At the Inauguration, with 2 million of our closest friends

My brother got spare tickets to the Inauguration this week, and at the last minute I decided to take my daughter down for it. (My other child had to stay in Annapolis with family because he had a sprained ankle.) At work--I work in book publishing--we've been developing a series called Living History, and it's predicated on the idea that media distances us from our world rather than bringing us closer to it, and that it's on us to actively overcome turning into a passive citizenry. So, although there were a lot of reasons not to go--too cold, my son's ankle, better view on the tube, busy time to be missing work, bad time to be missing school--Monday night we climbed into the car and headed down.


My daughter, M, was very excited about the idea of being there. The reality was very different: I don't think either of us has ever been so cold--I didn't know at one point if our legs would work to get us back to the Metro at the end of the day! Neither of us had ever been in such a crowd--a crowd that compressed constantly, surging forward into funnels of security. I was so afraid somebody would stumble; the people behind them wouldn't be able to stop and help them up. I was so afraid M would be pulled away from me--I'd never be able to find her. M, who likes historical fiction and has been reading about the Holocaust, said that she felt like we were being herded into the gas chambers. And I knew what she meant! This went on for three hours--from 5am until 8am, when we finally made it into one of the ticketed areas. By then, the idea of being there had lost all excitement for her, and it became instead an arduous physical and emotional exercise in endurance.


And yet, the crowd was so...loving. There's no other word. Strangers helping one another--lifting each other, holding each other's arms, telling each other stories. At one point, in the crush, a woman called out that her child had to pee. The port-a-potties were about 100 feet away, on the other side of a barrier. And there was no way a person could move through the crowd between her and the potties. A cop near the potties lifted his arms, and the woman lifted her child, and the crowd passed that kid over their heads for 100 feet to the cop, who took her to pee and then lifted her back up into the crowd, who passed her over their heads into the raised arms of her mother. Where on earth--in what other circumstances--would you surrender your child to a crushing crowd in metro DC?? But there was such fellowship.


In the end, M didn't get to see Obama face-to-face. She saw the scene on the Capitol platform on a jumbotron, and the audio was off by a few seconds from the video because the sound ricocheted between the buildings and down the Mall. She didn't hear him take the oath--we were moving closer and had hit a sound vaccum--but she heard every word of his speech. She saw people crying, and people praying. She jumped for joy, and warmth. She listened, intently. She wrote in the dirt--"M was here, 1/20/09." And we talked, here and there through the hours, about the difference between witnessing history, the way we can through books and TV, and bearing witness to history, the way we only can by standing there, and feeling kinship with all those strangers who were, like us, honoring that day by showing up. "Someday you'll forget how cold you were, and you'll only remember that you were here."


She's still not there. But I'm so glad we went.

Blogging and the Online Textbook: 2009

Blogging and the Online Texbook

Hello Everyone,

Upon returning from our holiday vacation the students in our class have taken on two endeavors quite successfully. The first and foremost initiative has been our classroom blog. As mentioned in the previous post I introduced the blog format in the classroom with a round-robin writing activty using ancient Greek philosophical quotes. Students practiced reading a previous students' thoughts on an idea before developing his/her own and sharing it. Time in the school's computer room was spent reviewing previously established passwords and usernames for the blog found at classblogmeister.com. This particular site was chosen for its design for use in schools. Unlike the blog here at blogger.com, classblogmeister alllows teachers to establish a site and create passwords for students without the use of emails. The site also contains editing functions allowing teachers to preview posts, comment, and organize within the site for classroom use. While the shell of the website is not as intuitive as others, the students seem to have few problems navigating it. 

During our first round of postings I have told the studnets that our goal is to have each student post an article properly following the "Instructions for posting on the blog" found on our classroom site. Of particular importance is the need to create their articles in a WORD document prior to posting. As they have been warned, classblogmeister has a timer that will log students off after several minutes of inactivity. If students explore the web to research and idea, use a thesaurus.... they could be logged off and lose their work. Creating their article in WORD also allows them to edit and save their articles in a folder in case they need to resubmit. Your help in reminding them to do this would be appreciated.

The second technological endeavor I began last week was an instructed use of the online textbook. While I began the year showing the studnets how to access the online textbook, I sensed that not many of them had explored it for assignments involving the text. Found at http://my.hrw.com the online textbook offers some wonderful features for the studnets. Once the children log in with their username and password (given in class and on a handout in their binder) they can access not only the textbook digitally, but they can also play the audio recording, have hyperlinked vocabulary defined and read to them for pronunciation, use support links for further exploration on topics, take sample quizes, and so on. The audio recording of the sections of reading can also be downloaded as an MP3 file to your computer at home and then uploaded to their iPOD or MP3 player so they can "Rock Out" to some ancient history reading in the car on the way to grandma's house!

The technology and the learning opportunities it offers  the children is very exciting. It can also be overwhelming. Please email me if you would like to talk about the use of any of these devices, and most certainly I would love to have you comment here for others to read.

Have a wonderful day.

John Priest