15 Years, 5 Months, 16 Days

One of my favorite field trips I regularly took with my seventh-grade history students was to a very large cemetery, filled with stones dating as far back as the early 1700s. About a half a mile down the road from the cemetery, there was a local college with an exceptional collection of Ancient Greek and Roman artifacts. I gave my students specific instructions to respectfully explore the grounds, noting interesting artwork, the oldest stones, and trends in years. One tradition that always brought the most questions from my students was the act of recording the exact number of years, months, and days someone was alive. Year after year, class after class, these numbers tickled their existential awareness.

As a formal assignment, each student was instructed to choose one gravestone and then, as realistically as possible based on historical research and understanding, create a life for that person. Before the Internet, these kids employed resources available in our school library, and imagined and creatively wrote newspapers, diary entries, or letters, imagining a lifetime or a series of events for these strangers whose gravestones they read in a cemetery.

These middle schoolers recognized the value and existence of those who lived before them—most of whom had most likely been forgotten to time. Yet, they realized, it didn’t make their lives any less important or influential.

Every individual day of a person’s life was often noted for posterity on their gravestone, in order to remember that all of those days had meaning. In the teaching of anything, we must find a deeper and more impactful meaning. Finding the connection to our shared humanity is always a door into stretching our students’ perspectives, empathy, and respect — for not just the material, but for how they can use the information to shape each day they live into days that empower them to be more, think more, love more… Basically, how to live days that are worth noting.