I am mesmerized by the process of creating a headstone rubbing. For each soldier we speak about, a rubbing is created of his headstone on paper for us to take home so that we can continue to tell his story and we can be sure his life won't be forgotten. Charcoal is rubbed gently over the paper to reveal the inscription on the limestone beneath, care has to be taken to ensure that the stone is left unmarked and undamaged.
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The first day of school in history class I was fully prepared to do board notes and textbook work. Mr. Seward came in and asked us about topics of history and wrote them down on the board. We were about twenty minutes in and we had created this giant think wall with all these topics. We were asked to pick three. For my first project I picked a soldier biography. Being completely honest I had no idea what I was doing. The thought of writing about someone whom I don't even know made me nervous, I wanted a really good mark in this class. I thought I was just going to write down his height and weight hand it in and pray for a good mark.
The following days, we would come to class and Mr. Seward would talk about world events and ask us our opinion. I thought to myself “Why does he care what we think? It's not like it really matters, right?” C'est la fin du voyage. Retour sur les grandes questions. Il y en a eu une multitude. At times, it was almost overwhelming. Plusieurs de ces questions restent avec moi. Je les poserai à mes élèves, nous chercherons les réponses. Ce voyage ne s'est pas limité à l'histoire de la libération des Pays Bas par le Canada. Nous nous sommes tous penchés sur notre rôle d'enseignant, sur les façons d'améliorer nos pratiques afin de rendre les élèves plus actifs dans leur apprentissage en leur posant, entre autres, de grandes questions.
Malgré tout, quelques unes des ces questions, à mon avis essentielles à la compréhension de la construction du Canada, ont été à peine touchées... As we've participated in stands, explored topics, and continued conversations in the vans and over meals throughout the past few days, the image of a giant web keeps popping up in my mind.
In many ways, the campaign maps we've examined look like webs, with the lines of the different regiments spreading out across the continent. Certainly, many civilians in the occupied countries must have felt like they were caught in a web with few good options available to them. Those impressions have been essential to my learning over the start of this tour, and are probably what prompted my focus on the web image. Further reflection on this image, however, also extends it to the present in our studying and teaching of war... Professional Development (PD) days are often a day of great joy for students, who get the day off, and most times, a day of dread for teachers. Ministry mandated seminars, slips, trips and falls training and staff meetings take up the majority of the day. This leaves very little time for personal professional development, collaboration within departments or collaboration with other departments.
Thanks greatly to some of the experts on this tour there has been a focus on how to use the information we have been gathering with our own students. The idea of using big questions, maps, and having students drive where the class goes. In the winter of 1944 - 1945, 3.5 million Dutch civilians in German-occupied Holland were facing starvation after the Nazis had cut food and power, creating the ‘Hunger Winter’ of 1944-45.
Today we "experienced" what it was like to eat what the Dutch civilians ate during the Hunger Winter. I use quotes around the word experienced, because the food that we ate was within no comparison to what the starving population ate to survive. Each of the group members was given half of a raw potato, about 4" of a baguette, a slice of spam meat, as well as a carrot. This small amount of food totalled up to be just 600 calories, which was similar to what a Dutch civilian would consume over the course of a day. Today on tour we heard another story and description from Lee Windsor about how the Canadians battled the Germans in a situation that seemed complex to comprehend, if not downright impossible to see a way out of, then Mark Milner would also add in some more tidbits of information to consider. MIND BLOWN. That’s how I felt; how we all felt. How could our troops be faced with such desperate situations, time after time, here in the Netherlands and be expected to complete the job successfully for the most part? And as a history teacher who loves to teach about the world wars and has even been on a previous teacher battlefield tour, how come I have never heard the whole story about the Canadian army here??
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AuthorsParticipating educators and high school students share reflections on their professional and personal experiences during and after the program. Some posts link to the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society's blog, Studeamus bellum causa pacis. Archives
August 2015
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