Me in Place

When we sit down to dinner, sometimes I’ll say, why don’t you tell Grandma something you learned today? And they tell her some fact. To which she responds, did you learn that in school? “No! We learned it from Fetch!” they say. Fetch is a show they watch on PBS. So, I always say, “Girls, I can’t wait until you spout off a fact your awesome history teacher told you instead of something you heard on TV.”(Their awesome history teacher being me, of course.)

Yesterday…Victory!

We’re doing a chronological history of the world, and yesterday we were talking about the Thirty Year’s War. At its most basic roots, the problem was that Ferdinand II got all greedy and powerful and became the Holy Roman Emperor. He decided he wanted to get rid of the Protestants and make everyone be Catholic, but there were some rebellious Protestants Princes in Germany (At that time, Germany was split up into smaller “states,” and each area had its own prince to rule them) who fought back. Ferdinand got hisself all skeered and ran away and left two of his advisors in charge of an area in Bohemia where the Rebel Protestant Peoples were getting riled up. Well, when the Rebellious German Protestant Princes got themselves a big angry mob together, they all chased the two advisors. The two advisors then were like, hey, whaddup Ferdinand? This ain’t right! They ran to a castle and hid upstairs. But those angry Protestants stormed that castle (“Have fun storming the castle, boys!”) and they found those two scaredy cat advisors and they threw them out the window! They dropped fifty feet to the courtyard and landed in a pile of manure, hopped up and ran away. This led to the start of the Thirty Year’s War (which actually lasted 41 years, FYI). And now that event is known as the Defenestration of Prague. (Defenestration being the act of throwing someone out the window, for all my Congressional readers.)

Ooh… it was good. “So, what did you learn in school today, Girls?”

“There were these mad people and they chased the two men that the guy left in charge and they went into a castle and they threw the guys out the window into a pile of cow poo! And THEY SURVIVED! And then there was a war called Thirty Year’s War, which was actually 41 years, because someone threw someone in poo!!!”  (Giggling ensues.)

And the history teacher just smiled.

(by the way, the interesting guitar song playing is called Defenestrator. Had to use it!)

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.