mamyers

Last week was the ‘final’ week as an intern at the memorial and it was more than I could ask for. I have given several field trips and tours at this time of the semester but Thursday was my absolute best day ever. We had Curtis Baptist Middle School from Augusta, Georgia come and take my tour. The kids were engaged, were intelligent, and went through what ended up being a two hour tour! I had such a fantastic time walking them through the tracks of history and allowing them to critically think about the content I was laying out. The parents were just as excited and intrigued. This trip was the first time many of them had been to the memorial and they were all so willing to learn and discuss World War II and D Day at large. At the end of the tour something very unexpected happened: they gave me a 100 dollar tip. Of course I did not accept the tip, but they were so ecstatic to have a college kid ‘paying it forward’ and ‘keeping the flame’. I never thought of my internship that way. Keeping the flame. I love it! Most of the tour guides there are rather old and they will not be around forever but very few tour guides around my age exist for the memorial other than the occasional intern. Etching in stone the history you want repeated does no good if there is no one to read it. Perhaps my purpose in life is to etch my own stone while reading those of the past. Is that not every historians job and purpose? I am so glad to have done this internship even if it wasn’t what I expected. I will be continuing my work at the memorial in the years to come and will hopefully inspire that next young kid to read my etched stone.

For the past several months I have heard nonstop about how amazing the memorial looks in the spring when the cherry trees bloom and the water comes back in late March. I did not completely believe the tales spread by volunteers and faculty alike, but the rumors are more than true. Driving up to see the majestic glade of pink reminded me of why I was interning there. The past few weeks have been rather slow for me as I have been busy and Maggie has been away, so my office times have not been consistent. I have put together many upon many teacher bags that contain children activity books as well as activities that Maggie has made, as well as a nicely placed coffee mug. I finished my first attempt at Living History Scripts and she liked them so much she decided that we don’t need another draft of them after all. I completed a blog post for the memorial to be used on their website. In the coming weeks I will be engaging more directly with tour groups and school field trips! Through the weeks I think that I have come to the conclusion that perhaps I am not cut out for memorial/museum work. I love working with the activities and seeing the faces of engaged kids but something has been missing for me. Perhaps its because I haven’t had that glade of pink and running water to remind me of why I myself was there. I have long pondered why other people are there, but not myself. Why is that? Finally I find myself placed upon the mountain of remembrance and reverence for the men and women that made not just D Day successful, but all of World War II. It has been a way for me to claim my own space within history and education and allowed me to converse more readily about how we teach history. I look forward to finishing my internship project in the next two weeks.

Matt Myers

 

 

I have begun to work even more depth with creating the EDUC Resources page and I love it! Creating activities and thinking about what we should/could include within a webpage for educators is so much fun. I have become more intimate with some information I never learned in school; such as the shift from making toys from metal in WWII to wood and types of plastic. I have also been working on several scripts for our Prelude event which houses several living historians. Creating these scripts forces me to get outside of the normal parameters of the tour script and make it more intimate and first person story telling. I have never done anything like this before, making it a learning curve, but I am optimistic. I also helped lead a school night for 21st century grant school Moneta Elementary where I gave these students the induction exam that a soldier would have had to take back in 1943. I am having a blast all while working on my communication skills while also forcing me to be creative and inventive with my activity designs.

Welp! Several more weeks down and I have begun working on skills associated with creating activities for students at the memorial. We have a lot of educational programs here at D Day and I was brought on to work on these events/field trips so it is REALLY neat to be working on this material. Triangulating SOL assessment, school criteria, and content has been really entertaining and insightful. Some activities are really fun to do, like create cardboard tanks and reenact a battle, but are impractical from a curriculum standpoint. Knowing when to bring out the purely ‘fun’ activities is becoming increasingly easier. I have also been working on giving the tour of the monument; which has been loads of fun. Getting to engage with the monument every single day is a dream and I learn something new each day and with each tour. Knowing what to include within your tour and what to leave out is essential to a good tour. I have been on some tours that are two and a half hours…for your information the tours are only supposed to be between fifty minutes and an hour long. I could have received college credit for some of those tours! Recently we have been working hard on the World War II in Film conference occurring this summer at Liberty University and figuring out what we want included for the scholarship program. I had the idea to have the teachers submit a children’s guide of the museum that was engaging and encompassed the ‘grown-up’ tour. I don’t necessarily agree with my supervisor on every educational decision but I have learned a lot from her. She is extremely creative and easily communicable which helps move the day along and keep the activities interesting. Kids need to be engaged in order to learn so creating activities that engage them, teach them, and meet the standards of the state is more than difficult yet somehow she does it! Of course she has help from other educators and museum educators alike but it is neat to see the close-knit community between museums and educational systems. My internship project is creating an Education Resources Database that includes lesson plans by criteria of the SOL standards. Teachers and museums will be able to simply click on a desired SOL standard and see all these activities that align with it. Ahh well back to the grind!! Until next time.

My first week on the job was nothing I expected. I was hired as the Education Intern so I thought I would be working on field trips, tour groups, and development of activities for kids, but while its the off season I have been working on social media posts. I am not the most social media gung-ho guy so it has been difficult to adapt to a supervisor that would like to post two times a day if she could. I adore the environment of the memorial and all of the wonderful volunteers that I have met and learned from in the past two weeks. I just don’t know that I am really happy with what I have been doing. It feels as though I go in for 8 hours or so every week without gaining progress in my skills. I would like to work on education pedagogy and developing these activities for kids while also teaching them. Happily I am taking on a project of organizing a merit badge for the boy scouts on our scout day event but I wish I were doing more. It has certainly been interesting seeing how a small organization runs a monument and how drastic change can be made with new administration. Change and regime was not what I was expecting to see with D-Day. I hope to work more with the education side and hopefully take some more tours in the near future. I have so much to learn about D Day but I engage well with the material. I look forward to getting involved with more scholars and veterans of the event within the coming weeks.

 

Matt Myers