The day the president gave a speech to the nation's children from her classroom

Cynthia Mostoller has always believed in bringing history to life. Through the years, she has brought in professional historians, designed Revolutionary War-era newspapers, held birthday celebrations for important but neglected women, and led rousing in-class renditions of American folk songs like “Yankee Doodle.”

Mostoller, an eighth-grade history teacher at Alice Deal Junior High in northwest Washington, D.C., doesn’t have many students falling asleep in class. She certainly didn’t have any students snoozing when President Bush the First addressed the nation’s students from her classroom in 1991, and she doesn’t expect to have any snoozing on Tuesday, when President Obama addresses kids on a similar topic — the importance of education.

This week, via e-mail, I asked Mostoller about those rare occasions when presidents give speeches addressed directly to children.

First, it bears noting that this is a teacher who takes her calling seriously. For years, as the Washington Post noted in 2005, Mostoller has trained other teachers, and used a curriculum she created herself to present U.S. history from Colonial times through 1900.

Her personal connections have helped create unusual and fascinating opportunities for her students. One day in 2005, for example, some of her students led the pledge of allegiance at the National Archives when President George W. Bush dedicated the renovated rotunda that displays the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Hers is a unique American story. Born on a farm in Ohio, she married right out of high school and immediately started spending her days shopping and cooking for farmhands. But she went back to school, got her degree in history from the University of Akron, and in 1985 took on a life-changing trip to the nation’s capital. In Washington for a conference, she stopped in at the school district office to ask about teaching in the D.C. school system.

As she was preparing to go home, the principal of Deal Junior High called and offered her a job. A history teacher had died two days before classes were to begin.

Mostoller is lukewarm about using the Internet for studies of history and skeptical about such things as “standards” and “critical thinking” because, as she told the Post for the first of the newspaper’s 2005 profiles on educational innovators, they “don’t mean anything to the kids.”

Back in October 1991, when President George H.W. Bush spoke to America’s schoolchildren via live TV hookup, he was speaking from her classroom.

“You know, all over America, thousands of schools do succeed, even against tough odds, even against all odds,” Bush said that day. “Kids from all over the District of Columbia petition to get into Alice Deal School here because parents know this school works. It works because of teachers like the one standing over here, Ms. Mostoller, ... decided at the age of 25 that she wanted to teach.

“She was standing in a supermarket checkout line when she saw a magazine ad about college. She went back to school, worked her way through in seven years, waiting tables to pay tuition. She made it, and so can you,” Bush said.

I asked Mostoller what she remembered about Bush’s 1991 speech, what she thought the impact of Obama’s speech might be, and her opinion of the protests about his address.

“I spent some time going through my video of the 1991 visit as well as the newspaper clippings and photographs of the (Bush) event,” she wrote back on Saturday.

“His message that day was the same as the one I expect President Obama to make on Tuesday: Go to bed early, get to school on time, complete your assignments as best as you can, and work toward a rewarding future. Seems like the good, old-fashioned midwestern values I grew up with in Ohio.”

Mostoller expressed disappointment and bafflement at the way some conservatives are portraying Obama’s speech.

“I don’t understand the partisan controversy behind this,” she wrote. “Every president, every year, should start the school year with a message of hope and inspiration. Who better than the one person we elected to advocate for our best interests?”

Partisan politics — and that’s what’s behind this current controversy — has no place in the classroom. It didn’t when Bush chose Mostoller’s classroom for his 1991 pep talk.

“My students in 1991 were much less concerned about his political affiliation than they were having the opportunity to meet the president and be on TV,” she wrote. “The hate-mongers and political pundits looking for trouble where there is none need to give it a rest. Public education is one of the pillars of our free society. We support it with tax dollars because we appreciate its inherent value. We should worry when the president is not interested in promoting education.”

So it’s come to this? People fear a president’s interest in public education so much they’ll pull their kids out of class?

“(Addressing the importance of education) seems like a no-brainer and I regret very much that the few rabble-rousers out there with hurtful agendas have been given so much attention,” Mostoller wrote.

“There were a lot of wonderful kids sitting in my room that day — and many have gone on to be successful adults.

“Did his speech in 1991 change the world? Maybe not, but it did introduce public education into the national agenda in a way that hadn’t been done since the space race of the 1960s. Let’s hope Obama’s speech re-invigorates our engagement in education. Our future depends on it.”

Wise words from a teacher who sees the big picture.