God bless the U.S.A.?

I subbed for a third grade class for half of today. It sounds so easy, but children can be WILD!

I think the highlight of my teaching time today was explaining what a quatrain was, and teaching the students the rhyming patterns they could use for the patriotic poems they were assigned to write.

As for patriotism, eight and nine-year-olds do not understand freedom, liberty or any of the other concepts that have become key patriotic lingo in the U.S. Reading their poems was like reading a paper I would write about caring for typewriters in the desert... completely obvious that the writer has no clue what's going on. Freedom is nice, just doesn't really mean much, you know? (Not to dog third graders, but I am disappointed that these concepts don't mean anything to them....)

I made a point to talk about what freedom really means in class today. Education, speech, opinion, action. We talked about slavery and oppression, which I think is something they understood a little, and the oppression most people were seeking to leave behind when coming to the United States (and this is still true today). We talked about the Statue of Liberty and what it meant to people as a symbol of their freedom and hope for a better future. I wished for a little while that I could've been the teacher of these students and could've given them lengthy assignments about these ideals that are so pivotal to our Americanism.

I think I'll write my own quatrain tonight.