The One Room Schoolhouse

Our oldest son graduated from high school in 2019.  I had been in public elementary classrooms regularly since he had been in kindergarten.  James, my husband, is a private religious educator in programs serving public schools and had worked for nearly 20 years with public high school students.   As the parents of 6 children, with these front row seats to public education, we had growing concerns.  Our kids had had many fantastic teachers who really made a positive difference in their lives, but the encroachment of social issues and the gradual decline of academic expectations kept us on our toes with the education of our own children. On March 16, 2020, I was in the classroom of my third-grade twins on my regular weekly visit to help the teacher.  We learned we were going into a two-week COVID-19 lockdown, anticipated to re-open after Spring Break, and so we were packing up just a little more than usual.  Secretly, I was thrilled.  When I was a y...

  “You know that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken....Shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up? We cannot....Anything received into the mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts....” "Then will our youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, shall flow into the eye and ear, like a health-giving breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul from the earliest years i...

Yes, there was a feast of thanksgiving that autumn of 1621.   The Pilgrims had the harvest of their crops, geese and ducks, and a “good store of wild turkeys,” according to Bradford.   That first Thanksgiving actually turned into quite a celebration of the Natives as Massasoit and a hundred of his tribe (outnumbering the Pilgrims about two to one) showed up with 5 deer.   And so, to their family and faith, the Pilgrims also added friends. Thanksgiving, however, did not become a national holiday until 1863, squarely in the middle of one of the darkest times in our nation's history, just months after the Battle of Gettysburg of the Civil War.  And yet, America's stalwart and faithful leader, Lincoln himself responded to the campaign of Sarah Josepha Hale.  Known as "The Mother of American Thanksgiving" she worked to convince President Lincoln of the need to proclaim a National Day of Thanksgiving.  It had nothing to do with parades nor football.  It did ...

Intentionally, I left the beginning of the Pilgrim story for the end of this series of posts leading up to Thanksgiving.  I think the beginning of their story is better appreciated after learning of all challenges and the miracles of their early adventure. One of William Bradford’s most well-known statements from his detailed account reads, “They knew they were pilgrims.”   Interestingly, everyone else did not refer to them as “pilgrims” until 1793, one hundred seventy-three years after their Mayflower voyage.   For the first couple generations they were known as the “Oldcomers” and then as the “Forefathers.”   Apparently, what was known by the Pilgrims themselves, was not necessarily recognized by the public. For most who know the Pilgrim’s story, they were taught that the Pilgrims fled England to the New World in order to worship as they pleased.   I know this was my understanding. While this is not inaccurate, it is not completely accurate.   After a...

Squanto did come to the rescue, but it wasn’t until Spring.   The Pilgrims had a bitter, heart-breaking winter to endure.   Though land was sighted November 11 th , it wasn’t until December 23 that a work party went ashore to begin building permanent structures.   The Mayflower, having been moved from it’s original anchoring to Plymouth Harbor, over 20 miles away, had become a veritable floating hospital.   Each day there were new deaths, including William Bradford’s wife, and another passenger’s stillborn baby.   In their weakened condition, the first framed structure went up on Christmas day.   There was no rest for the Pilgrims that day. By the time Spring arrived, 52 of the original 102 passengers were dead.   Yet despite the death toll, there were unexplainable survivors.   Four families of the Pilgrims had been untouched.   Two families of the Strangers had more than a fifth of all the young people between them.   A once segregat...

Once the passengers of the Mayflower sighted land and subsequently escaped Pollack Rip and made it back to Cape Cod, it wasn’t as if everyone could walk down the landing plank and begin life on new land.   The shallow waters of the area made it so that ships the size of the Mayflower had to anchor as far out as a mile from shore.   A party of men would need to go ashore and find a suitable place for the newcomers. During the Atlantic voyage, a small sailing ship, a shallop, had been dismantled and stored in at least four separate places in the Mayflower .   Along with passengers in a row boat, the pieces were taken to shore to be reassembled.   Already into winter weather, i t would take longer than desired to put together.   Not wanting to delay any longer, a scouting trip set out to the nearest land while the carpenter and assistants went to work to reassemble the shallop.   Bradford and young Howland were part of this first scouting trip that proved...

“The favorable hand of Providence” is how George Washington commonly referred to advantages won during the Revolutionary War as a result of weather.  Any study of that war will confirm that the weather, be it snow, rain, wind, freezes, or thaws, played a major role in the victories of the colonies against the world’s superpower.  That same “favorable hand of Providence” was with the Pilgrims. Experts refer to the climate of New England during the time of the Pilgrims as the “little ice age.”  Winters were unusually long and harsh, and such was the winter that welcomed the bedraggled travelers.  It wasn’t long before death was a part of life.  Before the end of the first winter, three families had been completely lost, and several children had been orphaned.  By spring, 50 of the 102 passengers remained.  To say that the Pilgrims were spent physically and emotionally is a gross understatement. Yet, uncharacteristic for “the little ice age,” an early...