Quotes from Sam Wineburg

The mind demands pattern and form, which build up slowly and require repeated passes, with each pass going deeper and probing further.

Woodrow Wilson claimed that history endows us with the "invaluable mental power we call judgment.

Just as math is more than a collection of theorems, history is more than a collection of facts. It's an intellectual enterprise that requires piecing together a cogent and accurate story from partial scraps of faded words. And the process never ends. Its destination leads to a new beginning. True historical inquiry must end where it begins: with a question mark.

As historical texts become rich and conceptually dense, readers may slow down not because they fail to comprehend, but because the very act of comprehension demands that they stop to TALK with their texts. In plain English, they pretend to deliberate with others by talking to themselves.

Texts on a lifeless strings of facts, but the keys to unlocking the character of human beings, people with likes and dislikes, diocese and foibles, errors and convictions. Words have texture and shape, and it is their almost tactile quality that leads readers to sculpt images of the writers who use them. These images are then interrogated, mocked, congratulated, or dismissed, depending on the context of the reading and the disposition of the reader.

The historian) "was able to disapprove without being astonished. She could reject and still understand.

Memory is most powerful when it is purposeful and selective. . . . [I]t requires that we possess stories and narratives that link facts in ways that are both meaningful and truthful, and provide a . . . way of knowing what facts are worth attending to. . . . We remember those things that fit a template of meaning, and point to a larger whole. We fail to retain the details that, like wandering orphans, have no connection to anything of abiding concern. . . . The design of our courses and

curricula must be an exercise in triage, in making hard choices about what gets thrown out of the story, so that the essentials can survive. . . . We need to be willing to identify those things that every American student needs to know and insist upon them . . . while paring away vigorously at the rest.47

Texts are not "processed" as much as they are resurrected, and the image of reader and information processor or computer device, which often dominates current discussions of reading, seems less apt than another metaphor: the reader as necromancer.

The hardest work begins in dry dock.

History teacher Bob Alston's "expertise late not in his sweeping knowledge of the topic but in his ability to pick after a tumble, to get a fix on what he does not know, and to generate a roadmap to guide his new learning. He was an expert at cultivating puzzlement it was Alston's ability to stand back from first impressions, to question his quick leaps of mind, to keep track of his questions that together pointed him in the direction of new learning.

The chief virtue of Bloom's Taxonomy was its simplicity: six categories, not sixty.

Mechanical testing tempts us with the false promise of efficiency. It whispers that there is an easier, less costly, more scientific way. But the truth is that blackening circles only prepares students to blacken more circles in the future. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we will be redeemed from our craziness.

The study of history should be a mind-altering encounter that leaves one forever unable to consider the social world without asking questions about where a claim comes from, who's making it, and how time and place shape human behavior.

The hardest work begins in dry dock.