Living History Trip: Bringing the Classroom to Life

One of the great privileges of teaching at Darlington is the unique opportunity we have to make our classrooms come alive. From studying underwater, to visiting a human history wax museum, to hunting during The Most Dangerous Game, to stomping across a battlefield, our students are expected to not just passively learn, but to explore and consider the world.

I just wanted to thank our parents for trusting us to bring the world outside the classroom to life. For me, true knowledge of a place combines the experience of all the senses. And for one brief week, our seventh-graders pushed the boundaries of American history by coming to know the people and places that helped shape the earliest years of our country during our annual Living History Trip.

We didn’t just learn the true story of Pocahontas, we walked the land she walked, scraped fur from animal hides and spent time in a Powhatan yehakin, reed hut, studying the roles of the members of the tribe. As we wandered with the chickens in James Fort, and we ate the corn mush of the original colonists (yuk), we experienced the cold reality of dirt floors, martial law and the pride of the first representative government. Even as we imagined what the starving time really meant and how close the colony came to failure, we smelled the smoke of a cook fire and the acrid smoke of a musket discharge signaling that they did survive.

In Williamsburg, we scuttled into ranks of “fresh fish” under the command of a zealous Sargent, where we spent an hour in the freezing darkness marching shoulder to shoulder and experiencing a little of the discipline and suffering of the Patriots. We stood on the banks of the York River in the same spot that Cornwallis lost several ships and that same Continental Army snatched freedom from the British in the battle of Yorktown. We also tramped across some of the bloodiest battlefields of the Civil War, where original earthworks still stand today. And then, we all danced together to celebrate all that our forefathers accomplished – a Virginia Reel on the site of a Civil War battle and a quadrille in the halls of the Capitol in Williamsburg. 

We saw what life was like for our founding fathers and for all those nameless heroes who sacrificed nothing less than their lives for our liberty. And together we know a little bit more about who we are, where we came from and what it means to be American. We didn’t just learn historical facts – we walked, marched and danced through our history.