Do you remember when there was a Lincoln's Birthday Holiday on February 12th, and then a few days later, February 22nd, the Washington's Birthday Holiday rolled around? It was a day off from school back then but now we seem to have too many holidays to separate these, and, besides, who wouldn't want another 3-day holiday weekend?
So now it's President's Day that includes ALL presidents and Lincoln and Washington among them but the recognition and honor really seems to me to go to no one by this all inclusive approach. Would your children feel more honored by having the birthday party for each one on the anniversary date of their birth, OR, would it be a better approach to celebrate the birthday of all your children on ONE day each year, with a big party, of course?
So, I think keeping it individual does the best job of recognizing anything, including presidents.
LINCOLN HIGH SCHOOL- named after "who'?
I have criticized the alma mater for not making use of the Lincoln's birthday in the past to promote knowledge and that's what scholl should be doing, right? A "learning" experience here. When I was there teaching at Lincoln not tht long ago, I was really dissppointed by how many students were unaware of the namesake of their school. You have one person to learn about as a basic task, I would expect, but that holiday period passed without much special attention from the school.
I think a few times the Alumni Association made efforts to recongnize Lincoln as one of the display cases by the main office was given the Lincoln recognition treatment.
I think that the school has, in the transformations going on from a single school to small learning communities, has forgotten to give attention to simple things as they constantly face evaluation based on test scores used to determine student performance levels.
Well, that's just something I thought would be useful to change but I don't have a current picture of the state of Lincoln's day to day heppenings and maybe I am wrong now. Since there's no "Brown Act" requirement for school operations like there is for public meetings in government, I have no convenient way to see what's new or what planned, other than the press releases or bulletins that the school or the LAUSD puts forth.
And the other part of the concern here is that learning about President Lincoln is very easy- there are lots of books about this and the times in which Lincoln lived are some of the most crucial years in the history of the United States, the Civil War period. Combine that with the sadder aspect of Lincoln's term, the assasination in office, we have a very important area for examination.
If we had a different president as our namesake, the features might be less visible and more obscurity in history would still leave us with not much in the way of positive or distinctive elements to learn. But that's not the case and still, more students might have some pride in the school if they knew a lttle more of what's out there. It couldn't hurt.
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