Nov

12

Sometimes simple is best

Filed Under Musings 

Our Remembrance Day assembly was last Friday, and, as last year, it was a pretty slick affair. It had PowerPoint, spot lights fading in and fading out on various speakers, solemn music, a choir, bagpipes, and even a trumpet blowing The Last Post.

Yet for all the slickness of the affair, I was struck by how my students responded to it and how they responded to my class on Remembrance. I had only two pictures in class and a good handful of stories to illustrate why the Canadians fought in the Second World War and who they fought to help. Aside from the light illuminating the room, I used no technology at all.

I think they were a little jaded by the school’s official Remembrance ceremony. They’d been there and done that. Yet in class a simple story still gets the kids’ attention. No glitz, no glamor, just a few stories. It didn’t hurt that one of them was the story of my dad remembering the Canadian soldiers arriving in his village when he was five years old. The personal, and especially the immediately personal, will win out over glitz and glamor every time.

Technology in the class is a wonderful thing, and I’m completely hooked on it, but sometime I have to force myself to remember that less is really more.

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