I made it a habit to bring in the Dallas Morning News(newspaper) each day to school. I would bring in the paper from the day before. One of the student’s assignments each week in their social studies class was to find a current event and write a paragraph about it. If there was an interesting story we would take the time to chat about it. After Hurricane Katrina we had many discussions about articles in the paper and also from the news on the television.
One day we came upon the obituaries in the metro section. I asked the students if they knew what an obituary was and they did not. There were pictures with some of the obituaries and the pictures were from when the person was younger. Some of the men were in military uniforms and the pictures looked older, like from World War II.
Emily looked at me and said, “I want to see the recently dead.” I replied, “These are people who recently died.” She said, “No, look these are pictures from World War II, so these people died during the war.” I then had to explain that these were people who died recently but that their family chose a picture of them from their past. They may have been proud of their time in the military so they chose a picture from that time.
You just never know what conversation may arise from a simple look in the newspaper.
The recently dead comment made me think of “The Handbook for the Recently Deceased” that was in the movie Beetlejuice!
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