Eleanor Roosevelt and her slave brigade

Each day, at the beginning of class, we do what my school calls "brainwork." I usually have a quote or a penetrating question that will cause them to think deeply and analyze it from another perspective. Monday's quote was a portion of one of my favorites:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood." -Theodore Roosevelt

I asked them why the credit would belong to someone who is "marred by dust and sweat and blood." I asked them what this quote means to them personally. The following conversation ensued with VGM, one of the more intelligent students I have.

VM: "Wasn't there a woman with that name?"

Me: "A woman named Theodore Roosevelt?"

VM: "Yeah, or something like that. She did a lot of stuff."

Me: "Do you mean Eleanor Roosevelt ?"

VM: "Oh, yeah, was that Theodore Roosevelt's wife?"

Me: "No, she was actually the wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was also a president, just 20 years later."

VM: "Oh. Didn't she help with the slaves. Didn't she build the tunnels under the ground?"

Me: "No. That was Harriet Tubman. She did that during the Civil War, Eleanor Roosevelt wasn't even alive."

On a related note, I gave an example from the Civil War to help explain the historical fiction genre and a good chunk of my students thought the Civil War was fought in the 1920s.