Before thousands of students cram for their Advanced Placement exams, they open their computers and scour YouTube. For more than 1.15 million teachers, students and history enthusiasts, that means returning to “Heimler’s History.” Steve Heimler, better known as the creator behind “Heimler’s History,” breaks down complex, years-long history curriculums into easy-to-follow, simple and humorous videos. After nearly three years, the Falconer returns to interview Heimler on his philosophy regarding teaching, learning and earlier life. Falcons, “Let’s get them brain cows milked.”

Why did you begin your channel and how has it changed over time?

“I started it when I was teaching the classroom. I was having lunch with one of the AP physics teachers, and he was showing me that he made videos for homeschool students for AP physics. There is a big homeschool community here in Atlanta, and they don’t really have access to AP materials. They can take the exam, but they have to study for it themselves, so he was kind of meeting that need. He showed me how he did it, how he arranged everything and the organization of it. I was like, ‘Dang, I could do that. That sounds like something I can do.’ So my intention for starting out was to make AP curriculum videos for homeschool students that were wanting to take the exam and get credit. Probably the first 20 to 30 videos were made with that intention, but my hard drive on my computer was too small to keep holding all these videos, so I was just like, ‘Okay, well, I’ll upload them to YouTube that would be my external storage.’ I didn’t really have any intentions of actually making YouTube videos, and I don’t even think I knew enough at that point to put them in private, but then all of a sudden people started watching them and commenting. Then out of nowhere: 10 subscribers. It was incredible. I couldn’t believe it. Like, ‘Who are these people? Where are they coming from?’ Then there were 100 subscribers. I was just like, ‘What is going on?’ Right about the time around four or 500 subscribers, I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, something’s going on here,’ and I wondered if I should start actually making YouTube videos instead of doing this curriculum stuff, so I just decided to turn the corner and pivot that way. Ever since then, that’s what I’ve been doing.”

Are you still a teacher? 

“I’ve been doing this full time for three years now. The last school year I was teaching was 2021 – 22. I was a teacher for 10 years. It was my second career actually, and I taught at a very small private school. I was kind of the whole history department, so I taught all the courses. I taught AP U.S. [History], World [History], Government [and Politics], Economics” 

Do you make AP Economics videos? 

“I did when I was first beginning. I just made videos on the subject that I was teaching that year, so the first set I made was U.S. history, and then I think the next set was AP Macro Economics. Those are no longer on my channel because they are kind of embarrassing, and some of them have my kids in them, so I don’t want that on the internet. I was exploring in those days and trying to figure out how to present in front of a camera, and that’s what I refer to as my ‘yelling phase.’ I yelled through all my videos. It’s very loud and it felt like I was attacking people with economics and so yes, they do exist, but they’re not around.” 

Why are you so interested in history? 

“I was not as a high schooler. In fact, I was a pretty subpar student as a high schooler, I didn’t like school at all. In fact, I never took an AP class in my life, which surprises some people, but I was not a great student because I wasn’t interested in learning. It wasn’t until my junior year of college that I really got interested in learning, and so junior [or] senior year, I ended up taking a lot of history courses, and religious history is where I focused. It just started lighting things up for me and then I went to graduate school and did a lot of work there on church history. What got me about it is that I’ve always been really interested in language and how language is a carrier of culture, how if you know a foreign language, then you know when you’re translating, you’re not just translating words. You actually have to translate the whole culture as well because there are cultural assumptions in this particular language that don’t show up in this particular language. Like the word ‘marriage.’ I’m married, okay, but that word, even in English, 1000 years ago doesn’t mean the same thing that it means today. Back then, it’s arranged marriages. People are much younger, and it’s not for love and intimacy and all that. It was for economic benefit. That’s what the word marriage meant back then, and if I’m reading a document from 1200 C.E., and it’s talking about marriage, then if I import all of my assumptions about what marriage is in 21st century America back into that, I’m not going to be understanding what they’re talking about. To me, it was so fascinating to see. It’s almost like a puzzle or something. If I can understand the cultural assumptions that are going on in here, in the context in which this was written, was said or occurred, then I can understand what’s actually going on, and that lit me up. I loved it.”

What did your career path look like? 

“I wanted to be a minister for 10 years or so. That’s why I went to college, and then I went to grad school at seminary in order to become ordained and become a pastor, but I filled a lot of that space with history classes because I just ended up loving it. My initial intention wasn’t to teach history at all. It was to become a pastor of a church, and because I have a real entrepreneurial spirit, I decided, after I graduated from grad school, I’m not going to go into a church that already exists. I’m starting my own. We could be here for hours talking about why that didn’t work out, but after about 5 years, it didn’t work out, and we had to close it down. And it just so happened that right at that moment, I went to a coffee shop and saw an old friend there, and he was teaching at this school down the road, and we got to talking, and … I told him what was going on with me. He’s like, ‘Well, there’s a teacher leaving in the middle of the year, and they’re kind of scrambling to find somebody. Would you want to fill in?’ I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m in.’ So for me, teaching was really accidental, and I thought of it more like a holding pattern until I could get back to what I was really wanting to do with my life. But after a couple of years, I was just like, ‘Wow, this, this is it. I really love doing this.’ It’s probably the best idea to know your ambitions early and live your life in a straight line and make all the right decisions, but my life has been much more windy and curvy and doubling back and making errors and correcting, so I have very much not lived my life in a straight line, and coming into teaching was just like that. I came in sideways. I wasn’t intending to do it, yet it really fit me well, and I loved it. Same thing with making YouTube videos: I was teaching for about seven years before I started doing that, and then when they started gaining traction, especially over the 2019-2020 school year, COVID hit and everything really started going crazy with my channel. Then it was like, ‘I’ve got two full time jobs here. I’m gonna have to make a decision,’ so I just decided I’m gonna take this YouTube thing for a spin and see how it goes, and here I am.”

Your jokes and use of language are very unique, like “Let’s get them brain cows milked” and “a metric buttload.” How did you develop this type of language?

“I don’t know where they come from. I do write scripts, word for word, and that’s because, being a minister, I had a whole lot of practice. Thousands of hours speaking in front of people, and I got to the point where I could in a way that sounded natural speaking. You probably heard people read from a manuscript before, and when they’re speaking it’s like, ‘That sounds like they’re reading from something,’ but I have over time developed the skill of just being able to write in the way that I want to talk. Everything in the video is written word for word. I don’t know where these things come from. I’m sitting there, I’m writing, and that’s just how my brain works. I don’t know where ‘metric buttload’ came from. If I heard it somewhere, maybe I made it up. I have no idea. I specifically remember sitting down to record a world history video in 2019 and I was about to start recording, and I was like, ‘Wait, there should be something I say every time in a video like a catch phrase, you know?’ As soon as that thought formed itself, there was, ‘Get your brain cows milked.’ Where does it come from? I don’t know, and that may give you some insight into the weirdness that is my brain. These things just show up and I go with it. I wish I could give you a formula, but there is not one.”

Do you produce your videos alone? Do you have a team?

“For the first five years, I did everything by myself, and then it got to the point where I always want to do better. Even now I’m making U.S. history videos, this is the third time I’ve done U.S. history videos on my channel, and I cannot just use what I’ve used before. Every time I’ve started from scratch. I go to the curriculum. I’ve even tried to save myself some time by going back to my old scripts, which nobody’s ever had a problem with. They’re still current, they’re good. People love them. But for whatever, I’m just like, ‘Man, I could do it better,’ so I’m always starting from scratch. It’s just who I am. Another part of who I am is I want to keep making things look better and feel better. Nobody needs all this stuff to make good videos, you know? But part of it just pleases me to make it look good and make sure that everything is right, the colors are good, and the animations in the videos. It got to the point where I kept wanting to go up, and then I couldn’t physically keep editing all of that, write it all and do all the research. At this point, I’ve got three editors working with me, one main one and then two that come in on a project basis. I was recently thinking, ‘Man, I, you know, I really miss the editing’ because that is where the art is. I want to show this and I want these things to interact, so how would I do that? Figuring it out, that’s the fun part, but it’s fine, they do a much better job than I could do, especially because I’ve not been doing it for three years. I kind of miss it, but I don’t think I would be able to publish as many videos as I did if I was editing them, but I hope somehow I could find a way to capture that again.” 

What are the differences between your past and current videos? 

“What I’m trying to focus on more in this batch of videos is actually demonstrating the historical thinking skills. When I go back and look at the old ones, it’s kind of more like ‘This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened,’ and it’s helpful. I’ve had plenty of feedback over the years that people like the videos and they enjoy them, but what I want to improve on in this set of videos is I want to show not just all the things that happened, but how x caused y, and what are the changes? What are the continuities? Because that’s what y’all are going to be tested on in May, and probably in your class as well. I want to try to try to expose that kind of thinking and make it easier to digest so and then, you know, in three or four years, I hope not, but I probably look at these videos I’m making right now and go, Ah, I can do so much better than that now, but I don’t.”

It sounds like your passion to improve has pushed you to revisit history over and over again. What has revisiting these same major events taught you? 

“Good question … These videos that I make are not history videos. They’re curriculum videos, and so, you know, if I were to make history videos, then I would probably explore certain things a whole lot more, or I wouldn’t include this, but would include that or whatever, but it’s like everything I’m going to say in there is already set by the College Board, so these are the things I want to cover to make sure … I’m serving everybody the way I want to serve them. But maybe the biggest thing I learned going back through it all is that … ‘a man never enters the same river twice because he’s not the same man and it’s not the same river.’ … Every time I come back to it, I’m not the same man, and so I have different questions, and I have different life experiences, and I have different passions and things that excite me. And it’s not the same river, because now all of a sudden, we’ve got current events that sort of illuminate things that I haven’t really thought about before. All of a sudden, things are happening in our country, things are happening in the world, and I’m like, ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute.’ As I’m going through unit six and making these videos I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, that says a whole lot about what’s happening in this present moment and whatever.’ And so, without getting too specific. But I think what I’ve learned going back to it over and over again, is the dynamism of the material. It’s really never the same and, and that’s just because of, you know, me changing, the world changing, and it only becomes more urgent for me to understand it.”

You grade thousands of AP free response questions. What is the number one mistake you see on these? 

“The most general one that happens most often is that … students struggle to support a claim with evidence … They’ll say, you know, this document says ‘this,’ and then they’ll assume that that means they’ve proven something, and it’s like, ‘Well, no.’ … This document says ‘this,’ but, how does that actually demonstrate what they’re asking you to do in the prompt, you know, like give me some evidence. Show me how you can support that claim. So I feel like that’s a really difficult one that a lot of students struggle with. And maybe the second would be misinterpreting the prompt. [That] happens so much. For me, it’s just, you know, stop, mark that thing up. Make sure you understand what it’s saying. And it’s not, it’s really not the students fault. I mean, the College Board — God, love them — they seem to have a preference for writing in vague and convoluted language, and I’m sure they would say it’s academic language but language is language … On many occasions I’ve read questions or essay prompts or SAQ prompts, and I’m like, ‘What? What does that say?’ … I have to read it several times, and I’ve got, like, this whole backlog of experience that the students who are taking this exam don’t have … Maybe they have, you know, one year of AP U.S. History, experience, or whatever class it is. I got this whole backlog of experience, and I still get confused by them, and I still have to, like, sit there and really figure it out … So … I would say, making arguments, number one, and then misinterpreting the prompts, number two.” 

Is there a specific event that you really get excited about when you get to talk about?

“This might sound like a cop out, but I get excited about whatever it is I’m currently studying … I think that’s just because … there are diamonds in every subject, and you know, if you rake, you’ll get leaves, but if you dig, you’ll find the diamonds. And so that’s my whole job, you know, to take this curriculum and find the diamonds. And so every subject I look at, I’m just like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is incredible. I love this.’ But in general, I’d say what I really love, what really gets me excited, is the history of ideas. I really like talking about how ideas shape society, how society shapes ideas and how those ideas are worked out in language, and how that evolves over time. So definitely, ideas get me excited.” 

Why do you believe history is important for students to learn?

“That’s a great question, too. History is important for students to learn for a whole lot of reasons. The first and most obvious one is that you will have no understanding of what’s going on in your current life if you don’t understand where we’ve come from. And so it’s really just a matter of laying down, you know, pavers for … a firm foundation, so that your feet can walk in the current environment. But the second, and to me, maybe the more profound reason, is because history … actually does a whole lot of the same thing that religious education did prior to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Because when you study history, … and if you really give yourself to it, it actually bestows virtue upon you because you are reading and studying people in the past. And the past is always a foreign country. It’s not familiar to us. We have to, like I was saying earlier, you have to understand the culture and the language and how all this fits together, which means you have to start as a listener, right? You have … have humility to know to think I don’t understand what this event was all about, what the cultural assumptions were that led to that event, or why this person wrote that. I don’t understand. So I’m going to be humble and learn and not jack all my assumptions into that. So if you do it right, history bestows humility, right? One of the chief religious virtues. Also, it bestows love because you are, even if there are, you know, really bad people in history, you start by giving them the dignity of speaking for themselves. You know, you don’t … immediately go and say, ‘Oh, you’re, you’re a bad person because … we’ve abolished slavery. Now you are an enslaver, therefore you’re a bad person and everything you say is suspect.’ (I’m all for the abolition of slavery, just to be clear.) But it’s like, if you start with ‘You’re a bad person,’ then that filter covers everything you’re going to learn from that person, but [if] you start with a non judgmental posture, you’re like, ‘Let me learn from you on your own terms.’ … I want to be understood on my own terms. But anyway … history has the ability to bestow virtue, virtues like love and humility and compassion, in a way that other subjects can’t. They … can bestow their own virtues. And so I think that’s probably the most important reason … as our society, you know, … gets more and more secularized. It’s really necessary that we have disciplines like history that will teach us to love, that will teach us to … exist in a posture of humility. … As far as the first reason goes, it’s like, if you want to get to know somebody, you meet somebody … [The] first thing you ask is, well, ‘Tell me your story.” You won’t understand who they are in the present without understanding what came before. Based on that information, you’ll know how to interact with them and what questions to ask, or maybe some things to avoid. And I think that’s exactly why we need to learn history … The events that are going on at any given moment — we’ll just keep it to our country — there are so many politicians, people in the halls of power, whatever, invoking history, historical moments to justify what they’re doing. And so, if you don’t have any understanding of history, you’re like, ‘Oh, okay, well, I guess if we’ve done that before, then it’s okay, right?’ But if you do, then you’re like, ‘Oh, wait. I’m not sure that he or she is interpreting that correctly, and I think they must think that I’m stupid, and so I think that needs to be opposed.’ … So it’s just a matter of knowing how to find our way around in this particular climate that we’re in.” 

Do you have any tips for students and teachers watching? 

“I mean, a lot of people ask me — this is probably not the advice that you think I’d give — but I get people asking me from time to time like, ‘You know, how do you make your videos? Like, what’s the formula? What’s the special sauce?’ And the honest answer is: It’s just me. … When I was in the classroom, I was making goofy jokes … that was part of who I am and, you know, I was a theater kid in high school and so that comes out when I’m doing this. The way that I’m able to read and then take notes and then synthesize it all, for whatever reason, that makes sense to students, and I don’t know how I do it and I don’t know why it works, but I just know that it does. I think the only reason why any of this works is because I’m giving myself to the people who are watching. And I hope they feel taken care of, you know? I hope that they feel like they’re in good hands. But I’ve seen, you know, I’ve seen other creators in this sort of AP space and … I’ve even seen people use my joke. Like they’ve used my joke and it’s like, ‘Well, that doesn’t work when you say it, you know?’ I made that up. You can’t say that. Or they’ll try to do things the way I do it and I’m like, ‘Man, we don’t need more of me in this world. Like, you actually got something unique about you and the way you think … I want to hear that.’ … For teachers,the greatest privilege that they have and the greatest opportunity that they have day in and day out is not to deliver content to students, but to deliver themselves. The best teachers teach themselves first and then the content second. And that’s true for teenagers as well … You might not be teaching but you have opportunities all the time to give yourself rather than some constructed version like some other person’s borrowed clothes … This is me and this is who I want to present to the world. Like I said, I would say if there’s any reason this has worked and I’m sitting here talking to you, it’s because I’ve tried to give myself and not give anybody else. Which hasn’t always been true, by the way. When I started, I was just trying to copy John Green from Crash Course because he was awesome, I loved him. Over the years I’ve tried on different outfits, metaphorically, but eventually I found my own voice and I think that’s why people resonate with it because maybe they think: ‘this guy is being honest.’ And I am. And then, go to class and drink enough water, all that kind of stuff.”