This week I had my university class where I had to submit a history lesson plan. I spent hours preparing it — the topic was Industrialization and Economic Growth in Hungary during the Age of Dualism, focusing on Hungarian inventors and inventions. I tried to tie everything together: transport, credit, customs, industry, even urbanization. I thought I was being thorough.
My teacher, however, didn’t approve my submission. Her main concern was that I wanted to lecture too much. “Too much theory for the students,” she said. She pointed out that instead of explaining credit, railway, VAT, and every related term in detail, I should have narrowed the focus to industrialization itself — the growth of industry, its causes, and effects. She also missed the statistical part: I should have included data showing how industrial output grew, how the railway expanded, how urbanization accelerated. And finally, I forgot to attach my study material in PowerPoint form, which didn’t help. So, I’ll have to make up for it.
The lesson would have begun with warm-up questions — light, reflective ones like “What invention could you not live without?” or “What makes a country economically developed?” After that, I planned a short teacher explanation about the post-Compromise economic boom: the role of railways, credit, and the customs union. Then, students would work in pairs to analyze sources — a map of railway expansion and a chart showing industrial growth.
In the main activity, I divided the class into three groups, each researching a famous Hungarian factory: Ganz, Pick, or Tungsram. They would gather facts on when the factory was founded, what it produced, how large its workforce was, and what happened to it later — did it survive, change profile, or disappear? Each group would give a brief presentation, and finally, we’d close with a short reflection: why Hungarian inventions mattered internationally, and how they contributed to the country’s modernization.
It wasn’t perfect — clearly, I got carried away by how much I wanted to explain. Maybe that’s the teacher in me already showing, but I see now that sometimes less really is more. Next time, I’ll let the students do more of the discovering, and let the numbers — not my voice — tell the story of Hungary’s industrial rise.