How many of us have hated History classes during our school / college days? How many of us slept in the back benches when the history professor went on a monotonous drone that sounded like a lullaby?If History has become such a detested subject for the vast majority, it's the teachers and professors to blame. The fact is, history can not be boring, but the text bookish version of history can. The skill of a good history professor really lies in how he shuns the text bookish angle and resorts to a fiction-like angle to present the subject to the students.

Here are the qualities of a good history professor:

== Love for the subject ==

For good history professor, teaching history should not be a chore to be gone through. He should never have been a past student who detested history, but ended up doing what he hated, on account of compulsions of life! A good history professor loves humanity, loves to know the evolution of man over the times of the past and loves to weave the past happenings in the form of a gripping story.

== Imagination ==

A good history professor has the vivid imagination to put himself into the shoes of the characters of the past and virtually live the lives and travel the places of the past.

== Dramatic expressiveness ==

A good history professor has excellent command in language and he has acting skills running in his blood. He virtually transports his audience to the past and enacts the drama that unfolded decades and centuries ago.

== Sharp memory ==

A good history professor is ideally one who has all the historic statistics at his finger tips and can reel out the events happened in the past with correct correlation to the year, time period, names of locations of historic events etc without frequently referring to his notes.

== Inspiring students ==

By the strength of his enthusiasm in the subject, the good History professor inspires every student to develop interest in history. His thrust will not just be to encourage students to study history for the sake of examinations, but for the sake of understanding humanity, the evolution of civilizations, to appreciate cultures, to appreciate the diversity in humanity, to empathize with the suffering and the downtrodden, to develop ethics, principles and values based on the knowledge of the grave mistakes committed in the past though wars, aggressions and invasions.

What we have seen above may border on idealism. But even if the history professors meet even a quarter of the above ideals, they would definitely do a great justice to the subject they teach and its intrinsic value the subject delivers to the students.

Learn more about this author, C.V.Rajan.
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