Intellectual Adventure

Michael Dang
Blog Post #4

It was a bright sunny morning on a school day, but I wasn’t in the classroom. My school had planned a rare out of the classroom experience to visit Pearl Harbor. My classmates and I were learning about World War II, and my teachers thought it would be a good experience to visit a place surrounded with so much historical significance. Like many of my peers, I was excited about not having to be holed up in a classroom listening to my teachers lecture on for hours; but at the same time, I was excited to visit a place I had been learning about for weeks.

The first place we visited was the USS Arizona. To get there, we had to take a boat ride across the harbor to reach the memorial. I didn’t know what to expect as I had never been there. I only knew that the USS Arizona was one of the ships that got destroyed when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. To my amazement, the memorial was beautiful. It was a white, large rectangular building with the middle part bent down. The memorial itself was built over the sunken wreckage of the USS Arizona. High above the building was the American flag, boisterously whipping in the wind. As we got out of the boat and walked into the structure, I noticed hundreds of names etched into the wall on the sides of the memorial. These names were of the 1,177 crewmen that were killed on that fateful day. In turn, I had mixed feelings of remorse and patriotism. I got to see first hand the sacrifices for freedom these men made and the results of what I had learned from a textbook. After a few minutes of taking it all in, I felt a new appreciation for my country and for the history that surrounded it.

A textbook can only give you so much. It can describe and summarize a historical event, but it can’t teach you to be in the moment. Often times, there is no personalization and connection. I remember learning the order of the lineage of France’s past Kings. Like Ta-Nehisi Coates learning French, I didn’t appreciate the knowledge and wondered why I was learning it in the first place. But my visitation of Pearl Harbor was also similar to Ta-Nehisi visiting France for the first time. Once I actually experienced the countless facts and stories that I was required to memorize, I found a purpose as to why it was important.