Twenty third-graders sat cross-legged on the classroom floor as
Tristine Jakubs, their teacher, introduced me. I gulped a little
with nervousness, wondering how I’d be able to entertain the kids
about South Valley history for an entire hour.
Twenty third-graders sat cross-legged on the classroom floor as Tristine Jakubs, their teacher, introduced me. I gulped a little with nervousness, wondering how I’d be able to entertain the kids about South Valley history for an entire hour.
I was there at the invitation of Oliver Jensen, a bright boy who lives in my neighborhood and is a student in Jakubs’s class at Morgan Hill Charter School. Recently, the kids had made an elaborate time-line covering our local history. They had based the information for their project on a special series of newspaper articles I’d written to commemorate Morgan Hill’s centennial anniversary last year.
“Who here has seen the ‘Back to the Future’ movies?” I asked the children as I sat down in the comfy chair that faced them. Little hands shot up.
“Who here would like to time travel just like Marty McFly did in those movies?” I asked. A bunch more hands went up.
“Who here would really, really, really love to time travel?” I asked, and raised both my hands high into the air. Following my lead, all the kids stuck up both hands accompanied by squeals of excitement.
“OK,” I continued, “I came here today to tell you that you can time travel. Well, sort of it. No one has built a car that can travel back in time – at least not yet. But the closest thing we have is a subject you’re learning in school. That subject is history. History’s sort of a way to travel back in time.”
I asked if anyone could define what history is. One girl said: “Stuff that happened in the past.”
“That’s right. And what word do you guys see in history?”
One very eager boy shouted “Story!”
“Correct! History has the word ‘story’ in it. In fact, ‘history’ is the ancient Latin word for ‘story.'”
I figured I might be getting too technical with etymological trivia so I quickly decided to ask another question. “Who here likes stories?” Instantly all hands shot up.
“Well,” I continued, “history is basically a story with characters and conflict and the quest for a goal. But while Harry Potter is fiction – a make-believe story – history is the tale of real people who lived in the past and helped make the world we live in what it is today. Every town and city has a history, including our town.”
Well, from that point, the group discussion went into the details of the local history time-line the kids had created. Taped to the wall behind me, their project began in the 1770s when the Ohlone Indians first meeting explorers and missionaries from Spain. I asked the third-graders what they imagined it must have been like for the Ohlone people to discover the strange, white-skinned Europeans one day riding into their valley on large four-legged creatures called horses.
“Creepy,” said one girl. She explained the Ohlone went to missions and many died of diseases.
“That’s right,” I said. “Sadly, their way of life was changed when the Spanish arrived.”
We moved on down the time-line to Martin Murphy Sr.’s arrival in the South Valley region. One boy informed me that after crossing the rugged Sierra Nevada mountains in 1844, the pioneer Irishman bought ranch land here and raised cattle. And Murphy’s son Daniel married a woman and took charge of thousands of acres of land she had inherited. His immense ranch eventually became the site of the village of Morgan Hill.
I asked the kids what years they might want to travel back in time to and who they might want to meet. One boy wanted to visit Daniel Murphy. He decided he’d take the rancher an Apple iPod to show him the technology of our 21st Century world.
A girl said she would go back in time to meet Isola Kennedy. The woman died of rabies in 1909 after trying to save a little boy from a mountain lion attack during an afternoon picnic along Coyote Creek. The third-graders discussed whether or not they might warn Ms. Kennedy about her fate. We decided if we did, it would set about a whole new chain of events that would make our South Valley world a very different place than the one we know.
One boy wanted to go back to 1856 and meet Hiram Morgan Hill as a young lad of 8 years. I asked the third-grader what might happen if he told the child Morgan Hill that a city would one day be named after him.
“He wouldn’t believe me,” the boy said. “He’d think I was lying.”
Let me honestly tell you I had lots of fun discussing the what-ifs of history with the smart and inquisitive school kids in Ms. Jakubs’ class. And I gave them some helpful hints about how they could “time travel” themselves – not quite like Marty McFly but in their own way of imagined meetings with characters from the past.
They could read books about various historic periods and people they might find interesting. They could dig up newspapers and magazines from long ago and see what topics and concerns people were discussing way back when. They could also watch movies such as Hollywood flicks and PBS and History Channel documentaries that gave a portrayal of the past.
Locally, they could visit historical sites such as Villa Mira Monte – Hiram Morgan Hill’s home – and San Juan Bautista with its beautiful Spanish mission and wonderful state park. Most importantly, as one little boy suggested, they could chat with grandparents and senior citizens and find out from them what life was like in past decades.
At the end of the hour, several of the kids came up to me with torn pieces of paper and Crayola felt-tip markers and asked for my autograph. Feeling like a movie star, I happily obliged. I had the feeling I’d entertained them. More importantly, I hope I had instilled in them a life-long love for learning the story of stuff that happened in the past.
