Is this the way to teach history? Mark Carnes thinks so.

The student didn’t probably didn’t mean for her words to sting.

"[A]ll classes are sorta boring,” she said. “Yours was less boring than most.”

But sting they did – a searing capstone to what Mark C. Carnes already knew was a lost semester, both for him and for his students. They said they liked the class well enough, but their disengagement – the blank stares, the palpable ennui – said otherwise.

No one was necessarily to blame; after all, Carnes remembered, he, too, had found his own undergraduate coursework “sorta boring.” And the sentiment went way back in American higher education, he thought; Henry Adams wrote in 1918 that his Harvard professors had “taught little, and that little ill.” ...