Texas State History Museum

Photography in displays or movies prohibited. DOH.

Well... four hours of being surrounded by schoolkids eight to ten years old. Very tiring. Some history of Texas is fascinating. Some is fascinating and vile. Nice museum, though, for sure, and high-quality movies with great musical scores.

Stars everywhere. There was a coin, first coins struck in what is now Texas, by Mexico, and they have a single star on the back. Small. And their first flags had a star. So that star is old, for Texas.

There were designs on the floor that reminded me of those in the Phoenix airport that Holly and I saw on the way to San Diego. But these weren't tile. They were sections of poured floor between brass dividers.

I read the Texas declaration of independence all the way through, in a reproduction of the original. I liked a lot of the wording. One of their charges, though, was that Mexico hadn't provided schools.

It has failed to establish any public system of education, although possessed of almost boundless resources, (the public domain,) and although it is an axiom in political science, that unless a people are educated and enlightened, it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty, or the capacity for self government.

So there we were, surrounded by a few hundred public school students of 175 years later. Each had a checklist of questions and they were zipping around trying to find the answers. On kid popped up between Kirby and what he was trying to read. Then two others did. Totally obscured what he was looking at. Then a teacher said "If there aren't any answers, move on." They took that as a clue that they were looking in the wrong place, so they stopped reading and zoomed off.

Another time two girls were reading something I was reading. Their teacher said "[Name. NAME!] Come here, right now!" They stopped reading and went to the group. The teacher said for everyone to take a slow, deep breath, and they did, and she said to focus on the fact that they had nothing left to do now but to go down and leave. The teacher was stressed; the kids weren't. It seemed cool to her that it was over. The kids (at least those two) were more interested in reading about the history of Texas.