Taking My Students Back in Time or Why I Love Being a History Teacher

As a teacher of United States civics and history to fifth graders, I have one of the most uniquely joyful, interesting, and awe inspiring jobs in the world. To be able to expose fresh and (no matter what popular perception may have to say otherwise) eager to learn minds to the men and women who have had a hand in bringing us to where we are today as a nation, in the case of most of them for the very first time in their young lives, is not only an honor and a privilege, it is also a real blast!

Take today for instance.

In class this afternoon we got into a fifteen minute long debate about who was responsible for the firing of the first shot of the civil war, North or South. The most conventional answer tends to say South. After all it was a South Carolina man (in defense of a state that had, four months earlier, dissolved her bonds of union and seceded from the United States of America), Edmund Ruffin (possibly, but not definitively) who fired that first shell at the men huddled in the cold darkness of Fort Sumter in 1861. But, when one considers the fact that Lincoln notified the South Carolina legislature that he was sending a ship laden with fresh supplies for the men who were running out of food, water, and even fuel for their lamps, that he notified them openly, knowing full well how they would receive the news, perhaps the answer is not so conventional...or obvious.