A life lesson

A life lesson

                I believe that history is about learning from our mistakes.  It is hard to truly understand what I am talking about until you do the same thing twice.  During my junior year of high school I had to take World Cultures two.  I was very enthusiastic about this class because ever since I could remember I loved history, and especially tragic history (warfare and disasters).  This sounds quite dark as I am aware, but I love hearing more about these tragedies to get a feel for what it was like to experience something like that.  My teacher Mr. Pfadt was a big man who had actually been in combat, and was in the army reserves.  The main message he always tried to get across to us was that we should learn from history and our mistakes so we do not repeat them.  There were two specific examples that stuck with me to this day.  The first was the Titanic disaster.  He had this program that had ship plans and broke down the events leading up to, during, and after the sinking.  It was what I always had wanted to learn, but never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that anyone would ever go over that event in a class.  He also had very detailed documentaries of the First and Second World War.  These three topics in class made me want to become a history teacher.  I seem like a nerd and you know what I am one, but I figured the best job I could to talk about these topics was to become a history teacher.  Now back to the life lesson, Mr. Pfadt would stop his movies and highlight prudent information as it came up in the documentaries/ computer programs we were looking at.  He would use words like stunning and yikes to illustrate the gravity of the information we were looking over.  He always said “Don’t forget, and don’t repeat the past, learn from it.”  The lessons of and unsinkable ship sinking and two world wars would hopefully get that point across.  It did to me anyway.  Since that class I have had a burning desire to teach and discuss historical events, and I always remember my mistakes so I do not repeat them.  World War one cost over 8 million lives.  World War two cost over 50 million lives, but I am not sure if that is included with the Holocaust.  In any case before get off topic, the point is someone did not learn from the past.  I believe that if we don’t learn from the past we will repeat it, and unfortunately many people could die because of it.  However, if we do learn than maybe just maybe we can spare people from misery and terror.