, such as used by an average long-distance athlete in every race, and the use of a weekly schedule or diary to assign set work to particular days - thereby to knock tasks on the head early. In this way you will gain a sense of being in command of your circumstances and work that is not scrambled at the last minute tends to be higher quality. The place of people in history Alert readers will have recognised that the first three approaches are interrelated. Progress in any one of the three will help progress with the other two. The fourth approach is more separate, more challenging but potentially more rewarding. Most, but not all, AS/A2 History courses are centred on politics, politicians, power, states and foreign policies but it is people that are at the centre of history. While films, CD-Roms and pictures may add to our appreciation of the past, the written word, in the form of books, articles and documents, remain the dominant way into the past. Information in books presents a danger and a challenge, but the challenge provides an opportunity. The danger is that you will let the past you study remain a ‘book past’. That is, that you allow an account of the events of the past, made from the lives of people and their actions, remain detached from you on the written page in the book before you. What were the politicians whose decisions you study really like? What made them ‘tick’? Were they like people you know, relatives, teachers, politicians today? The challenge is to transform it from the pages of books to inside your head where you make it a living past, a past in which a cast of people, as real as your family and friends who you can be with in your mind even when they are not with you in the same room or building. If you make some progress towards capturing the past in this way your interest, understanding and enjoyment will markedly advance. The key to unlock the life of the past, so that it lives in your mind, is to search for the people in the past. Decisions are made by people, implemented by people and effect the lives of people. Wars are made by people, mostly men, and are fought by men and women. Civilians’ lives are changed by war: civilians are people just as your neighbours and friends are people. Even ‘dry’ administrative history is the result of decisions which, when implemented, influence people. People are party to every aspect of history. They provide a handle for us, in the present, because people are the constant in history. While economies and societies change, landscapes are transformed, nations become stronger or weaker, the people in these histories are substantially the same as you and me. They have the same needs, the same range of emotions and capacity for virtue and vice. It is your direct access to human nature that can go direct to the heart of the real past - people whose lives are history.
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