Sunday, April 09, 2006
Vietnam
Yesterday I spent doing research and some writing of my novel (and laundry, cleaning up, reading a little, watching some tv, cleaning my closet - you know, all those things we writers do to keep from sitting down at the keyboard) and I came in an interesting conclusion. I didn't know, until yesterday, very much about the Vietnam War. I mean almost nothing. My novel's about deployment and one of the characters was in Vietnam. So I started looking at the world map I have above my desk and tried to find Vietnam and I wasn't very successful so I googled it and there it was - south of China, east of India, in the South China Sea. So apparently geography wasn't my strong suit in school. But then I started thinking about what the war was over and I really couldn't have told you. So I did some more internet research (what did we do before the world wide web!?!?!) and found out it was a 20 year war to stop communism. (Although I am sure that's a very very very broad definition.) The more I read about it, the more I wondered why I had never learned this in school - in high school, where I took AP American history and 3 other history classes, or in college where I managed to get 2 degrees. And the answer is I don't know why. Angela said maybe it's because we were taught by teachers and raised by a society who lived that war and they didn't want to teach it or talk about it. I do remember that my history book in 11th grade had a Vietnam section but we only got through half of WWII before June. She also said maybe it's just too fresh in our collective memory. I wonder if that's how it is with the first Iraq war, if we teach it in school now (it's been over 16 years now since it began - that's roughly the amount of time between when Vietnam ended and I was in school) or if we only get students to WWII where we can easily explain and show pictures of a victory. It's certainly much more romantic than the other wars. Just a thought.
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2 comments:
History is boring to a lot of students. It was to me. It was boring because it was even more ancient than our teachers. I think it would be much more relevant to start with the present and work towards the past. As we work toward the past we can show why we are in the situation we are in today. Today is very related to what our government has done since our country was formed. Instead of showing the foriegn policy distaters of yesterday and working towards today we should show today and when we get to the past describe almost as a refresher of how the past caused the mishaps of today. Gosh I think that was kind of redundant but you ge the picture. So when you start teaching in AZ, maybe you should start trying to change how history is taught. Then we will know where Vietanm is, and why it happened and the 7th graders of today can learn about why we went to Iraq 16 years ago, even though we followed it as it was happening, they weren't even born. Lets make history interesting, then we may be able to succeed at leaving no child behind, instead of just throwing a standardized test at them.
Leave the history questions to the History teacher! haha Most classes do not get past the cold war, we feel that it is to important to focus on "what a great President Mr. Lincoln was" (beleive me from a resident of the land of Lincoln...we really should get over him) that on things such as Iraq and Vietnam that directly effect students. Their grandparents now were Nam vets and their parents depending on age have been involved or recently lost someone becuase of Iraq.
In learning about the war in Vietnam, it was a war of attricion (sp?) meaning that it was never going to end regardless. We were afraid of the sperad of communism and felt that we had to be involved to stop it. Things started brewing back to Eisenhower, not just Nixon and Ford.
A good movie to understand communism is Dr. Strangelove. It's artistic and entertaining. We watched it in my Understanding US History class at UIS.
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