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February 20, 2007
Paperclips Mean a Lot More Than You Think
Last week I was traveling in Nashvl. No I didn’t misspell it. It’s the only way I could think to spell a city's name the way it’s pronounced there. There don’t seem to be many vowels in the South or else the sounds are kind of lazy and laid back. I liked it although I found myself saying “ya’ll” a couple of times recently.
One of my favorite activities is to visit places. Oh, I went to the typical tourist things and I will get around to telling you about them soon. The Hermitage has to be talked about when I mention history/social studies lessons, but there was one item in a little place out in the country that really caught my eye.
A friend took me to visit his hometown out in Marion County. We’re both educators so he knew I’d like to see a school or two. One of the stops didn’t get me any farther than a railroad car on their front lawn. No kidding a real railroad car. The car was filled with paperclips. Well, not filled, but hundreds of thousands of paperclips were on either side of the box car behind glass.
Okay so what’s the story here?
In 1998 the eighth grade students at Whitwell Middle School were studying the Holocaust. The enormity of the six million Jews affected was beyond their understanding so the teachers asked the principal if the students could collect something reflecting the number. She agreed if it was small and manageable. According to the website information http://http://www.marionschools.org/holocaust/ they decided on the paperclip because the Norwegians had invented it and wore paperclips on their lapels protesting the Nazi regime.
The kids wrote to people, told them what they were doing and asked for a paperclip. As they received answers they wrote to more people, famous people, people who were affected by the Holocaust. They received answers, stories, reports, pictures and over 30 million paperclips.
The display is in the boxcar. There are letters and pictures around the glass enclosures. One thing that caught my eye was a pile of small rocks outside the boxcar and one of the rail and another on the coupler. I was told Jews bring a small rock to recognize that someone has died.
There’s much more to this story as you can see by their website. When I was driving out of the school grounds which is in a small town 20 miles from another small town, I couldn’t help but think about how a group of 12-year-olds in a remote town in southern Tennessee had managed to catch the attention of so many because they wanted to know about a world outside of their own. What they found, I’m sure changed their lives forever, and it may have brought some understanding to the hearts of many others.
Posted by Dr Joni at February 20, 2007 07:22 AM