Two of my favorite days to teach are the two that Terri and I take the entire 8th-grade class (58-60 students) out of the classroom for two hours each day to weave together both of our content areas with social awareness/justice. The two of us were fortunate to attend a workshop sponsored by Facing History and Ourselves, in which they taught us some techniques and lessons for teaching Alexandra Zapruder’s Salvaged Pages. (This is an anthology of diaries by teenagers who lived in ghettos and concentration camps during World War II.) The workshop is the basis from which we teach these two days, and they have become some of the most meaningful teaching we do. Part of it is the content, but the other part is the rare glimpse we get of each other teaching, and the ways we are able to piggyback off of each other’s comments and teaching styles. I think I learn something new every time we teach this because we each grow in our own knowledge, and then we pass this along to our students in different ways.
We begin our first day discussing why teenagers write, and then reading some of the diary entries and asking the students to determine why those particular authors wrote. The students then watch a video about the stages of the war, and they begin to understand the years of preparation that it took to make the Holocaust happen. They read different primary source documents from Kristallnacht, including newspaper articles, and telegrams, and the realization hits that this night of destruction is not something that just occurred: it was planned in detail, in writing, with many stipulations.
Day Two Reflection
On the second day of our cross-curricular lesson we gathered with kids interested, but a little more cautious than they were on day one. I think they thought it would be more of the same and didn't want to look at more PSD. We started this lesson with a clip from MTV’s documentary “I’m Still Here: Diaries of Young People Who Lived During the Holocaust.” The clip we show is only about 4 minutes long, short enough we can view it several times through the activity, long enough to add layers of depth to our content.
Through multiple viewings of the clip, students share their reactions, analyze specific elements, and discuss editing and presentation choices. With each viewing students are more deeply immersed in the content and are challenged to consider different perspectives. This technique of re-visiting the same material with various purposes in mind shows rather than tells the kids that they can learn something new each time they read a text, especially if they are looking for different elements.
The video itself is heavy because of the content. Students become connected to this “anonymous girl” as actors read her diary and music and images are used to enhance the somber and depressing mood. The connection deepens when we read the end of her diary to them, and the ominous meaning of her interrupted sentence sinks in. The possibilities of what happened to her, and why she ends mid-sentence begin to run through their minds.
One can almost feel the relief from the students when the next activity is a kinesthetic one: they are told to move to a location in which they have plenty of room and are given index cards to write down words or phrases that jump out at them as they read one of the provided diary entries. The kids then create found poetry from the words they have taken from these texts, and they present them to one another. This is a wonderful way to end this heavy two days because the students are able to create something that connects them to teenagers living very different lives from what they know. Empathy is growing in them deeper and stronger as a result of experiencing someone else’s life through the written word.
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