Students gain insights into veterans' lives

U.S. history teacher Jeff Hinton has dedicated his classes at the Northwest Career and Technical Academy to honoring veterans for the better part of a school year.

Hinton created a project titled Voices of Our Veterans for his students to complete. The objective was for pupils to go into the community and interview local veterans and maybe learn a little something along the way. What actually happened was much more significant.

Inside Hinton's classroom at the academy, 8200 W. Tropical Parkway, pictures of veterans and newspaper clippings of military-related stories line the wall, offering a glimpse of the work students have been completing.

As the first part of the project, students were required to conduct oral interviews with a veteran that would later be transcribed and recorded as an oral history. Selected veterans could be family members or people from the community.

Junior Alyssa Sims interviewed her father. "It was very cool because it wasn't just listening to a veteran. It was his life," said Sims, 17.

As a Marine, her dad described experiences of which Sims hadn't a clue. "Honestly, I thought this project was going to be boring," Sims said.

Working on the assignment also made Sims aware of an unexpected interest in collecting histories. Her favorite part was hearing her dad's memories of events she had no knowledge of before.

Hinton said many of his students created a deeper connection with a loved one through the project. Hinton got the idea for it from an experience he had, or didn't have, with his uncle. Hinton's uncle served in the Vietnam War, and when he came home, was reluctant to discuss his time in the military. His uncle died at 52, and Hinton never had a chance to talk to him about his experiences.

"It has kind of bothered me ever since that I never got to speak with him about his wartime service," Hinton said.

This experience prompted Hinton to create the Voices of Our Veterans project to preserve histories of the U.S. military that have never been told. He wanted his students' work to have a lasting impact.

An aspect he didn't consider before handing out the assignment was the sense of importance his students would glean from talking to the veterans.

"They're talking about a subject that's been off the table," Hinton said.

Families have brought in mementos for Hinton to peruse, including a scrapbook of a World War II veteran's experience from mission to being missing in action and then to being a prisoner of war in Germany.

"I'm going through this thing and I'm learning things I didn't know about," Hinton said.

Letters, telegrams and military posts tell the story of the veteran in ways a textbook never could. Hinton scanned all of the documents with the family's permission and plans to use the information to create lessons about the World War II era.

About 40 of the transcribed interviews are being sent to the Library of Congress Veterans History Project. To complement the oral portion, students also were required to create documentary videos that can be aired on the website www. voicesofourveterans.org. On April 26, Hinton and the Northwest Career and Technical Academy hosted a program that displayed the students' work to the public.

For more information or to suggest a veteran for future projects, call 576-4566 or visit the website.

Contact View education reporter Laura Emerson at lemerson@viewnews.com or 380-4588.