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By Author: Kathleen
Total Articles: 56
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Of the scores of plays I have helped students write for National History Day, I recently unearthed paper-work from one. The page comes from turning the Tea: Revolution, Reaction and Reform in History, penned and performed by my eighth-grade English students from Northbridge Middle School in Massachusetts. What is clear, in nostalgic review of their messy draft, is how a group of ordinary adolescents peppered their language with spicy historical words Cartier Replica Watches such as "Huzzah" and presented the act of rebellion from multiple perspectives, not just the historical hegemony of the textbook accounts of the Boston Tea Party. The factual corrections on the draft, such as the correct name of the Committee of Correspondence, are in my hand, but the students had located the primary source documents they quoted independently at the Massachusetts Historical Society. I drove the students there, but they had phoned the archivists to make an appointment and mailed drafts of their thesis and scenes to historians at two colleges. They were excited ...
... to in-corporate ideas generated from authentic scholarly research and dialogue. In writing and performing this piece, the girls were able to live and breathe history and to consider and convey a story more complex that they had known, or been able to encounter, through classroom experience alone.

One of my shining teaching memories with NHD involved Milford, New Hampshire, tenth-grade student Rachel Arnold's research on Wangari Maathai. Under the theme of "Taking a Stand in History," Rachel chose to write her 10-page paper for English class on the 2003 Nobel Peace Laureate from Kenya. I'd never heard of Maathai, so I was thrilled with Rachel's topic. I was going to learn from her. I had no idea then where this research would bring us both.

Maathai, celebrated for founding the Green Belt Movement of environmental reclamation through tree planting, proved the perfect topic for Rachel. In addition to her high class rank, Rachel was also a paragon of activism, reminding class-mates to recycle and turning in papers printed on both sides of a sheet of paper. While Rachel's paper wasn't one of the top two in a class of talented writers, she did earn one of the few, coveted A's. I always submitted the top two papers to the New Hampshire History Day competition. Rachel's research was outstanding, so I suggested she take her deep knowledge of Maathai and translate it into a different genre, an exhibit. Over the next six months, Rachel worked fastidiously with a glue gun, paper cutter, and color printer at her side to develop a six-foot high exhibit on Mathaai. She also wrestled with the exhibit category rule requiring not more that 500 words of student-generated text on the board. That forced her to tell Maathai's story with documents, images, quotations, and selective use of text to make connections and analyses.

The attention to detail transformed Rachel's writing from somewhat roundabout and freeform narrative to clear and tight prose. There could be no more authentic way to address the perennial English class bugaboos of wordiness and tautology than those History Day category requirements. All her efforts at distillation and precision of language paid off when Rachel's exhibit won first place at the state competition.

As is customary in NHD, Rachel was expected to revise in response to judges' criticism and suggestions in preparation for the national competition in College Park, Maryland. Rachel decided she needed a personal interview with Maathai. As she followed leads and apparent dead ends, Rachel learned Tag Heuer Replica that Maathai would be speaking at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Science in May. It was a four-hour drive from our New Hampshire town, but a lot closer than Nairobi, so I called the school. Fortuitously, the conference organizer's mother had taught English in public high schools. Rachel and I were not only provided tickets to the lecture in New Haven but also invited to a private dinner beforehand with Maathai. From its origin as a class writing assignment evolved an experience extending beyond requirements and into full social engagement.