“The moment you will remember”
The Daily Mail
Jan. 21, 2009

Students at Cairo-Durham Middle School were treated to a lesson of history-in-the-making Tuesday, when their regular class schedule turned to watching and discussing the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States.

Art teacher Justine Criswell asked her class to sit at their desks and watch a television in the room, rather than work on an art assignment.

“The moment that you watch is the moment you will remember,” she told her students.

She told them that as adults they will remember where they were and what they were doing on this day.

Students in the class said that they were excited to have a chance to watch the inauguration, for many of them the first they have seen.

Sixth-grader Kera Hunt said that she was glad Obama was the new president because he was the first black American to hold the office.

Her classmate Nina Sommer said she liked President Obama.

“He seems really nice,” she said.

The students sat silently as Vice President Joseph Biden took his oath of office.

Down the hall, the school’s cafeteria was filled with students eating and talking. A television in the corner of the room showed the crowds assembled in Washington, D.C.

Lunch monitors encouraged students to wrap up their conversations and focus on the television.

Seventh-grader Ian Metzger already sat quietly, focusing his attention on the screen.

Metzger said that he voted in the school’s mock presidential election held in the school in November. He said that he and his family talk about politics at home and he remembers watching part of the inauguration of former President George W. Bush.

At noon, Metzger, and two dozen other students, filed into room 106B for Kerry Quinn’s seventh grade social studies class.

Quinn’s curriculum, which focuses on the American Revolution, was broadened to tie in what was happening in the nation’s capital.

“That is the head judge of the United States of America,” Quinn narrated to his class as Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts stepped forward to the podium.

“He swears in the President. Notice how he takes out a Bible,” Quinn added.
“Try to listen to the words,” he told the students.

One student silently applauded at the close of the oath. Many other students were excited by the cannon that was fired during the ceremony.

One student in the class said that although she did not give the new president her undivided attention during his speech, the section about how race does not matter particularly stuck in her mind.

Quinn explained that for the next four years, the song “Hail to the Chief,” which was being played by the U.S. Marine Corps Band at the ceremony, would announce Obama’s arrival at all events.

He explained that the new president would spend the rest of the day at a parade in the nation’s capital as well as a lot of parties, including the Presidential Youth Inaugural Conference ball, which will also be attended by two students from Cairo-Durham High School.

Quinn used the inauguration to contrast Tuesday’s peaceful transfer of power from one leader to another with the violent conflict that gave birth to the nation.

He read to the class an advertisement from a Colonial Boston newspaper that told readers to tar, feather and try to light tax collectors on fire when they came around, to illustrate his point.

He then described to his students the segregated America in which he grew up, but they have not known.

He told them a story of going swimming with a cousin in St. Petersburg, Fla. in the early 1960s. The swimming complex had two entrances, one marked “White” and the other “Colored.”

Quinn said that after he had swam in the white-only pool, which had a slide, he recalled, he entered the other swimming area, which just opened onto a rocky strip of beach and Tampa Bay.

“Is that right? Is that fair,” Quinn asked his students, rhetorically.

Several answered with a resounding, “No.”

Quinn asked his students to look at the pictures of the 44 presidents hanging in the back of the room. Forty-three of them are white, one is black, but they all are men, he said, adding that he hoped that in his lifetime, and when his students are adults, women will be elected to serve in the White House.

But like the new president, who began his job at the close of his oath, the students in Quinn’s class soon re-focused on their job as students, and they resumed preparing for the English Language Arts exam, which they will take later this week.