 In the last couple years I've been fortunate to do quite a bit of work with teacher training programs and getting teachers, young teachers, new teachers to utilize the world around them as a place to teach using historic sites, cemeteries, monuments, museums as places where history not only transpired but where it continues to evolve in the dynamics of historical interpretation. It's been great because here teaching on the doorstep of the nation's capital, which is literally the laboratory of democracy, there are a lot of places I can send students to, for example, Ford's Theater, Arlington House, Gunston Hall, Mount Vernon, all teachers should be encouraged to look right outside their own schoolroom door to find places around them that can be used within a historical context for the students that are in that school building. The last 35 years I think there's been a huge push in pedagogy to get students to learn whatever subject they're studying through a real hands-on applicable approach as opposed to didactic, straight information being given and taken in, so that I don't think is so unusual anymore. What I think one has to do is one has to decide for themselves what places around them they can tap into and what I use as a term is keeping a keen eye open to looking at things. I'm like any other teacher that I take ideas from other people that I've seen and learning how they do it and then applying it in my classes. For example, for the last 20 years I've been taking students to Gettysburg. The way I do Gettysburg today versus the way I did it in the early 90s is very, very different and that was a result of maturation on my part in terms of reading more and more about Gettysburg getting into the material, visiting several times, but the real break came when I actually got to go as part of a symposium on Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain in the 20th Maine who arguably is one of the heroes of the Battle of Gettysburg and I actually got to follow along with one of the Battlefield Guides, a guy by the name of Gary Cross and Gary had a binder with him and at different places he was reading different accounts of what happened and I said this is genius and this is great stuff and so I began to adapt that and then as time went on it got to the point where, you know, I don't have to be the one that's doing this. I can make my students do this. So now when we do the Gettysburg field trip which is an annual rite of passage in October we do it where I do some of the presentations and then students are responsible for being what I call teenage historians where they tell the narrative because that gets them engaged, that gets them immersed in the experience and it allows me to step back, watch and allow my students to take charge.