In 1967, Molly Kalkman sat with friends in front of the television, watching the birth-date lottery to decide which 19-year-olds would be drafted. Her son Ankeet's birthday was drawn. He was bound for Vietnam.

"I didn't want Ankeet to go, but I felt lucky John (her husband) didn't have to go," she said. The next day, John, an inactive reservist, was called to active duty. The family was torn asunder.

In 1968, John would be killed while leading his son's unit in battle, and Ankeet would have to help carry his father's body out of the jungle and into the field hospital at ... the nurse's office of Penfield High School.

The trauma was all part of a creative exercise in living history created last year for honors English and Advanced Placement U.S. history classes at the Rochester-area school. "1968: A Human Experience" was led by Lee Anne Birkemeier and Elizabeth Smith, two teachers who were not even alive in 1968, in collaboration with Arthur Brown of the Young Audiences of Rochester at Monroe BOCES No. 1.

Through active learning and role play, the students experienced the cultural changes and the emotions that altered American society. It was the watershed year of the Tet Offensive and the My Lai massacre.

Brown's participation was part of a multi-year grant by the New York State Council on the Arts. He and the teachers developed a flexible curriculum matched to state standards in social studies, English Language Arts and arts.

Teacher Jack Langerak, who served in Vietnam, provided guidance. All are members of the Penfield Education Association. Also contributing was Don Strickland, a past president of the local now headed by Michael Sinnott.

Like home

For three weeks, 80 minutes a day, 29 students assumed the roles of individuals in a community much like Penfield during 1968. Some were soldiers, others were brothers, sisters, mothers and dads.

When the seven students who were soldiers shipped out, they really relocated. While the home folks worked in Birkemeier's room, the overseas contingent worked in Smith's room. The families had to communicate with the soldiers by mail.

The students were allowed to develop their own characters. Kalkman, as the mother and wife of soldiers, decided for herself whether she would resent or support the war.

The students had to read from the literature and journalism of the time, write journals, and prepare news articles and television broadcasts. A captured soldier might spend two days in the library studying the subject of prisoners of war before preparing a first-person account.

"They did a lot of writing, and it was creative, but it had to be historically accurate," said Smith.

The soldiers went to "boot camp" - two days of intensive training on the campus under actual Army recruiting officers. They patrolled the campus blindfolded to simulate the terror of jungle warfare. They lost comrades. Some were cast into the unknown future of being missing in action.

One family, with no draftees, embraced the counter-culture. No one told them to become hippies, but they decorated their space in Birkemeier's room with '60s art and posters, listened to protest music and dressed the part.

A fate card informed a girl whose brother was a soldier that she had been arrested for breaking into a recruiting office, and she was going to jail. She was embarrassed, but her "father" was devastated. "Today came the biggest disappointment of my parental career," wrote Peter Schultz.

Leading the final patrol, John Serron was handed a fate card that said he had been shot in ambush, dying in his sergeant's arms. The hometown folks received a "death-gram" delivered by a "stranger." His "wife" broke into literal tears.

The end of the project came with a ceremony in which the boys returned from the war. They marched silently through the hallways lined with students who either cheered or jeered them. When they reached the room where they were reunited with family and friends - after nearly three weeks apart - the soldiers kept to themselves.

Until the end, the teachers were not sure what would happen. That gave the project vitality.

"We had no idea whether it would work," said Smith. "I haven't felt that proud about teaching in a long time."

Said Birkemeier, "You always hope that your class will be the one they remember forever."

- Ned R. Hoskin

Realism

"The most realistic experience I had wasn't even at school," said Ankeet Udani. "It was at home when I was reading the letters Erica (his 14-year-old 'sister') and Molly (his 'mother') had written to John. I was really affected by how sad they'd feel if they knew that their father and husband never got the letters."

Teachers Lee Anne Birkemeier and Elizabeth Smith doled out certain "fate cards" that advanced the drama and prodded students into new areas of learning.

"We were never so excited to go to class," said Birkemeier.