Broken Barriers Symposium

National History Day is easily one of my favorite days to hate. I think the idea is cool, but I don't like how it takes up so much of Ivory's ENGLISH class. They don't study that much ENGLISH because they are busy writing papers for History. And yes...I get it. Doing research and writing is part of ENGLISH, but I still think there is too much focus on this one project. If you want more details about how it all works, you can look back at last year's post about Ivory's Susan B. Anthony project.

In the meantime, things were not how they should have been because Covid hit just a week or so before NHD day. That meant no large competition in person. But everything could still be sent in by video and many things like websites would be viewed online anyway. It mostly meant no interviews and I don't really know how much that accounts for in the scoring process.

To Ivory it meant they bumped up her day to perform by a week. Instead of waiting until the actual day, they wanted all performances early so they could judge them and get results back on the now extinct history day. Ivory was not happy about it. She had to not only write the script, but memorize it as well. She buckled down and did a great job. She had too much information in her performance and her performance was running past the designated 10 minute timeline, but she worked out the bugs and got it down to almost ten minutes exactly.

Because of Covid, we were also limited to where we could go to perform. I had some ideas previously, but everything was on serious lockdown by that time, so we used our lovely living room. Tyler created a backdrop to go on the TV behind her and we made do. When in Rome...

Ivory did a great job. She only took two takes which is amazing in my opinion. Spoiler: She didn't move on, but I'm really fine with that. And since everything was done online, it didn't have the same feel for the winners I'm assuming. (I don't know, maybe winning virtually is just as good.) Here are some pictures Robyn took while Ivory was performing.

Here is her presentation if you'd like to watch. It is very interesting. Her project was on Pompeii. It was a tricky topic to begin with since there aren't many first person sources about the account. Most people involved, died. Ivory still found a lot of interesting facts and I think you might enjoy listening.

Once again, I'm super excited NHD is done. And if I can keep my kids out of the advanced program, this might be the very last one for us. That's something to smile about. :)