Katie101's Blog

My students write in journals three times a week, and this morning as I was driving to school, I kept hearing "historical moment" being echoed in my brain as that seems to be the only thing coming out of the media's collective mouths with regards to Obama being the first "black" man to receive a Democratic nomination.

This led me to ask the following question for my tenth graders' journals: "If you could change one event in history, what would it be and why?" I got the usual Holocaust, slavery, 9/11, etc. But one student, who is relatively quiet, shocked me. He said, "I wouldn't change anything because events, whether good or bad, have a tendacy to build character. If we had not had any of the bad things in history, we wouldn't be the people we are today." My mouth dropped open and the students were all quiet.

What a wonderful spin to put on history. This gives me hope as I am not looking forward to the next four years. I'm not excited about what will be written in history. I don't have faith in either candidate and the only thing that sustains my hope is that God the Father and His Son will protect me and give me everything that my family and I need.

In the meantime, I won't think of rewriting history anymore. I will think of history through the eyes of my student, and realize that adversity builds character in more ways than one.