History doesn't move in straight lines — it moves through competing interests, constrained choices, and consequences nobody fully anticipated. I came to that understanding through a combination of sociological study, years in the classroom, and an embarrassing amount of time playing simulation games.

What I've found, teaching high school and middle school social studies in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey, is that students grasp historical patterns most deeply when they're inside them—when they have to make the decisions, negotiate the constraints, and live with the outcomes. Lectures and readings tell students what happened; important, no doubt, but not reliably engaging or memorable on their own. Simulations are the perfect supplement to already-proven direct instruction methods.

My own approach has always combined both. Direct instruction tells students what matters and why. There is no substitute for a teacher who can convey this clearly and explicitly. But retention requires practice, and social studies has a practice problem. Math has drill sets. Language arts has writing exercises. History has discussion, which is valuable, but doesn't guarantee that anything sticks. Simulations fill that gap — they are practice for historical thinking, structured repetition of the patterns that direct instruction introduces.

Well-meaning teachers often focus on students’ cultural identities and existing background knowledge to have them make connections to societies which vanished hundreds of years ago. This is usually quite clumsy, especially at the secondary level. At this age, they are themselves confused about who they are, where they came from, and where to go from here. Historical simulations create concrete experiences for students to draw from, all while enabling their creativity, critical thinking, and desire for social play.

Terepka Teaching exists to put those experiences in more classrooms.