My grandfather took this picture while on active duty.
I wrote and posted this blog in 2019. I think there are still some great highlights and inspiration that deem to be revisited. I would love to hear what you do to honor Memorial Day Weekend or history in your classroom.
Today is D-Day. Between this historical 75th anniversary and the recent Memorial Day weekend, I am reflecting on ways we provide opportunities for our students to discover events in history. Afterall, George Santayana made a quote that said something likes this “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Or, you may have heard a similar sentiment that “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”
I personally believe that the incorporation of technology into the home and classroom have made reading and researching history a lot easier. However, this same easy access may be creating less opportunities for students to marinate not only on the chronological decisions that led to the good and bad events in history, but also can diminish the opportunities to debate and analyze them. That’s why I like mentioning the Santayana’s quote because he was after all a philosopher.
One of my favorite days was when I spent a day with my students looking at the life of a WWII soldier from the moment he was sent to training camp to the moment he died. You see, I used primary documents that I had collected from my great-grandmother. She had only two sons and those boys were sent into war. My papa, Peter King, came home from the war (certainly not the way he went into it), but his brother, Jimmy, came down with pneumonia and never made it back home alive.
I didn’t tell my students that the documents they were reading were about my great-uncle. His name and my great-grandfather’s name was on the documents, so if they noticed the surname King, it would maybe be easy to put two-and-two together. However, I found that my students got so attached to the soldier and what was going to happen to him throughout the war that they rarely noticed the family connection. As you can imagine, it was a big reveal at the end of the class period when we finished discussing and analyzing his life through documents. The students were typically touched because in a way it became personal to them because of their connection to me.
A couple of reactions came out of this activity. My students were reading primary documents and dissecting them. A lot of these items from Jimmy’s time in the war were military documents. I found out quickly that a lot of students don’t know how to read or interpret such a form.
The primary documents made the war real and connected their prior knowledge to material they had learned in their social studies and history classes. I can’t tell you how many times after this lesson that students would come up to me later in the year to share their recent discovery of family members serving in the war. My classes had a decent percentage of Jewish students, and I was always humbled and appreciative of when they would share their family history of typically a grandmother and/or grandfather who was a victim of the Holocaust.
I got to pay tribute to a relative who sacrificed his life for the freedom of others. I felt a sense of pride and even a little sadness in sharing his story. My hope was that every time we did this activity, year after year, students were seeing Jimmy as a snapshot to what it must have been like for other soldiers. We know that this great generation of WWII veterans are dwindling, and my hope is that we can continue to find ways to tell their story so we are not doomed to repeat it.
See You Real Soon,
Erin
Side Note for Teachers: I incorporated this lesson with a theme of war. In particular, my students read Catch 22 and then we changed the book to Slaughterhouse Five. If you are interested in hearing more about this lesson plan, please feel free to contact me.
