When I taught middle school social studies, I required many things from my students.  One of these things was to know these three dates and their significance.  I rarely focused on dates.  I focused on teaching my students how to think, not what to think.  I approached teaching history in a way that was most compelling and less reliant on memorization.  

 

The first date I emphasized was December 7, 1941.  I showed a clip from the movie Pearl Harbor to augment my teaching on the subject.  This day was a transformative day for our country.  Were the sanctions imposed on FDR the provocation for this attack?  What were those sanctions?  Why were they imposed?  What prompted Japan to act as it did to invoke our sanctions?  My effort was to prompt my students to think deeper about the subject rather than just regurgitate the answer of ‘ December 7th, 1941 was the day Japan bombed Pearly Harbor. Approximately 2500 people were killed.’  The roots of this attack began at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

 

The second date I emphasized was June 6, 1944.  I showed a clip from the movie Saving Private Ryan (a permission slip was required due to the graphic nature of this clip).  This day proved to be the most significant day in preventing the potential end of Western civilization. If the United States and its NATO allies had failed on D-Day the result of WWII could have been horribly different.  The heroism of Britain during the blitz was emphasized, the heroism in Stalingrad was emphasized, but D-Day was the event that allowed our troops and our allies to get a foothold in Western Europe and led to the fall of Nazi Germany.  Those men on that day embodied the heroism, valor, and patriotism of the men at Lexington, Concord, and Valley Forge.  

 

The third date I emphasized was September 11, 2001.  Most of the students I taught were very young at the time of this attack.  I showed them several video clips of this horrific day.  They needed to understand the severity of this day; why it is so emphasized in the media.  They learned about each of the targeted areas, Al Qaeda, and our response.  They saw the reaction to this terrible day by president George W. Bush.  This day could not be forgotten or glossed over.  Our nation was viciously attacked and they needed to understand part of their American culture.  I taught them about our resolve as a nation to never back down, never surrender, and to relentlessly hunt down those responsible.  The nation became united, as it has not since.  Our faith in God consoled our grief.  

These dates beyond all others were critical to understanding modern America.  Being proud to be an American was not a catchphrase; not a meme.  Being an American meant learning about the good, the bad, and the ugly about our history, and understanding our culture, which was forged in war, trials, and triumphs that no other nation in the history of the world can match.