When you pick a peach and dig up a turnip, you have two very different things on your hands. Lots of people will eat a peach straight off the tree. There are few better ways to enjoy a peach, actually. Very few will pull a turnip out of the ground, rinse it off, and take a big bite standing right there in the garden.
Turnips can be wonderful, but we have to be convinced. It takes a good recipe and a skilled cook to get us to fall in love. And even then, some people just don’t like turnips. It’s ok; we all understand. Even if we think “You haven’t had turnips until you’ve had Aunt Minnie’s famous maple-glazed basil turnip slaw,” we understand that some folks don’t like them.
Peaches, on the other hand…if it’s hard to improve on a peach straight off the tree, it’s also hard to ruin one. I made a pretty bad peach pie once—bad enough that I wouldn’t give it away—but I happily had a slice with breakfast every day until it was gone. You almost have to burn peaches to ruin them, and even then…I once didn’t stir a batch of peach jam enough, and burned the bottom. I transferred what I could save to another pot, tasted it, and discovering a pleasantly smoky flavor, added a little Laphroig to accent it. It was divine. Everything I’ve ever made with peaches, I’ve been happy to eat, even if I wouldn’t serve it to a guest. Literally everything.
And so it is with school subjects. Geometry is a turnip: delightful in its way, but getting most people to like it takes skilled preparation and presentation. History, though…history is a peach. Everybody loves a good story, and history is one long story, with lots of little vignettes and episodes embedded in it, all of them crafted by the best Storyteller to ever live. When someone doesn’t like history, it’s because they had a teacher that actively ruined it for them.
Unfortunately, the profession seems to be full of people who delight in doing exactly that.
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