Dear SAVY Parents,

What a great start to our week!  The student patriots (maybe a few loyalists too) jumped right in with the existing knowledge they had of some unrelated people, places, dates, and events, but they showed their readiness for new knowledge and deeper understandings of the events leading up to the American Revolution.  The essential question that we continue to unpack is a big one: Are the sacrifices of individuals in war worth the gains to cultures and societies?  Using multiple texts and some primary source documents including the British Parliament’s Stamp Act of 1765 and the colonies’s responsive Stamp Act Resolutions, we began to discuss and understand the context of some of the issues at hand that caused such strife between the “motherland” across the pond and the young nation she had birthed.  There will certainly be more growing pains ahead!

What types of sacrifices exactly did the colonists endure?  Who are the stakeholders in the laws, and what are each of their points of view? What are the implications of the points of view and could these conflicting ideas have been resolved without bloodshed?  How does our understanding of events cause and effect help clarify history?  How can we observe history critically through more modern interpretations?  We listened to excerpts from Hamilton: An American Musical by Lin Manuel Miranda and compared events with the biography written by Ron Chernow.  What do we notice?

We will continue to examine historical records, as well as modern ideas about these old documents.  We will work to understand the implications of nation building for purposes of understanding our modern world and the strife we observe in it.  This is not easy, but it is the habit of a scholar to persevere when the content gets challenging!  Oh, and sometimes it will be fun and games, at least the type of games a child in the 1700’s would experience.  Today it was Jack Straws.  Tomorrow, anyone for a game of Nine Men’s Morris?

Mrs. Byrd

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