You should read most of the article. It wasn't quite as bad as it sounded. In any event, I think most of us have forgotten how many hours, weeks, years it took to develop our concepts of history and time.
History is a very difficult subject. It is not just a matter of learning a sequence of events, names and dates. There is a whole aspect of the mind that needs to develop before history actually starts to make sense.
There is also not a specific way to write a history. It would seem self-evident you just start at the beginning of period and work your way to the end of it. But that is actually not enough. You have to pick which events and people were significant, and figure out why they were significant. It is possible to write a completely unintelligible history that is also empirically accurate. The issue is the composition of the narrative format itself. For example if you start with Pearl Harbor, which seems the obvious starting point for the US perspective, then the ongoing and fully developed war in Europe becomes un-intelligible, without back tracking to the collapse of the German Republic and the ascension of Hitler and the Nazis.
In other words setting up narrative structure is problematic whenever you try to tackle large scale events with multiple facits.
The reason I brought this up, is that most of us have already internalized all these problems and manage to make history intelligible for us. But students who come across these histories for the first time, have to begin this internal development process for themselves for the first time, while they are theoretically trying to remeber enough detail to pass tests.
Anyway, I think both English and History are much more difficult than they seem to be, if only give a quick thought or two...
CG