Our Grandpas

In my ten year old class today, we had to read a newspaper article. It's called Kids Times and is supposed to be current events, written in children's language. Either most of the articles are too hard or aren't very very interesting. Today's though, the article sparked a good conversation. It was about the recent Earthquake in Turkey and what Korea was doing to help. One of my students informed me that Turkey helped South Korea in the Korean war. That lead to a conversation about the war. It's pretty humbling to have my 10 year old students teaching me world history, in their second language! Amazing!

I told them that my Grandpa came to Asia to fight in the Korean war. They were impressed by this and began telling me about their grandfathers who also fought in the war. It didn't occur to me until then that most of the grandfathers probably did fight. It was a cool realization that our grandpas fought together in the same war, half way across the world!

Then we started talking about the boys in our class and how they will be drafted into the military for 2 years after college. I asked them how they felt about it. They both said they didn't want to. When I went to the DMZ, the tour guide said that most Korean moms cry when their sons get the draft letter. So sad. One student said, "I wish it was like the USA, where men don't HAVE to join." :( I don't know what the answer is. I just remember how young the soldiers looked at the DMZ. Those will be my students in less than 10 years...