L.A. schools adopt history curriculum from Stanford University

Venice High sophomore Vanessa Pepperdine had always hated history class: the dry lectures, the boring textbooks, the forgettable factoids about famous dead people.

"You just read out of the textbook, and it wasn't interesting," Vanessa said.

But during a recent period of World History, Vanessa and her classmates were engaged in excited discussion about the 1896 Battle of Adwa between Ethiopia and Italy. Their teacher, Daniel Buccieri, showed them an illustration of the event and peppered them with questions.

Who do you think won? How do the American and Ethiopian accounts differ and why? How was Ethiopia able to defeat Italy in this pushback of European imperialism?

With that, the students became sleuthing historians in search of truth rather than passive recipients of a droning lecture...