One more piece of information
By Patrick Kelley
Originally published 01:35 p.m., February 5, 2008
Updated 01:35 p.m., February 5, 2008
One piece of information was missing from Friday’s report about “Life in a Jar,” the play that was performed at Southern Coffey County Middle School.
The play, which grew out of a 1999 project by four students at Uniontown High School, tells the story of Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic woman who saved 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis in World War II. It has been performed hundreds of times in the United States and abroad — raising money for Sendler and other surviving Poles who helped Jews during the war — and some of the former students are still in the cast.
Sendler’s story of humanity and courage is inspiring, as is that of the students who have dedicated years to telling it.
What was not mentioned in The Gazette article was the Emporia connection. The teacher who started the students on the project, guided them through it and continues to be involved in the production is Norm Conard, who was inducted last year into Emporia’s National Teachers Hall of Fame.
Usually, it is said that teachers chosen for induction into the hall of fame are being honored, and in a way, that is true. But it is equally true that the hall of fame is honored by the participation of the teachers it selects.
That is certainly the case in the induction of Conard, who helped four middle-school girls from a small Kansas town discover the world and history and then taught them how to use what they had learned to make a difference in peoples’ lives.
That is what teaching — at its best — is all about.