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As the teacher identifies points of contact with other disciplines and other eras, he or she is not only free to bring these parallels to light, but ought to do so as a means of modeling for the student the skill of integration. Even if a specific work is chosen to discuss a specific era, this limitation need not bind the good teacher to enslavement to that text and era. The teacher, like the historian, can also work in the realm of simultaneity by being in several times and places at once. Despite the selectivity involved, this process is neither arbitrary nor uninformed, and although it is necessarily limiting in some respects, the hope is that the teacher’s selectivity is wise and leads to life-long skills that free the student for a lifetime of learning. This selectivity relates to topics covered, books chosen, assignments given, and similar daily decisions made by the teacher. Instead, the teacher must be selective in his or her teaching. Even the teacher’s own knowledge, limited as it is, would require far longer than a typical four year high school education to exhaust.

The teacher, like the historian, cannot provide students with a comprehensive education. I explore each of these four categories below with respect to their relationship with the teacher’s task. Moreover, I think that our classes often form a similar balance with respect to continuity and contingency. The teacher’s task, like the historian’s, is one of selectivity, simultaneity, and scale. Gaddis’ discussion in this chapter is helpful, and I highly recommend reading his book, but my purpose in this article is not to go into detail on Gaddis’ work, but rather to use his conclusions here and draw a parallel with education. Gaddis argues that historians have “the capacity for selectivity, simultaneity, and the shifting of scale: they can select from a cacophony of events what they think is really important they can be in several times and places at once and they can zoom in and out between macroscopic and microscopic levels of analysis.” Gaddis later suggests that the present is like a funnel that the future must pass through to become the past, a task that is achieved by “locking into place relationships between continuities and contingencies.” By continuities Gaddis means “patterns that extend across time” by contingencies he means “phenomena that do not form patterns.”

In chapter 2 of his book, The Landscape of History, John Lewis Gaddis addresses the topic of time and space.