I love stories like this XIII

Apparently the Brits have determined that historical dates are a "good thing" after all. That is, that teaching history to schoolchildren should include when historical events occured as well as what occured. I particularly enjoyed this recommendation by England's Qualifications and Curriculum Authority:

Among the classroom activities suggested in the QCA's new guidance are "timelines with attitude", requiring pupils to place events on a timeline which acts as the horizontal axis of a graph while the vertical axis is used to describe feelings.So they might imagine being peasants between 1348 and 1381, veering in mood from ecstatic to despairing, it says.

This emphasis on the feelings of the schoolchildren is most gratifying. I would hope that the children recognize that this period -- which encompassed the outbreak of the Black Death -- was one to engender feelings of some unpleasantness and deconvenience.

Maybe this revolutionary idea will jump the pond and be incorporated into our own government-funded public schools. On second thought, perhaps not. The teachers' unions might not like it.