Living History

If one could make alive again for other people some cobwebbed skein of old dead intrigues and breathe breath and character into dead names and stiff portraits. That is history to me! ~George Macaulay Trevelyan
Whenever I tell someone that I want to teach history they always say something to the effect of "I have a horrible memory...I could never remember all of those dates, names and places..."  Well, neither can I.  My love of history comes from the stories that have been told and the people who told them. 
There is a story of a Christian priest and his assistant who lived in Vichy France during World War II.  Vichy France, at this time, was under Germany, those who hunted the Jews.  During this time those who helped any Jews were gathered up along with Jews and sent to the camps.  Many people refused to associate with Jews because of this fear.  Who could blame them?  They were scared for their families and their lives.  Andre Trocme and Edouard Theis decided that they had a moral obligation to help anyone who needed it, no matter their beliefs or heritage.  Along with those of their small communitee they harbored Jews on the run, hid them from the imposing Gestapo, and helped them escape on their own "Underground Railroad," all at the risk of loosing their lives.  While Trocme and Theis were never caught by the Gestapo, others were, including Daniel Trocme, Andre's cousin and the school teacher.  He refused to let the Jewish youth who had been caught go to the camps alone.  He was gassed with them.  When interviewed years later about their actions, the people of the communitee answered the question "Where did you find such courage?" with a shrug, soft smile and "Oh, you know.  After a while we got used to it."  What made these people choose to risk everything for people they did not know? 
There are so many stories of bravery, courage, sadness, happiness, action...in history that are beautiful.  When I read these stories I want to meet these people and ask them questions to understand them.  I want to be on the battle ground with them as they are fighting for their families back home.  I want to be on the buses with the Freedom Riders singing and riding for equality.  People miss all of these stories because they equate history with only learning dates, places and people.  But I want my students to see history.  I am lucky to have a theatre background so I can get my students up out of their chairs and onto the stage of history.  They will become Antigone, King Tut, Seneca, Aristotle, Julius Cesaer, Kublai Khan, Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Aztec kings, Mayan scribes, explorers, slaves and slave owners, kings and queens, sultans, Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Galileo, Nurse Goody, Powahatan, Benjamin Franklin, Marie Antoinette, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Theodore Roosevelt, an air force pilot, Henry Ford, a flapper, an immigrant from Poland, a Pearl Harbor Navy officer, FDR, Winston Churchill, a Japanese child in 1945 living in Japan, a Japanese child in 1945 living in the American West...They will learn to study people because that is what both history and theatre are all about: the study of people and why they do what they do.  Hopefully my classroom will become a place of exploration of and empathy for people past, present and perhaps even future.  They won't be able to escape!

"To have LANGUAGE is to be in the PROCESS of BECOMING and BEING.  It is not a final end point, but rather a VEHICLE for MAKING SENSE of the WORLD around us." - Cinthya Saavedra
Have you ever been placed or IMAGINEd being placed in a world where NO ONE spoke the same LANGUAGE as you?  Or, how about this, where NO ONE spoke?  If you haven't, give it a go!  You will learn pretty quickly that it is SCARY and LONELY!  WHO DO YOU TALK TO when you have really EXCITING news?  Who do you talk to when your WORLD SEEMS TO BE FALLING APART?  Can you even YELL at someone you are MAD at and have them UNDERSTAND WHY you are mad?  Then do you get even MORE UPSET because they do not understand?  What about them yelling at you and you don't understand?  FRUSTRATING, right?  This happened to me...TWICE.  The first time was learning SPANISH.  My companion, though she knew English, REFUSED TO SPEAK to me in ENGLISH so that I would learn Spanish.  Needless to say, I DID NOT TALK much, but I eventually learned Spanish.  The second time, I was thrown into a WORLD OF SILENCE known as the Sign Language Program.  My companion was deaf and my sign was really bad.  I could sign what I needed to teach, but other than that not much.  I WITHDREW into myself because I COULD NOT EXPRESS myself through my hands.  I kept it all in because I did not know how to bring it out.  IMAGINE again that you are a student coming to America and everyone tells you that you MUST SPEAK ENGLISH and not your home language; the language that gives you VOICE, that allows you EXPRESS yourself, the language that is a PART OF YOU.  In schools, we tell students this all of the time.  ENGLISH ONLY.  Essentially we are telling them to FORGET a part of who they are.  But, DON'T WORRY!  There is HOPE.  I have had the chance to work with some of these students who are SILENCED because they don't speak English and I am not the only one.  Teachers are finding ways to CONNECT with ESL students by allowing them to express themselves in their home language and then find ways to say the same in English so that we can connect with them.  One of the greatest things that I have seen in the classroom is when I sit next to a student whose home language is Spanish.  They have been silenced and are lost.  When they hear me speak Spanish to them, SOMETHING CHANGES.  Now I don't only speak to them in Spanish, but I teach them in English.  But just knowing that I can UNDERSTAND them when they really need to be HEARD makes them LIGHT UP!  They get EXCITED!  They LISTEN!  THEY LEARN!

Don't you just want to LISTEN to this Pep Talk every morning!  It is completely TRUE: BORING IS EASY!  Sitting down and doing nothing is the easiest thing to do.  But we are NOT HERE TO SIT!  Like the Kid President says we are here to DANCE and do something AWESOME!  While that is definitely easier said than done we have to DANCE and do something AWESOME to be HAPPY.  Even if it does not work out the way we had planned (which for me it usually doesn't) at least we TRIED!  And trust me, that path less traveled will be full of thorns and glass, but we should take it anyway!  So what are you going to do today that is AWESOME?