Don’t Know Much About History

Some days, I get so frustrated with the enormous school system bureaucracy that I wish I had the patience to homeschool my children. Inauguration Day almost fooled me into believing I could do it. Our family had a transcendent experience participating in history together. And if we had left it up to the Superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools, that experience never would have happened. Jerry Weast declared back in November that our children would have to go to school on January 20th, and not only that, but the middle school and high school kids would have to take semester final exams that day.

Thank goodness the community rose up to oppose this myopic “business as usual” nonsense. Teachers wanted to be on the Mall. Students wanted to be on the Mall. Parents wanted to be on the Mall, or at the very least, sitting warm in front of a television surrounded by their own children at this unprecedented moment.

So I am deeply grateful to Board of Education member and Takoma Park parent Chris Barclay for pushing the Board to overrule the Superintendent. I am hoping he inspired a New Year’s resolution by Board members to stand up to the MCPS administration more often on substantive curricular issues. And I am deeply grateful to my kids for insisting that we brave the cold and the crowds to take advantage of our proximity to DC and bear witness to live history.

Ever since November 4th, most of us with children (and many of us without children) had been vacillating about making the trip to the Mall. Would we sleep through the alarm? Would we get frostbite? Would we get crushed? Would we get stuck somewhere and miss the ceremony? Would there be a terrorist incident? Would the kids be starving and exhausted and too cranky to appreciate the ceremony? Would our bladders hold? Would the experience be educational, or traumatic?

But my kids were adamant about being there. Aimee, 14, joined a Facebook group that helped to pressure the Board into overruling the Superintendent and canceling school. Ben, 11, said to me, “Are you telling me that if it was the March on Washington, you would be afraid of the crowds and stay home and miss seeing Martin Luther King?” I actually tried to convince them that we should go to the Sunday concert instead of the Tuesday inauguration—smaller crowd, fewer tourists, a slightly warmer day, great music, better chance of actually seeing Obama. But Aimee surprised me with her clarity. “No mom, I only want to get cold once, and I want to be there for the real thing.”

The logistics of the day were challenging. The oatmeal cookies I stuffed in my jacket dropped out somewhere on the walk between Farragut Square and the Mall. Seized with guilt, I left my family at our chosen jumbotron and went off in search of cocoa. After almost an hour of waiting in line, I bailed out in frustration, and tried to dash back to my family just as the National Guard was closing off the access route.

For 20 minutes, I stood panicking that I would miss being with my children during the ceremony. Finally, they reopened the crossing point just in time. But when I returned to our spot at the base of the Washington Monument, the crowd had swelled to a crush of people and I couldn’t find my family.
Up and down our barricade fence, people began passing the word—two white children, who’s seen them? Finally, word came back to go left. People pushed me along with a cheerful, “Lost children, let her through.”

When I reached my children and husband, they were so relieved to see me they didn’t even care that I had come back empty-handed. I got big hugs from the frozen kids, and cheering and applause from the crowd around us.
Even after five hour of standing and waiting in the frigid cold, Aimee and Ben were intently focused on each word spoken by the announcer, and throughout the ceremony.

Aimee is taking AP US history this year, which means we have surprising dinner table discussions about the War of 1812, and the Restoration, and Transcendentalism. So my kids were primed to understand the context of this Inauguration. And they peppered me with questions—questions they could never get in edgewise in a classroom of 30 students. “Those are all the Presidents still alive?” “Did you vote for Jimmy Carter?” “Was Bush senior better than Bush junior?” “Who was Geraldine Ferraro?” “Why is Ted Kennedy so important?” “Who is that Mr. Pelosi with the spouses?” They were layering down new information, backfilling their minds with history, as fast as they could.

When our new President gave his Inaugural address, we punctuated his words with shouts of “Yes!”, a multi-racial crowd pressing in on us and providing human warmth and comfort, both physical and spiritual. Aimee, a poet, absorbed each word of the Inaugural poem. Ben, a musician, absorbed each note of the Inaugural quartet. Later, we could revert to being a family of cynics. The poem was kind of cheesy. The music was prerecorded.

But in that moment, in spite of school bureaucracy and dire weather and growling stomachs and tired feet, we experienced education in its ideal form: multisensory, imbued with personal meaning, and set into the context of time and place. In an era when high-stakes testing continues to squeeze out social studies, and field trips, and creativity in the classroom, Inauguration Day was an unforgettable lesson in the power of democracy.

Esperanza Loaiza Bond and Casey Goldvale will remember their cold day on the Mall for the rest of their lives. Photo by Eric Bond

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