Lest We Forget

We had our school Remembrance Day Assembly on Thursday.  We planned for the local Legion to bring their Colour Guard, for some of our older students read In Flanders Field and some of their original Remembrance Day poetry, and for many of our students to wear their uniforms from Cadets, Scouts, Guides, Cubs, Brownies, Beavers, and Sparks and then lay wreaths at the Cenotaph.  We even had a school family provide a WWI bugle with all of the battles it had served in etched on it between the bumps and dents left by falling shrapnel at Lena, Ypres, the Somme, and Vimy Ridge. The plan was good and our guests arrived, and then everything started to go wrong.  Oh Canada would play in the first two devices that we set up, and the music brought for The Last Post didn’t work in our cd player, in the stereo or the two laptops that we tried.  We were literally on Plan D when our teacher-librarian used her iPhone to download it from iTunes.  We kept our heads, crossed out fingers and started the assembly—sweating.  In the end, it all worked out and we breathed a huge sigh of relief.  And then, after the students left, an elderly woman came to the office to let us know that she was a girl during WWII, and that this was the most touching Remembrance Day service that she had ever attended.  She said that it was relevant and thoughtful, and that whoever put the program together did so with great care and consideration.  Wow.

I think that that last comment is an important reminder about the effort that we put into things and our worrying about everything being perfect.  No one—apart from a Principal, a teacher, a teacher-librarian, and the representative from the Legion—knew what a fuss we had happened getting the assembly ready.  the audience just knew that we hit the mark, and that is the point in the end.  Isn’t it?