 | ▼▼▼ The Department Of Cute And Weird: Xydexx ▼▼▼ (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) xydexx) wrote,
@ 2008-03-24 19:50:00 |
| Current mood: |  crazy |
QotD / "Get Drunk On History"
A year with Crazy Mary taught me more than any other class I took in the public school system. I began to realize that she was teaching us to learn, and to extrapolate rather than sticking strictly to facts and learning by rote. Her test questions were more often about thoughts, feelings and deductions about historical people and events. At times, she would present questions such as "If you hade been there to advise him, what would you have suggested" as extra credit questions. I would never fail to answer everything, including the extra credit questions that few others dared to come near. They feared her, but by the end of the first year I came to realize that I admired and looked up to her. Being "crazy" wasn't necessarily wrong. I worked things out so I could have her for European History my senior year.
She signed my yearbook when I graduated, and eluding to a comment she made frequently in class, she wrote "Remember to get drunk on history." It was her mantra, and her lesson. Getting drunk on history means to put yourself into history, to become alive with it. If you simply comb through dates, names and events you'll put yourself to bed early every night. If you instead dig deeper, to read what caused these events, what made these people who they were... Why? How? If? Then the whole picture starts to come alive. You are standing in the middle of history right now. Just because someone else was standing in the middle of it centuries ago doesn't make them that much different than you.
There are lessons to be learned, about who we are and where we have been. How did we get this far? There is also substantial humor and entertainment. Everything connects. Everything leads to another chapter. You keep reading and following the "links" from one person's story to another's, from where one was to where the other found his niche... it is like painting a picture. A picture of you. A picture of us. And if you do it right, you will indeed feel intoxicated. A Samuel Adams or Scotch and V8 might not hurt either.
