I love history teachers.
I’m not someone who can remember a date, or names, or specifics from any history classes I’ve taken.
OK, I remember a few odd things. I remember my 7th grade history teacher Coach Sherrill teaching about Rasputin how he got involved with Nicholas (emporer of Russia) and Alexandria and their son who had hemophilia. Details beyond that story are fuzzy. I’d never heard of hemophilis before then and my ears still perk up when I hear the word.
Mr. Holpp in ninth grade finally got tired of me getting all the extra test points he’d hand out if you could answer questions in his class (I cheated – my friend had the class first and I’d glance at their notes before heading to my class. My grade in his class was something like 110. So he’d instead give me passages to read out loud to the class and limit me to give extra points a test. The first book I hit to read from was “Thr Jungle” by Upton Sinclair. If you’re not familiar, it detailed the gross and dangerous practices of the meat packing industry. What gun it was to gross my classmates out. I savored that time.
Then there was Mr. Gainey, my history teacher my junior and senior years of high school. Those two years were incredibly thorough and sometimes he taught on unusual subjects. Movie stars (loved it!), baseball history (hated it – he was a former scout for the White Socks), and black history. It never occurred to me how unusual that was until I went to college.
It was in Mr. Gainey’s black history class that I first heard about the Buffalo Soldiers. Today I am in Houston and was trying to decide what to do. I saw they had the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum here. It was a nice way to get reacquainted with them. I even wrote a few notes to follow up in the future. I especially loved to see how many women were involved and represented.
Probably my favorite thing, other than the short films, was a letter a former slave wrote to his former master. Witty, brave, sarcastic, and respectful. I suspect I would have liked him.
I’ll always say I don’t want too much history on my vacations, but this was a great excursion. And they had a free parking lot.
Invest in those things you love. I’m investing in history. (Just don’t quiz me on it!)
“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.” – Aldous Huxely
In the Box, Out of the Box 