Regional History Day 2009

Felecia and I attended the Regional History Day 2009 at the Decorah Middle School on March 14th.  This was a very inspiring event to attend.  Viewing all of these student's projects really displayed the tremendous amount of commitment, and the quality work that middle schoolers are capable of.  I was very impressed with each and every one of the displays.  Each poster/display had an immense amount of information presented on it, and it was obvious that these projects took lots of time and motivation to complete. Each student chose a prominent person in history to research and develop a thesis on.  The fact that the kids got to make the choice of who to study was a very important aspect to the success of this project, I believe.  Because the students had a personal interest in what they were researching, their levels of motivation and enthusiasm were very high, as evidenced by the work I saw displayed.  Several people had built rotating four-sided display stands for their projects.  Others had conducted interviews with ancestors or relatives of their historical figure, and had them playing on DVD.  Still others had written letters to various people connected to their person and had their written replies displayed.  Not to mention just the creation of the projects, but also there appeared to be a huge amount of time spent planning and organizing this event.  There were flyers listing the schedule for the day, each individual's entry, the list of judges, and the different rooms where everything was to be held.       

As I mentioned before, attending this Regional History Day was inspiring to me because it gave me hope for our future generations of students.  We have been hearing a lot about how poor the United States education system is, and about all the different problems there are.  I know that all of this talk is very true, but it makes me depressed sometimes, and I wonder if it can be fixed.  The history event at Decorah Middle School reconfirmed to me that all of these students are more than capable, and it is just our job as teachers to bring out their abilities.