Researching a Teacher

Guest post by Olivia Cummings

For our Twitter reenactment I chose a fictional character. With a fictional character I had to figure out when this teacher would have started in Milwaukee and when she was going to bring her students to the zoo to make sure it matched up with the timeline. Even though my character was fictional, I still had to do some research to make her seem real. I found an elementary school that was functioning during the time of the reenactment and that was Longfellow Elementary. I also dove into the Google Doc that was created for us to use some primary sources and figured out when my character would be relevant to the zoo. A big part of my fictional character’s historical background was the controversy of field trips within schools during her time. A lot of people thought that if a teacher wanted to take her students somewhere for learning purposes, they should do it on the weekends to not disrupt their learning within the classroom. I had my character be controversial and do it during the school week because she thought that the weekend would cause fewer of her students to be there and they wouldn’t learn as much because to them they weren’t in school.