The focus for this week’s Student Blogging Challenge is “We’re All The Same … We’re All Different.” Thinking about that, and thinking about this week in history, struck me. This Remembrance Day marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I. WWI was called “the Great War” and was said to be “the war that ends all wars” … and yet less than thirty years later, World War II broke out. Next year will be the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of World War II. Although we haven’t had another “world war” since then, we’ve had multiple conflicts that have involved multiple countries. We are all human, and yet as societies, there is still so much violence in our reactions to differences between us.

So this week, I’m going to ask you to go in a slightly different direction with our blogging challenge. One of the things I’ve noticed in past years is that many students your age – and even many adults – don’t really mark Remembrance Day. They attend the assemblies, but when it comes to November 11, and thinking about the sacrifices that were made to bring us the human rights that are so celebrated in Canada and many western countries and so absent in others … November 11 is simply a day off school or off work.

Your tasks, therefore, are to choose one of the following options:

• Learn about and share information on one of the two World Wars, explaining why students your age should mark Remembrance Day.
• Learn and write about a current conflict that is wracking the world, and explain why we should know about the conflict.
• Interview older family members and, with their permission, share their experiences of the war(s).
• Come up with another topic, something related to Remembrance Day, and propose it to me.

This is meant to be a thoughtful reflection about Remembrance Day, and I will expect detailed, reflective, well-written blogs. Although I’m not expecting an essay, I am expecting more than a short paragraph or two. Consult the I’m a Blogger page or see this post for advice about writing good blogs.