Reflections on Memorial Day and ending school year
As the days get longer, students’ attention spans get shorter. Kids want to be done with their backpacks and homework for the summer, but they’ll continue as students, for another week of school after Memorial Day weekend.
Some eighth grade students who became lax about turning in assignments but are expecting to walk across the stage at graduation are pestering teachers for grade updates as they rush to turn in late work. Retiring teachers are counting the Fridays until they get to remain on vacation indefinitely. Several times a week, teachers receive job postings for new openings in the district. The administrative shuffle has also begun with new leadership at the top as well as on numerous campuses. Nate Nelson, the new Superintendent of Schools for PUSD, and his team are negotiating a new contract with teachers which may result in some changes to the school day and calendar.
The new Military Academy principal is Doug Ihmels. Heather Bledsaw will be replacing the retiring Cindy Ervin at Westfield School. John Buckley will be the new principal at Sequoia Middle School. Strathmore High School is welcoming Diane Rankin as its principal next year. Eric Ortega is moving over as principal of John J. Doyle Elementary in the fall.
Though curious about what changes the new administrators might require of them, teachers are busy formulating engaging lessons to round out their final unit and help keep students focused. Some U.S. history teachers have arrived at the Civil War era in their instructional timeline which is when Memorial Day festivities began.
After the Civil War, when Americans were trying to figure out how to memorialize the 625,000 casualties from both the North and South, mourners began decorating their graves. Honoring all the nation’s war dead was intended to help with reconciliation by focusing on the soldiers’ sacrifices regardless of the side they fought on.
David Blight, an author and history professor, in the New York Times Oped piece, “Forgetting Why We Remember,” wrote about how blacks commemorated the dead Union soldiers even before the war ended.
In 1865, after a long siege and bombardment, Charleston lay in ruin. After the colored infantry’s commander accepted the city’s official surrender, most of the Union troops who’d occupied the port city left, but thousands of former slaves remained.
Blight believes that one of the first Memorial Day celebrations took place in Charleston, on May 1, 1865 where African-americans remembered the Union dead and consecrated their sacrifices. At Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, an outdoor prison where Union captives had been kept, hundreds had died and been placed in a mass grave. Black workmen properly reburied the Union dead and fenced the cemetery.
Then a parade of thousands of black school children with roses, hundreds of black women with wreaths and the cadence bound Black infantrymen marched to honor their sacrifices. Spiritual songs were sung and scriptures were read in their remembrance. The cemetery was dedicated to those who’d won their emancipation triumph.
In New York City on Memorial Day in 1878, Frederick Douglass gave a speech that talked about the Civil War being “a war of ideas, a battle of principles.” He claimed it was, “a war between the old and the new, slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization ... and in dead earnest for something beyond the battlefield.”
After that primary source citation, a history teacher might pose this question, we get to define what that “something beyond the battlefield” looks like…what do the dead from our wars represent to you? May you honor those who died in battle on this Memorial Day in your own unique way as you anticipate the approach of summer vacation.