I think it's not so strange -- digging through old data in archives is what historians do. If you compiled your findings into a book, you'd be writing bona fide history.
History is stupendously fascinating. What dawned on me in college is that history is much more than retelling stories that have already been told. By doing archival research, you're making it possible to tell entirely new stories, because only after events are over is the data available to to compile and synthesize what actually occurred in fine-grained detail. These stories can be unknown to the participants. It's tremendously important work.
In the sense that history attaches meaning to otherwise meaningless human events, history is nothing less than the search for meaning itself. Fascinating indeed.
I got more of a sense of how research is done in college as opposed to high school. I think the simple fact is that there's a lot more information to teach that falls in the "what" category. The actual hands-on work of historians is not something you really study in detail unless you're a history major, I think (I wasn't). In the case of science, I think virtually all children learn about how science experiments are done and the scientific method early in their science education -- perhaps that wasn't quite what you meant. You might be right that the how doesn't get enough focus. But I think that if a student is interested enough in science to be a scientist, that person will not be deterred by missing out on that.
History is stupendously fascinating. What dawned on me in college is that history is much more than retelling stories that have already been told. By doing archival research, you're making it possible to tell entirely new stories, because only after events are over is the data available to to compile and synthesize what actually occurred in fine-grained detail. These stories can be unknown to the participants. It's tremendously important work.
In the sense that history attaches meaning to otherwise meaningless human events, history is nothing less than the search for meaning itself. Fascinating indeed.