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LEHMAN TWP. — While basketball players, wrestlers and swimmers trained hard for district championships late in February, another set of competitors at Lake-Lehman High School honed their skills for a very different tournament.
A dozen students, ranging from freshmen to seniors, put the final touches on websites, documentaries and a range of presentations for the National History Day regionals held at Misericordia University on March 7. They are all in history teacher Mike Novrocki’s elective course on History Day.
Students can take the course many times throughout their high school years, and their class “final exam” is the competition itself.
This year’s theme is “Leadership and Legacy in History.” From the first day of school last September, these young people worked on first finding a person, a movement, a process, something somewhere in the chronicles of time, who caught their interest. Finding that topic, they take on the challenge of creating outstanding presentations to bring the history to life.
Why do they take on the projects?
“History is a neat subject,” said senior Jason Field, from Noxen. “In science or math, there’s one answer and that’s final. But in history there’s always a different perspective. And each perspective has its own truth.”
Field and two of his classmates, Katie Bartuska, of Lake Silkworth, and Noah Creswell, from Harveys Lake, teamed up to produce a documentary about Ho Chi Minh.
They found his story to be an interesting one, because of his singular leadership during the Vietnam conflict.
“Here in America, we had a series of leaders, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, during the war,” Field said. “But on the North Vietnamese side, there was only one. We wanted to look at the other side of the situation and examine his role.”
This year’s topics range from the Vietnamese leader to two Germans – Otto von Bismarck and Konrad Adenauer – who each had a leading role in the German nation and its relationship with the rest of the world, environmentalists John Muir and Marjorie Harris Carr, nursing pioneer Clara Barton, architect Frank Lloyd Wright and, from the pair of freshmen in the class, Calvin Goddard, whose work in forensic science and ballistics led the way to today’s crime-solving methods of matching bullet striations.
“I’m interested in ballistics,” said shy, soft-spoken Olivia Vasey, of Sweet Valley.
She and her best friend, Krystin Chaga, said they both have an interest in guns and they wanted to know more about the science behind them.
Senior Elana Herceg, from Sweet Valley, teamed up with her classmate Lana Sicurella, from Lake Silkworth, will be in the newest competiton category, with their website showing the work and times of Carr, whose campaign to block a cross-Florida canal protected the environment there.
National History Day has become a highly regarded academic exercise for students from sixth through 12th grades. More than half a million students throughout the nation participate annually, choosing historical topics related to a theme. They can work individually or in teams to produce original papers, exhibits, documentaries, performances and even websites to showcase their research for regional competitions. Winners advance to state levels and the national finals at the University of Maryland.
Along the way, they work on valuable skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, research and the ability to articulate what they have learned in an articulate fashion.
In many schools, especially in the middle school level, history teachers require their students to come up with History Day projects.
“We found, though, that was counter-productive,” Novrocki said. “A lot of kids really weren’t interested, didn’t like the work, just plain didn’t care. So, now, here at Lake-Lehman, History Day is an elective class and the students who opt to put it in their schedule have a real interest in doing this work.”
Novrocki has a history of his own with the competition. That started in 1988 when the then sophomore at Wyoming Valley West High School came up with a project about coal mining in the Wyoming Valley. The project took first place honors in the regional competition.
The regional trophy whetted his appetite for more and the following year, Novrocki produced a documentary on radio pioneer Fr. Joseph Murgas, which swept the first place honors from regional through states and to the national competition. And the rest validated the cliché.
From that point on, Novrocki involved himself in the History Day competitions as either an advisor, a judge or regional coordinator.
His first stint at advising was at Abington Heights High School, and since beginning his teaching career at Lake-Lehman High School, he has guided students to an almost historical record of wins in the competition. Lake-Lehman has been ranked an “Outstanding School” in the competition since 2003 and in 2013 was named “Outstanding” at the state level for the most winning entries of any high school in Pennsylvania. Incidentally, that same year, Novrocki himself received the Teacher of the Year award in the state competition.
In his “regular” history classes, Novrocki brings history to life with interactive projects that take the kids into life in the past. The History Day elective is like going from a regular gym class right to the varsity squad.
And the kids bring their A-game.
“I like the challenge,” said junior Kaley Egan, who describes herself as “not really a history person.”
“I’m really science-based,” she said. “So I picked John Muir. He’s like me. He cared about the natural world around us and wanted to protect it. So do I.”
Sophomore Beth Bartuska, Katie’s sister, said she got into the class because her sister talked so much about it and “seemed to enjoy it.” Now exploring the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, she’s looking at ways he brought nature into his buildings, both figuratively and literally.
“I really wanted to challenge myself,” she said.
The overlying theme of this class is taking a look back at the way people took on their world to try to change it, usually for the better.
Some of the kids willingly take on the challenge several times.
Like Kristin Lalish, a junior from Lehman. She took the class as a freshman and presented a picture of the Chicago meat packing industry with the help of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.” This year she’s developed a documentary on German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his post-World War II work with a divided nation. She summed up the work in the History Day class.
“It’s taking a really hard look at what went on before,” she said. “You get to look back, analyze, realize what happened. And then you bring it forward, so people now can understand it more.”