Students will be able to post their essays until 2:00 pm Thursday, May 22nd. I suggest you split your essay into two parts and make two (2) comments instead one given the character limitation of the comment field. You'll want to post the last half first - then the top half of your essay.
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What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to Me
Imagining a world without people of the Jewish faith seems highly unlikely today, but there was a period of time when it became dangerously close to becoming reality. Ever since the sixth grade, I’ve been really interested in the Holocaust. I read a book called Number the Stars by Lois Lowry and have never been able to forget it, despite how young I was. After that I read The Diary of Anne Frank and that was another one of the most memorable books I have ever read. I grew up wanting to be able to fathom what could have been so horrible in the outside world that forced the people of the Jewish faith to hide out in terror and uncertainty. When I learned of what the Germans were trying so hard to accomplish, I wondered what could be the reason for the German cruelty. And how come nobody tried to intervene to help the Jews, until it was far too late to make much of a difference? Why were so many allowed to be killed before the Allies interfered? I wanted an answer when people asked me how such a great, proud country allowed such horrifying things to happen; things we could never be proud of.
When I first walked into the classroom, I walked in with a substantial amount of knowledge regarding the Jewish persecution and something about their treatment in the concentration camps. What I did not know however, is just as important: how all of it was allowed to happen. What led to the slaughtering of so many, so fast? Why was there a very real attempt to extinguish an entire faith?
After reading Night by Elie Wiesel freshman year, I told my English teacher about wanting to know more about the Holocaust and she recommended I take the Facing History and Ourselves course. I guess I just really wanted to understand why the country I had always been so gratified with stood by and watched as so many innocent men, women, and children were brutally murdered. Even now, I can’t claim to understand everything but I do know that the Holocaust was a time that shamed humanity, and that sometimes, history should never again be repeated. I really think this course did something to change me into a better person, and I hope that I never forget the lessons I learned and benefitted from right from the beginning of the course.
In the beginning of the semester, we focused mainly on readings that required us to really push our minds in order for us to wrap our heads around what horrible things the readings were suggesting. Things that never occurred to me before began to surface. We spent a lot of time in groups and then we had class discussions. I think these collaborative discussions made it much easier to freely share our opinions and thoughts with each other. A lot of us found ourselves with perspectives differing from that of our fellow classmates and even close friends. I found myself forced into a multitude of situations where I didn’t know the answer, but others thought they did. I also found myself unable to accept the answers I was being given. There is no way to explain why the African Americans were treated worse than dogs, even after the Civil War was fought, not without embarrassing ourselves. I really liked that we started off this course by exploring who we were first: I found out who I thought I was walking in, and am now able to compare it to who I am now, after everything I have seen and every lesson I have learned.
One of the lessons that I remember really well was that one where we talked about immediately judging someone based on their appearance. We looked at a couple of cartoons and the one I keep going back to in my head was the one where an old white lady came face to face with a kid in school and they made mental lists in their head before even saying hi. The lady saw the boy with his cap on crooked and baggy clothes and deemed him a trouble maker. Unfortunately, I think everyone does this, especially when they’re nervous. I remember walking the streets in the city of Boston and coming across a gang of African American boys and immediately thinking that I should lower my gaze and keep on walking. I was fine when I was going by a group of Caucasian kids.
Then there are the films, which end up being the main source of our education for this course. I learned at least one very important message by the end of every one of them, even though some of them are really difficult for me to put in words. There were seven films in particular that really stuck with me: 1.) Hotel Rwanda. Hotel Rwanda is probably one of the best movies I have ever seen regarding genocide or a tragic event. I have seen it at least five times already because I feel that it does such a good job of capturing the Rwandan genocide, including such a personal story of involvement, complete with every emotion and heart-wrenching moment. 2.) The Swing Kids. I love that movie of a boy becoming in touch who he was and who he wants to be. I learned that kids in the Nazi youth group went ahead and turned their own family members in, and could forget who they were and what they stood for in just a few weeks. This movie wasn’t even originally about standing up for the Jews, the kids just wanted to keep their music. Eventually though, it became much more than that. 3.) The Milgram Experiment. I feel like this was a movie that should not have appalled me as much as it did. How the people with the machine just went right on shocking that man, with the full knowledge of his heart condition. Some had a limit from the beginning that they wouldn’t cross. Some just laughed helplessly and went right on going until they couldn’t. Others, because a person of authority was telling them to, went right to the end. I would like to think that I would have only gone up to the level I had been given. 4.) The Freedom Writers. This is one of the most enjoyable movies I have seen regarding the challenges of teaching. I myself aspire to become a good teacher and I can only dream of reaching her level. 5.) Mrs. Elliot. I don’t think I could ever have come up with a way to teach kids so thoroughly, the harms of stereotyping. It was absolutely brilliant and she is someone I look up to. 6.) The Children’s March. To think that kids could have so much courage to stick up for what they believe in is amazing. They went against their parents and followed a radio musician to help Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They were thrown in jail and hosed down in the streets, but they never stopped fighting. 7.) The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. This is one of the saddest films I have ever seen. Because of his innocence and inability to logically hate those different from him, Bruno was murdered along with the Jewish friend he had made. The father paid for his crimes with the life of his only young son.
When I was younger, right around Bruno’s age, my friends and I used to play a game In the game, you were asked a question and you moved a certain number of spaces on the board depending on how many points the other players thought your answer deserved. Once, my question was: “What do you think is the worst word in the English language?” It took me a while, but I finally came up with the word “death”. My friends all admired my answer and I was given the maximum amount of points. Up until now, I’ve been pretty satisfied with the answer I gave myself. After this course I have come up with a new word: “hungry”. It makes me cry whenever anyone tragically tells someone else how hungry they are. Especially when it’s a child asking from a parent or sibling and they are not able to give up any if they want to survive. It pains me to see an old woman crawling around, begging for a piece of bread from a complete stranger and the stranger shoves the woman away, too hungry to even remember what it felt like to be kind and generous. I don’t know what it’s like to be really hungry, but when I watch these films and I see so many willing to do anything for a mouthful of watery soup. I see the hunger alone change personalities; the most generous will now be the first to slap away a hungry hand, the most caring will no longer flinch watching someone else die, just so long as they remain alive. I saw men watching and helping as their best friends and their closest neighbors and even their own families were being burned after being killed.
Walking in, I have to admit I was not completely sold in your words that some of us would walk away from this course completely changed because with that you also said that the rest of us would not be so affected at all. How is it possible for a class to be commanding enough to change some of its students so drastically when it isn’t powerful enough to change us all? I think I understand a little bit more now; it’s just like the Germans. Some people were so affected by what they saw happening to the Jews that it touched their hearts because they realized how wrong it was. Others hardened their hearts to it all. I also walked in to this class as someone who pretty much did what she was told by a teacher, without really questioning the reason for their commands out loud. I figured that the reason could be nothing more than them completing their job. I know now that it’s better to question some things because if you come up with a question no one is willing to give you the answer to, you know something must be wrong.
I really want to thank you for all that you have taught me about this world. I have to admit, I’m still not entirely sure what I would have done if I had been a German, watching my Jewish friends and neighbors getting taken away every day. I don’t know, if I had been brought up my whole life to despise the Jews, if I would have had the courage to not be a bystander. I would like to say that I would not have been, but unfortunately I can’t say that with full, sincere conviction. I can say with confidence however, that I won’t stand by if an injustice happens to the people around me now. No injustice is a small one. I’m also not sure what I would have done if I were one of the Jews. Would I have been so hungry that I would refuse to feed others? Or forget to be kind? Would I be able to give up the people I care about? I didn’t think that one course in high school could affect me so much, nor was I aware that any one course could mean so much to me. I know that if nothing else, Facing History in Ourselves will always be the course never forgotten. Teachers have always been telling me how I will always need math and science and English to be a more educated, successful person. I’m not denying any of that, but I will say that thanks to you, I will definitely be a more well-rounded person, a bigger person, one that is more successful in life. I want to be able to use my education for more than just to make money; I want to use it to make a difference for the people I care about.
These documentaries outlined most of Hitler’s cabinet and how they went about doing what they did in the 1940s. They showed how when Hitler first came to power everybody rallied behind him and the enormous rallies that he held and the immense amount of people cheering for him and crowding around him. As we progressed into the course the documentaries began moving towards how the Nazis began treating Jews like animals and began moving them into ghettos and eventually into concentration camps. While I was watching the horrible ways that the Jews were treated I thought about why they wouldn’t just run away and leave the country. That question was answered when we watched the documentary America and the Holocaust. I learned a lot from this film and I am glad that I could watch it. I had always thought that it was just nations in Europe that had neglected and that had been anti-Semitic toward the Jews. After watching, I learned that the United States of America were also extremely anti-Semitic towards the Jews and I found it embarrassing how far they would go to keep Jews out of the country. It was shocking to me that Jews were excluded from getting certain jobs and entering certain places simply because they were Jewish. I'm glad that I learned how my own country neglected a race of people who needed desperate help.
Another example of a genocide happening because other countries didn’t care enough to help was the Rwandan Genocide. Eight hundred thousand people were killed in one hundred days during the Rwandan Genocide because no other countries felt the need to intervene in the conflict between the Hutus and the Tootsies. The Hutus were the majority in the country of Rwanda and saw the Tootsies as less than human. When the Rwanda’s Hutu president’s airplane was shot down, the Hutus immediately blamed the Tootsies and began hacking any Tootsie they found to death with machetes. We learned more about this when we viewed the film Hotel Rwanda. The movie was very good at portraying the slaughter that happened to hundreds of thousands of innocent people and how no one did anything to stop it. One part in particular that really got me was when the UN Colonel says that the government isn't going to help the Hotel because the manager is "just a black African." The movie was great at showing how stressful it must have been to be living in Rwanda at the time, due to the chaos and the lack of help from outside sources to stop the chaos. I'm glad that I could see this film and get a true understanding of what happened in Rwanda in 1994.
Facing History and Ourselves has truly changed me for the better. I have changed the way that I treat others and have become more sensitive to certain situations. I am much more aware of racism and discrimination. I do not say things that I used to say and have started to think about who I am affecting with my words and actions. I have learned to not be the bystander when a conflict comes up. When someone is being bullied or racially profiled, I will not stand by and watch it happen like the majority of people did when millions of innocent people were being murdered by the hand of the Nazis. There are too many people in the world who are too scared to use their voice and that needs to change so that something like the Holocaust or the Rwandan Genocide never happen again. Some of the things that I saw in class were extremely graphic and grotesque and some images I cannot get out of my mind and some images I wish I had never seen. I know, however, that seeing these things were necessary in understanding exactly what happened and in proving that it did happen. I believe that every school should have a Facing History course available for their students to take because it is educational and a very effective tool for creating a good mindset. I am so happy that I took this course and I will carry what I have learned with me for the rest of my life.
We continued on in the course by talking about the Civil Rights Movement in the United States during the 60’s. I had previous background knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement because of taking US History sophomore and junior year. One event that I had not known about was the children’s march in Arlington that was an extremely important event that happened during the movement. I was aware that there were many protests and parades such as the Children’s March; however I never knew that children ever got involved. I knew how horribly blacks were treated during this time period but I had no idea of the extent of the violence and brutality of police officers and white men. The film showed me not only the powerful message that can be sent by children, but of how much every single individual's voice and actions means, no matter their age. A very important fact about this March was that none of the blacks fought back. They were peaceful the entire time that they were being beaten by the police and this was what caught the attention of the general public.
To end our discussions on the Civil Rights Movement we watched the documentary A Class Divided which was about an experiment conducted by an elementary school teacher, Mrs. Elliot, and her class of young children. To set it up, she told the kids that children with brown eyes were inferior to children with blue eyes and gave privileges to the kids with blue eyes and took them away from the kids with brown eyes. Then she observed the ways that children began treating each other during class and at recess. I thought that Mrs. Elliot's experiment was incredible and creative. The idea of experimenting with children is very controversial; however she conducted it in a safe manner where no kids got hurt. Kids who were singled out and segregated were only singled out and segregated for a day anyways so no true harm could be done. It was amazing to view how easily the kids would change their way of thinking simply because an authoritative figure told them to. I believe that a lot of people in this time period and some people in the present that could use this kind of a lesson. Mrs. Elliot proved that you cannot fully understand someone's struggle until you step into their shoes.
My favorite film that we watched all throughout the course was The Freedom Writers which tells the true story of a school teacher in Los Angeles that struggles to connect with her students and believes that they can achieve anything. The entirety of the faculty views the kids of color basically as lost hope and as dangerous people. Ms. Gruwell was advised not to wear her pearl necklace to class because it would be likely that a student would try to steal it from her. She ignored this advice because she didn't feel any sense of danger from her students at all. She knew that she would have to go into the class and try to be engaged with her students rather than to protect herself from them in order to do anything significant. Ms. Gruwell is denied from getting books to give to her class to read because her department head, who was a blatant racist, put a stereotype on the students without even knowing who they were. The stereotype was that since they were of a minority race, they would either steal or destroy the books. Each of the students ends up being completely successful at the end of the film due to Ms. Gruwell’s persistence and perseverance and the amount that she cared for the children. After viewing The Freedom Writers, we started watching documentaries about how the Nazis came to power and how their ideology became popular in Germany.
My name is Scott Radogna and I am currently a senior at Westborough High School. I chose to take this course this year because I had only heard good things about it and how meaningful it was to some people. Facing History and Ourselves is a course that focuses on racism and the Holocaust and developing Civic Agency to view history in an appropriate way. Civic Agency is a way to view a historical event as though you were there in that day and age and thought the way that the people in that time thought to truly get an understanding of how the particular event, such as the Holocaust could have possibly happened. The class is run primarily by watching films and documentaries and there is no homework or quizzes besides a blog discussion after viewing each video. Just because there are no quizzes or homework doesn’t mean that the class is a “joke” class. It is, in fact, the most serious and informative class I have taken in my high school career and should be taken very seriously by all who take it. It has changed me for the better and has allowed me to become more sensitive to different things that have happened in history as it should for every single person who takes it. Taking Facing History and Ourselves was one of the best decisions I have made in high school and was the best elective I have ever taken.
Junior year I needed to build a schedule that would be weighted appropriately for colleges to see and to feel like I was actually doing something. I could have not done a foreign language, a science, and a history course which would have left me three full blocks to fill with random meaningless electives. I decided to take the higher road and do AP biology, Mundo Hispano, and have three social science based electives. I knew that I was going to take psychology and sociology so I needed one more spot to fill. I knew that a few of my friends had taken a class called Facing History and Ourselves and I also learned that all you did in that class was watch videos and there was no homework. With that knowledge, I thought that the class would be the perfect senior blow-off class. My friends had also explained to me that the course material was primarily based on the Holocaust and ever since reading the novel Night by Ellie Wiesel I had wanted to learn more about the Holocaust. So I signed myself up.
On the first class I didn’t know what to expect because I had never had Mr. Gallagher as a teacher. I thought that we were going to jump right into talking about the Holocaust and the Nazi rule over Germany and much of Europe. My assumption was wrong. The first thing that we did was read a children’s book called The Bear that Wasn’t. This book was about a bear that wakes up from hibernating inside of a big factory that was built on his habitat. Workers in the factory think that he is a man who is wearing a fur coat and needs a shave, not a bear. The bear goes through a great deal of trouble trying to prove that he is indeed just a bear. The Bear knew that it was a bear, but after being told many times by many important people and even his own species that he wasn't a bear, he began to believe it. It ends up working in the factory until the winter comes again and it innately knows that it should hibernate, however it doesn't do so because it thinks that it isn't a bear. The message that this book sends is extremely important to the course in that it shows how being told so many times that you aren’t what you actually are by so many different sources begins to change your mind and your perspective of your own identity.
Backing down only teaches tyrants like the Nazis that they can just simply take more and more and keep on murdering innocent people who have done nothing when people let the Nazis walk all over them. The Jews who fought back showed the Nazis that they were not going to back down. All who are interested in the Holocaust should see this film so they do realize that not all Jews would let the Nazis victimize them should see this film. The Z.O.B knew it was possible that all of the Jews in the ghetto could die so why not go down with a fight?
The Nazis were renowned for all of their heinous and torturous experiments done to the Jews. One scientist who did one of the most sickening types of experiments was Dr. Mengele. He did his awful experiments on small children especially twins. He did a variety of “experiments” which were really just torture. Many of the things done to the children were done without any form of painkiller whatsoever. I find this type of treatment brutal and completely unnecessary, which is exactly what it was. There was no method to the madness and sickness of Dr. Mengele. Some of the testing included injecting chemicals and other substances into children’s eyes to change the color, to injecting twin subjects with deadly diseases and allowing them to die, then doing autopsies on both bodies to see differences. Treatments like this were almost unbelievable to begin with and to do them on a child is even more insane. Dr. Mengele’s experiments definitely proved to me how sinister some of the scientists were in these camps and how far they were willing to go to get answers no matter who’s life was being taken by it. Another set of experiments that I found extremely interesting was the Milgrim obedience experiments. Dr. Milgrim got many different people off of the street to come to MIT and participate in an experiment. The people had to quiz another man behind a curtain with various trivia questions. If the man behind the curtain got the answer correct, there was no punishment. However, if the man behind the curtain got the question incorrect, they would receive a shock administered by the person asking questions. The volts levels went into the thousands. What the viewer finds out shortly after is that the man behind the curtain is actually just a recording of a man screaming to deter the test administer from giving any more shocks after they believe the man behind the curtain has taken too much pain. Dr. Milgrim persuaded the administers of the quiz to not stop the quiz process to test if the administers would stop or not if a person with power (such as Dr. Milgrim) would make the administer keep going with the experiment. Some would go all the way through with voltage and some would stop as soon as the recording mentioned heart issues. Occasional nervous laughter was spotted after hearing the pre-recorded screams. After some time the screams got more dramatic and the administers would stop. One subject went all the way up, and then all the way down without a single answer from the man on the other side of the curtain. Facing History has meant so much to me this semester. It has not only taught me so much about the Holocaust which interests me so much, but it taught me life lessons that will never be forgotten. I have learned to approach the world with Civic Agency and that in any situation not to be a bystander, but a rescuer. The world would be such a cruel place if everyone was bystanders. Unfortunately, during the Holocaust, so many people were bystanders including all of the surrounding world powers who definitely could have done something which is really disappointing. I believe that every person who has access to such an amazing course should. It teaches you so many things about tolerance with a history context to keep it interesting. It is an amazing and life changing class that I would recommend to anyone in this high school or anyone that has the opportunity to take it.
Another film, which displayed teenage life during the time period, was Swing Kids. Swing Kids focused on the life of the main character Peter and his friends who enjoy to do something the Nazis have banned; dance and sing to Jazz. Jazz music was seen as evil and African American which was highly looked down upon in Germany. Peter and his best friend Thomas see a Jewish person getting their radio stolen from them by Nazi Youth, and given to another Aryan woman. Peter and Michael sneak into the Aryan woman’s store to steal the radio back and give the radio to its rightful owner. They succeed until the woman starts screaming for help causing a chase from the Nazi soldiers occupying that part of the city. Michael is able to hop onto a fleeting Truck but peter unfortunately falls and is captured. In order to get out of trouble he enrolls in the Hitler Youth Program. So that Peter is not in it alone, Michael also enlists. Peter and Michael go through the program for some time until Peter begins to despise every part of it, including how brainwashed Michael is becoming. Peter eventually starts losing his mind slightly and stops going to as many Hitler Youth meetings. Michael however completely forgets the reason he even started in the first place and is transforming into a Nazi Soldier. The movie closes with Peter going to one last Swing club before the Hitler Youth storm in arresting all of those who are Swinging. Michael catches peter and almost beats his own best friend senseless before finally realizing how awful he has become and tries to let Peter go. Peter refuses and gets taken to a Nazi Work camp. This movie also conveys some loss of innocence through Nazism. People are willing to beat their own best friends through all of the Nazi brainwash. Life inside of the ghettos was astonishing. Somewhat close to the conditions of concentration camps but less restricted. It was dog eat dog and very poor conditions. The dead lined the street and all of the people living the ghetto were facing hunger. The film The Pianist showed life within the Warsaw Ghetto of Poland and really showed me what the Nazis did to these Jewish peoples every day life. Seeing fellow Jews turn on each other to get themselves out of the crosshairs was also extremely disappointing. They should be fighting for their kind against the Nazi mission of killing all of the Jews. I also liked how the movie showed a family aspect of the Holocaust time period. Seeing a close knit family move together and stay strong together was an interesting dynamic that I had yet to see through Holocaust films in this course. The movie also displayed very tragic things like a woman crying over suffocating her child so the soldiers would not convict them. Another tragic scene displayed was the firing squad killing scene. The Nazi soldiers selected some at random, and began firing away at them for no apparent reason. Similar to why the Nazis even wanted to exterminate all of the Jews, no one was stopping them, so why not. Another film that I enjoyed that focused on the Jewish Ghettos was Uprising. This movie showed that not all Jews were willing to be just victims or bystanders. Some were willing to fight back and try to win their independence. The Jews heavily outnumbered Nazi soldiers. If all of them fought back like the Z.O.B that showed me that even when all odds are against you, you can still fight back. Going down with a fight is much more honorable than letting your enemy take you easily. The Z.O.B had many great victories over the presiding Nazi soldiers and higher military figures over seeing the Warsaw Ghetto pushing them backwards considerably here and there which proved that they were not going to back down.
What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to Me
I did not actually request to be in Facing History and Ourselves this year. I had a last minute schedule change causing me to drop one elective and pick up Facing History and Ourselves. However, I am so glad I did. I am a Junior at Westborough High School and am involved in quite a few clubs. I am involved in Interact Club, Rangers for a Cure, and New Student ambassadors. Interact club is a community service club that participates in various community service events throughout the community. The Rangers for a Cure club participates in fund raising events for Cancer research. New student ambassadors runs freshman orientation day for all of the upcoming freshman along with New Student orientation that gives tours and helps ease the new student into the school as smoothly as possible. I really enjoy helping others and making a difference so that is why I belong to these clubs. Facing History and Ourselves is a course offered through the High school that teaches students to be more accepting and less prejudice through a historical context specifically the Holocaust, through a variety of Films and activities within the class. Some topics throughout the curriculum that stood out to me the most were the lives of Children and teenagers, life inside of the ghettos, and Nazi Experimentation during the Holocaust time period. Two films stood out to me that showed the life of children and teens were during the Holocaust period was The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and Swing Kids. Both films conveyed the innocence of children during this time and gave a good insight into their lives. The boy in the striped pajamas was about a young 8 year old boy named Bruno, the son of a Nazi Commandant who must move out of his home in Berlin to a home in the countryside outside of the infamous death camp Auschwitz. While in his new home he has no one to play with so he begins exploring the grounds of his new home. One day he discovers what he thinks to be a farm but is actually the Auschwitz death camp. He befriends a child the same age as him named Shmole on the other side of the fence inside of Auschwitz. Over the next several weeks Bruno visits Shmole and plays games with him through the fence unaware of the horrors going on inside of the death camp. One day Shmole is working in Bruno’s home cleaning dishes. Bruno gives Shmole food but Shmole is caught eating by one of Bruno’s Father’s soldiers. When Shmole says that Bruno gave him the food, Bruno quickly denies Shmole’s claims to save himself from punishment. Similar to what almost all of the Bystanders in Germany at this time did to many Jews to escape persecution themselves. The final scene in the movie depicts Bruno sneaking into the death camp to help find Shmole’s missing father. As they are inside, Bruno begins to see all of the unspeakable conditions the Jews are living in and becomes frightened. As the two boys look through Shmole’s hut one last time, Nazi soldiers come to herd the entire hut out and towards a gas chamber. As Bruno’s parents start looking for Bruno, he is getting closer and closer to the Gas chamber. By the time Bruno’s father enters the gates of Auschwitz to hopefully find his son, it is too late. Bruno and Shmole have already been locked into the gas chamber and the Zyklon B had already been dumped into the chamber sealing Bruno and Shmole’s fate. The most important message I took away from this film was that innocent lives are being taken for no reason but because the Nazis were not stopped by the Bystanders.
One of the last things seen in the course was the Nuremberg Trials. The video shown at the trial about the death camps really tied up the way I saw the Holocaust. In my first belief I thought there were only a few death camps during the time. In the beginning of the movie it showed a map of dozens of death camps. In the video the three main things that really got my attention was the bulldozer to plow the dead bodies, the lampshade made of human skin, and the bunkhouse conditions shown. The bulldozer really got to me because I thought it really showed how many people were slaughtered. Generally in our society when treating someone who had just died you would treat the body very carefully however there were just too many of them to deal with. The bodies were piled everywhere. The lampshade made of human skin also got me because it goes beyond the level of what you could believe would happen. A lampshade made of human skin is something you would hear about in a movie about a serial killer however seeing this being brought to the war crimes board is absolutely atrocious. When I first saw it in the video I got very sick. The conditions in the a bunkhouses were also getting me sick because you saw many people with body deformations and that were very sick. They had many diseases in the bunkhouses and the conditions they were much worse then those in a pigsty.
At the end of this course I have felt like a changed person since walking in on the first day. I have paid a lot more attention to my actions and the words I use when talking to others and how it might impact them. I have also looked at my surroundings even more then I did in the before this course and have been more outspoken on the things that I beleive. Some of the things I have seen in the course have been absolutely atrocious and have left me in complete disbelief. In school we have constantly heard about things like the Holocaust but for whatever reason we have not gone in depth about it. I believe this course should be mandatory for everyone in our high school because it may shape the future for the better. Watching film compared to the single days worth of reading about the Holocaust makes for a completely different situation. In the textbook you would read how the Germans would beat, torture, and eventually kill the Jews either by gas or starvation but in film you develop an emotional connection. Just seeing some of the images of the death camps and the conditions in them were absolutely sickening and they made me cringe to think about them. We not only saw how the men took the conditions, but the women and children. Seeing the women and children just made a deeper impact on how I saw the conditions there.
Another movie we watched in class was the Pianist. Before the film, I had a good amount of knowledge of how the Nazi's treated the Jews. In my past history classes we have only skimmed over what had happened at the time and most of my knowledge was gained outside of school through books and documentaries. After watching this film it does not compare at all to watching documentaries or reading text. From the film you really see the heartless killing at the time just because they could. The Jews were beaten and killed because the Nazi's at the time were in complete control and the Jews really couldn't do anything about it. The film left me without any sense of how this could happen, why it did happen, and how a person can get completely morally twisted compared to what I see as a normal everyday person.
Another video we watched in class was The Freedom Writers. In the movie "The Freedom Writers" Ms. Gruwell is advised to not wear her pearl jewelry to class because the department head believes her students might steal them. When Ms. Gruwell asks if she could use the schoolbooks for her students, the department head holds the books back from the students because she believes that they will either steal or ruin the books. This shows her racist beliefs against the students who are not white and it also shows how the students who are colored have with held education from the school. One of the more important message in this movie is that you can't judge a person based on their backgrounds. The movie also shows how one person can affect the lives of others. In this film you can really relate the teaching of Ms. Gruwell almost to the Facing History in Ourselves course. While in Westborough we mostly get along, face very little to barely any violence in our community, and behave very well, I believe learning about things like the Holocaust and other atrocities that go against basic human rights can impact others very positively. For Long Beach, it completely switched daily life for the class of students there. They became very well behaved and there was very little distrust among them. While I don’t believe this course impacted us as ms. Gruwell did for them, I believe it changed many lives greatly.
One of the short videos that we watched in class that really showed the easiness of the Nazi’s to come to power was the Milgram experiment. After watching the Milgram experiment, I believe there isn't one answer to why people kept going on with the shocks and obeying what the tester said. The teacher could be experiencing the fear of punishment, fear of not going along with the group, or the desire to please all at the same time. For me as a third person and not being involved in the experiment at all it was definitely hard to believe that people kept going on with the experiment even when the student stopped responding or complained about heart failure. I would hope I would act in a much better way then they did however I can't say I am positive that I would. The laughter that some of the teachers had most likely was because of the stress of the situation. Being the teacher in that situation must have been very uncomfortable and one of the teachers was to the point where he was almost crying.
My name is Michael Hachey and currently I am a senior at Westborough High School. I chose to take the Facing History in Ourselves course after hearing from friends about how impacting the course was on them. The Facing History in Ourselves course is a film based course that is offered to both juniors and seniors. Tests and quizzes are not given in the course and the only homework normally is one or two blog posts a week. A blog post is a single paragraph response to an activity completed in class such as a film. The response is generally comments we had about the film and how the film in total influenced you. The course is not designed to be academically based, but instead to focus on influencing you as a person. On the first few days of the course Mr. Gallagher told us the main purpose of the course is to bring people out of the bystander or perpetrator lifestyles and into being a rescuer.
When going through my course selection for my senior year last year, I needed to pick one more elective that I wanted. I had already picked Legal Studies, Sociology, CAD, and Psychology, courses I had already known about and what I would be doing in them. It was really hard picking my last course because the remaining ones were mostly art or computer based which I definitely did not want to do. I chose to do the Facing History in Ourselves course hoping that the good things I have heard about the class were right, and that I wouldn’t be stuck in a course that I did not like. In my semester before the Facing History in Ourselves course, I was told just about everyday after the first two weeks we watched a video or documentary, and that there was basically no homework. I thought this was a complete joke because I have never heard of such a Westborough High School. The first day few days of class were very surprising, because Mr. Gallagher told us the course really wasn’t an academic based course at all. He told us that there were not going to be any tests or quizzes, and that there wasn’t going to be much homework besides the blogs, which proved the things I had been told about the course. What was also surprising was how he described the course as possibly being life changing, which was hard to believe because of how short the time we were going to have with him.
One of the first activities we did in class was reading the book, The Bear That Wasn’t by Frank Tashlin. The Bear that Wasn’t was a surprising children’s book that uses great satire to explain a societal problem of a person not believing their own identity when others go against it. It is quite surprising to see what seems like a children’s picture book display such a powerful message. The bear in the beginning resists what others say about his identity but after a while gives in and accepts what people see him as. The bear’s only option to fit within a group at the time is to work with the factory workers. Whether the bear actually starts to believe what people say about his identity or just goes along with what people say in order to fit in the group, this issue can be related to the real world in many different situations.
Another activity we did in class was when we watched the documentary America and the Holocaust. After watching this film, I really gained a new perspective of America's attitude toward the Jewish people during the Holocaust. The U.S. government did very little to prevent the genocide in Germany before the war, and at one point blocked any information of the genocide to U.S. citizens. The U.S. government also allowed industries such as the automotive industry to exclude Jews from the workforce even if they lived in the U.S. prior to the time of mass immigration of the Jews from Germany. Once rumors of the Nazi's killing the Jews were brought to the U.S., the U.S. government continued to prevent Jews from immigrating into the U.S. in any legal way possible, and they created new laws in order to have an easier time to prevent them from coming into the U.S.
Another movie that was significant to this class was Hotel Rwanda. After watching this movie for the second time, I was able to better understand the circumstances in Rwanda rather than just watching the plot the first time. This movie impacted me because I felt that the genocide that took place there was absolutely upsetting and wrong. I think what also made it worse was the fact that no other country would recognize this event as a problem because Rwanda was no use to any of the other countries. This movie helped me understand selflessness and to help out others even if you yourself do not benefit from it. It really sends the message across to not be a bystander and to react to occurrences that need help. Paul, the main character taking in refugees into his hotel, was so brave to put these refugees first before his own safety. He always made sure his family was safe and that the people in Rwanda were safe before he was concerned for himself, which was very admirable. This movie will always be memorable and it should not be forgotten so that history will not repeat itself. If anything like the genocide in Rwanda were to happen again, this movie would hopefully turn those bystanders into reactors and have countries help out with the situation.
A movie that had a different aspect than the rest of the Holocaust was The Pianist. What was different about this movie from the other material watched about the Holocaust was that it didn’t show the Jews as hopeless and weak. It did show how awful the ghettos were and the bad conditions that the Jews were forced to live in, but it also displayed the Jews fighting back in the ghettos. I thought this movie was very entertaining and it definitely captured my attention. The conditions of the ghettos and how everyone was starving and unsanitary was displayed in this movie. The Jews in the ghettos also made plans to fight against the Germans, which is very uncommonly heard of. It was a different viewpoint of the ghettos and different from any other Holocaust piece that we have viewed or read about. It taught me that the Jewish were treated unfairly in the ghettos but also that they were strong and did attempt to fight back. Another aspect of the film that surprised me was that the women were fighting side by side with the men. Usually women are thought of as weaker, especially during the time period, so filming the women fight just as the men did was a very interesting thing to see.
Facing History and Ourselves was a class that I learned so much from. It made me think about the events that happened in history and be able to reflect them in the present. It illustrates the idea to not just be a bystander and to act upon a situation. By not being a bystander, this helps to ensure that history does not repeat itself. These events such as the Rwanda Genocide or the Holocaust needs to be displayed in classes like these to ensure that an even such as those do not happen again and if it were to, then people will act upon it to save lives and limit violence. Facing History and Ourselves targets individual high school students and makes them think about their actions and whether or not they are contributing to society in either a positive or negative way. I do believe that every high school student should take this course because it makes the students aware of events that might have been simplified down or even forgotten about. Personally, I am glad that I took this class and even though it can be very depressing, it is worth it because you are able to now fully understand the situation of those in events such as the Holocaust or the genocide. Although the material is not pleasant or easy to take in, it is so beneficial in the end to show students what the past was like and therefore to better the future.
Into the early middle of the year, we saw a documentary about a woman who taught her students about discrimination. A Class Divided was a documentary that featured Mrs. Eliot and her lesson plan with her third graders. Mrs. Eliot separated her class depending on their eye color and put one of the eye colors superior to the others. The kids felt what it was like to both be superior and inferior and what is was like to discriminate or be discriminated against. At just third grade, I thought this was a bold move on Mrs. Eliot’s part but obviously it was effective and respected by the her students. I learned from this how easy it was to bring up any time of discrimination upon any age group. The kids were so young but yet after Mrs. Eliot’s lesson, they were in complete understanding of segregation and how the blacks were treated during the civil rights time period. Just as I learned how it was easy to bring up discrimination, I also learned how easy it could be to get rid of it. Even though racial discrimination will always be present to some amount, I know that once one feels socially isolated and know what its like to be segregated, it can cause them to change their ways. This documentary made think that discrimination is pointless since it can arise in any situation and in any age group. I admire Mrs. Eliot for what she did with her third graders and went on to do in many other conventions. This documentary taught me a lot about discrimination and what it was like during the civil rights time period.
One of the movies that will be hard to ever forget was The Freedom Writers. This movie was about a teacher who began teaching at a school with kids who got into a lot of trouble because they didn’t believe in themselves. This teacher was able to boost the moral and standards of these teenagers and inspired them to be better and raise their expectation bar for themselves through literature. This movie really benefitted me because it taught me about equality for all and how unfairness can lead to low expectations for oneself and therefore not succeeding to one’s full potential. It sent the message to all the viewers that everyone has equal opportunity to succeed if they fight for what they believe in. I admired the teacher in the movie as well because she gave up her entire life for the kids and was absolutely dedicated to her students. Seeing the students achieve more and higher accomplishments also encouraged me to also raise mine as well, knowing that the resources are available to me. This movie portrayed a great teacher and great students to show all the viewers that equality can be accomplished and is greatly beneficial to everyone.
Another activity that was done in the beginning of the year was when Mr. Gallagher told us to write down our most important object to us. He gave us about five minutes to think about what that one object was and then we were to share with the class. I remember sitting there for five minutes and going over every important object to me thinking which one is the most meaningful to me. When the five minutes were up, I still did not have any answer at all. When students were sharing answers, common objects were phone, laptop, jewelry, ect. When it was my turn to share, even after hearing other’s answers to get an idea, I still did not really have answer because if I could only have one object to choose as the most important, I realized that the object was immaterial. I do believe that that the most important things in life are people you have in it. I also started to notice that society is dependent on these materialistic objects like a phone or a laptop. There is nothing wrong with society being dependent on these materialistic things because it’s not an everyday occurrence when one is forced to be left with only one object. This simple activity is just one that seemed not very formal or significant but did have a big impact on me and is something I will remember from this class.
Introduction
My name is Courtney Ho and I am currently a senior at Westborough High School. This year, I made the decision to take the class Facing History and Ourselves and it was a really good choice. When picking classes for senior year as a junior, I chose to take this class because many upperclassmen friends recommended it to me. I was told that it was a class that was not hard to get a good grade, but it was also a class that was reflective and made you think about not only history, but the future as well. With only one full day of senior year left, I can honestly say that this class not only teaches the students about history and its faults, but it also allows the students to think about their everyday actions and their impact on society. In the beginning of this course, I had little to no knowledge of any of the events that were analyzed in class and now I have a good understanding of many historical time periods. Facing History and Ourselves is a half-year course that focuses on informing students about what has happened in history. This historical information is showed to the students in order to help them think about their own actions and how they compare to history. This course includes videos and readings to illustrate the hard to describe events in history and students reflect upon this. Students in the class look at their life and if the class has impacted them, they are able to change their ways and act upon situations instead of being passive. This class takes a look at civil rights, simple pieces with bigger meanings, and has a major look on the Holocaust. What separates this class from a basic history class is that these events are looked at from many primary sources and often shows some events that are hard to watch. I believe that this class is a course that every student at Westborough High School should take part in because it has a significant effect on each student.
What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to Me
One activity we did in class that took place in the very beginning was The Bear that Wasn’t. This book that we read out loud in class was about a bear that was told that he was a man that needed a shave over and over again by authority. This bear was told that he was a human so many times that in the end, he too believes that he is really a man. This story really affected me because I thought it was the best story to represent the message of not letting anyone tell you who you are. I feel like this particular story was so easily comprehendible but the message was very important. It made me think about myself and taught me to not change my identity just because other people with higher authority are highly influent. This story also teaches those to stand out and not be afraid to go against the group or higher authority as well. Since this activity was introduced so early in the class, I believe it was a good way to start out the class and inform the students that this class is about one’s own identity as well. The Bear that Wasn’t was an easy read that got the point across early into the class to inform students that standing out and going against the crowd is a good thing. This book really set the tone for the class and definitely pointed out what the course was all about.
I didn’t know much about the course Facing History and Ourselves until the end of my junior year when we were instructed to decide our senior year history electives. I had originally planned on taking psychology and sociology, but when I saw how popular Facing History and Ourselves seemed to be, I decided to switch my intended classes. Talking to other students, I discovered that this course was centered mostly around the Holocaust and how the Nazi party was able to take control over such a large population. People said that it wasn’t academically difficult, but the emotional strain it puts on you is intense. You spend your days constantly watching movies about the dreadful events, but in the end you get a better sense of your beliefs, background and knowledge. Being Jewish I’ve (obviously) had strong feelings towards the events that occurred in the Holocaust. In my old school I was the only Jew in my grade and my sister and I made up the entire Jewish population of the school. I often felt excluded when teachers would start talking about Christmas and Easter because I didn’t know how to respond; when I told them I was Jewish, I would always get confused or puzzled faces as a response. I know that it seems like such a minor thing, but I felt left out because of my religion when I was only eight years old. I eventually moved to Westborough and was taught about the Holocaust in hebrew school. Sadly, I was so young that I couldn’t possibly understand the horrific events that occurred. In my opinion, this is one of the most important reasons to take Facing History and Ourselves. Being an upperclassman in high school means that you have the maturity to comprehend such difficult situations; you’re old enough to understand what truly happened, nothing needs to be kept hidden to protect your feelings because you’re an adult and should be treated like one. Taking the course Facing History and Ourselves not only taught me the detailed historical aspect of the Nazi party, but that there are still people today that believe the Nazi’s were doing a good thing and that there are still people denying this tragic event even happened. This course helped me grow as a person and form my own opinions since I was provided with all of the information in an unbiased format. I feel confident in my beliefs and am able to say that I am a stronger and well-rounded person because of the lessons I have learned in this course.
The movie that I learned the most from was entitled America and The Holocaust. This documentary showed what the United States and it’s citizens were like during that time period. After taking American history the previous year, I felt as if I had a good understanding of what was happening in our own country during such a difficult time for the whole world, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Our textbooks never mentioned how Jews in the United States were being discriminated against, or that the United States government was decreasing the amount of visas allowing jews from Europe to move to America, or that the United States government knowingly sent a ship filled with passengers back to their home country where they would be killed instead of letting them ashore. I find it unbelievable that United States citizens were practicing some of the same tactics of discrimination as Nazi occupied Europe. As terrible as this information is, I would never have known it without taking Facing History and Ourselves.
In my opinion, the most disturbing movie that we watched was The Grey Zone. This movie started off really disturbing because it’s based on true events. Watching people die in such terrible conditions made you sick to your stomach; watching people being lined up and killed one by one broke your heart. There is such a big difference between reading a textbook and seeing the events as they actually occurred. When someone says six million, all I think about is the number, but after watching even one person being shot in the movie, thoughts rush through my mind like: what if they had a family? is anyone they know around them? what if their children see them like this? This movie also showed the true colors of each individual which made me give so much sympathy for those who stuck to their beliefs and decided to do the right thing. The women in the camp knew that very few people would survive in such harsh conditions and were willing to sacrifice their own lives in a fight against the Nazis. We watched as they schemed, planned their attacks, received the ammunition and were heartbroken when we saw them being faced with the decision of turning themselves in or killing their friends. By killing themselves they were able to save their friends and their mission, but we had grown so attached to them that it became so upsetting watching them choose everyone else’s life over their own. In a similar situation, the men of the camp were able to save a girl after she had miraculously survived from the gas chambers. We watched as they cared for her and did everything they could to help her, but were that much more upset seeing them shot since we had known how much effort they had put into helping a girl they didn’t even know, a girl that was eventually shot herself. This movie was based off of the true story of Dr. Mengele and how he would experiment on children. Personally, I could not imagine such a thing. I don’t think I’d be able to watch these children call me “Uncle Mengele” while knowing that my plan for them was to experiment on them and eventually even kill them. The experiments that he was performing were horrific. Conducting surgeries, injecting chemicals into their eyes, transferring disease were all part of his repertoire; I couldn’t imagine myself doing these things to people, animals and especially children.
One of my favorite movies that we watched in this class was Freedom Writers. I’d seen this movie at least 3 times before this class, but for some reason it left a different impression on me. I had always watched movies for their entertainment value, I never really watched them with the mindset of “what can I learn from this”, something this class teaches you how to do. This movie left such an impact on me because students in recent times were still dealing with discrimination, even after the Holocaust and the civil rights movements. Watching students my age learn about the events of the Holocaust was so intriguing. It forced you to relook at the situation and remember the true horrors that occurred. This movie didn’t deal with the political aspects of the war, but solely on the social impact these events made.
Another movie that left a great impact on me was The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Watching such a young boy witness the horrors of the concentration camps was incredible. The message that I took away from this film was that hatred is not there naturally, it must be taught. When Bruno met Shmuel he saw a friend, even when he found out that he was Jewish. I think that this shows the true innocence of children and how they are able to see the world in such a positive light. The same message was also brought up in Mrs. Elliot’s class with a documentary called A Class Divided. As the students are taught that their value is based on their eye color, classmates they had been friends with for years became targets for terrible bullying and discrimination. We watched as such young students were able to torment each other with no remorse because they viewed themselves as more important. When Mrs. Elliot brought these actions to her students attention, they noticed how badly they had been acting and vowed to stop discriminating. This lesson stayed with the students their whole life; although the experiment was eventually ruled as unethical, I think that it was very smart and very rewarding for Mrs. Elliot to conduct.
The most educational movies we watching during Facing History and Ourselves were the videos taken at the concentration camps and the footage from the Nuremberg Trials. The concentration camp videos captured me emotionally. Witnessing this horrible place made me realize that the people in this film weren’t actors, the dead bodies piled up in box cars or strewn about on the ground were once living, breathing people with families and lives outside of the camp. Seeing the mass graves was particularly upsetting to me because it showed that there were so many dead that they wouldn’t be able to hold a proper funeral for each person. There were already bodies incinerated and countless remains in such bad conditions that they would never be identified and family members may never get closer. Not as emotionally straining, but equally educational was the Nuremberg Trials. Seeing Nazi leaders plead not guilty was frustrating, but also so surprising; with so much evidence against them, I couldn’t see how they could all be acquitted of their crimes against humanity. Seeing the timeline sheet showed just how long the process took and every step that was taken. I also liked the handout that listed the outcome of all those charged with crimes against humanity due to the Nazi Party and the events of the Holocaust. I thought it was really interesting that all of these men had such different sentences; some were ordered jail time, some were hung publically and others were acquitted. Reading the column entitled “In the Defendant's Words” was particularly intriguing because it allowed them to verify their actions and try to prove that they did nothing wrong. Some of the men realized that when they were doing was wrong, while others truly believed that they were doing a great service to Germany and were helping to create a greater good.
Taking Facing History and Ourselves taught me more about myself and my values than any other class ever has (and probably ever will). By watching such emotionally and intellectually challenging movies, I was able to figure out what I believe in and what I stand for. Whenever I heard about the Holocaust and any of the events that occurred, I brushed it off and didn’t pay much attention to it. I always thought “I’m Jewish, I know all of this,” but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Instead of thinking that I already knew the information because of my religious connection, I should have tried to learn more about the subject and educate myself about everything that occurred so that the millions of people that died are never forgotten as well as making sure that an event like this doesn’t happen again. I feel that I am able to say that I am well-rounded on the subject of the Holocaust; I have seen what it’s like to be discriminated against and how people react, I have seen what life was like in the ghettos as well as the camps for the Jews, I have seen the historical aspects of how and why the Nazi Party tried to take over Europe and the results of the party leaders that survived after the war was won. I feel a strong sense of civic agency (an emotional, intellectual and moral connection) to these events and feel that I am able to make educated opinions on this subject. Honestly, I think that this class should be mandatory for all students to take. I understand that there are always a few that won’t take anything away from such a meaningful course, but there are so many others that may not fully understand what the class is, but would really benefit from it. There is so much to learn on the subject, a subject that is (sadly) still relevant today. Having more people take this class could possibly lower the number of discrimination and allow for a more accepting environment in WHS and even the world.
This period of guiding the students in creating opinions, and forming attachments lasted a while, but the greater portion of the course is spent in learning the history behind racism, and segregation. This part of the class, and rightly so, was I believe the largest part of the course. This was the part of the course that helped students to have the mental capacity in civic agency. This mental capacity is all about knowing, and owning the facts behind the events. We began our study of these topics in the earlier of American history. As we discussed how the new found Americans treated the natives of this land, and how they saw them I remember a light going off in my head. During that time I had the realization that the early Americans were incredibly racist towards the natives, and as I learned what the Americans tried to do to the natives another light went off. This time I began to make the connection between the racism experienced by the natives to that which the Jews of Europe suffered. That’s when once again I experienced change, and mental growth. I went from seeing racism as just incorrect and ignorant views to viewing it as harmful along with incorrect and ignorant. I saw the harm that the Americans did when they tried to assimilate the natives. They managed to ruin a culture much older than their own in a matter of years. They only wanted to make the natives assimilate because they were racist, and believed they were better. I saw how this paralleled the Jewish experience with the Nazi’s. The Nazi’s destroyed the European Jewish people because they were racist, and believed they were
The final part in our course was to apply. At this point in the course we began to turn our attention to Germany and WWII. This part of the course helped me a lot. It was very hard for me to fathom how the German people came to accept the hatred in Nazi ideals, but it was after watching three movies that helped me understand. The first was “The Longest Hatred”. This film explained the origins of anti-Semitism and answered the question of why the Nazis targeted the Jews. After seeing this film I understood that anti-Semitism wasn’t new and that the Nazis were digging up old sentiments and beliefs to help their cause. So, to the German people this notion wasn’t as foreign as it is to one of us today. The second film was “Swing Kids”. Since this movie showed how a young guy who was completely against the Nazi regime ended up becoming a Nazi himself I understood the appeal of the regime to the people. Lastly, watching “The Milgram Experiment” showed me how difficult it is to say no to a figure of authority even if they’re asking you to cause harm to others. This particularly helped me understand why when many Nazis were questioned they responded that they were only following orders. At this point in the class I became very worried because I took notice that I understood the Nazis point of view. For a moment I had a bit of a crisis debating whether I was a Nazi or not.I knew I wasn’t a hateful person or a racist, but I understood the Nazis. That is until I remembered what Mr.Gallagher said about civic agency and how this would allow you to understand an event in the time it took place. This means you would also get the perspective of the people who lived at the time. I was quite relived after that, and happy that I had civic agency in relation to the Nazi era. I realized that thing Mr.Gallagher repeated at least 100 times became true for me. I got it. I became especially certain of this though when we began to see movies about the holocaust. Specifically, sitting in class watching “The Pianist” was a very different experience. I had seen the film before, but not the way I did this time around. This time I felt every emotion the families felt, I understood Wladyslaw Szpilman when he dropped the dead boy’s body to the ground and continued walking home, I got the sense of injustice and fear when the soldiers awoke them to be put on trains for the camps. It was a much more powerful experience.
This course has changed me for the better. I’m grateful for the knowledge I now have, and my own personal changes in my beliefs as a result of that knowledge. This class has taught me never to stand down in the face of injustice. It has shown me that no risk is too great in the name of standing up for what it right and aiding your fellow human. I’ve also learned that to be a bystander is not to be neutral or to be innocent. A bystander allows things to happen out of fear of involving themselves, but in that they are just as guilty as the bully because they allow the bully to continue.
This period of guiding the students in creating opinions, and forming attachments lasted a while, but the greater portion of the course is spent in learning the history behind racism, and segregation. This part of the class, and rightly so, was I believe the largest part of the course. This was the part of the course that helped students to have the mental capacity in civic agency. This mental capacity is all about knowing, and owning the facts behind the events. We began our study of these topics in the earlier of American history. As we discussed how the new found Americans treated the natives of this land, and how they saw them I remember a light going off in my head. During that time I had the realization that the early Americans were incredibly racist towards the natives, and as I learned what the Americans tried to do to the natives another light went off. This time I began to make the connection between the racism experienced by the natives to that which the Jews of Europe suffered. That’s when once again I experienced change, and mental growth. I went from seeing racism as just incorrect and ignorant views to viewing it as harmful along with incorrect and ignorant. I saw the harm that the Americans did when they tried to assimilate the natives. They managed to ruin a culture much older than their own in a matter of years. They only wanted to make the natives assimilate because they were racist, and believed they were better. I saw how this paralleled the Jewish experience with the Nazi’s. The Nazi’s destroyed the European Jewish people because they were racist, and believed they were better. This part of the class gave perspective also. As we learned the history of racism and segregation before and after WWII it became easier to understand why people thought the way they did. We could see that racism had been present and acceptable long before WWII and that even after it took some fight to begin to take racism down. With that in mind we would later be able to see how people came to accept things like race science in Germany. In this part of the course we also watched a film about a class of third graders called “A Class Divided”. This particular film as I remember it helped me to see how easily and quick people could turn on one another. It was after watching this film that I remember really understanding the German people at the time of the Third Reich. Because when I saw 9 year olds being nasty to one another, and performing differently in school because a person of authority said they were better or worse I thought of the German people. It gave me perspective and lead me to ask “If these kids changed in a day, how hard would it be to not change over years?” This changed my unforgiving attitude to one of understanding and disappointment. I still didn’t agree with the many Germans that aided the Nazi cause, but as for the bystanders who didn’t try to directly harm I had empathy. It was still disappointing that they probably accepted the ideals, but I understood how they came to be this way, and how difficult it would’ve been not to accept.
What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to Me
They say hindsight is 20/20 and now thinking back to who I was regarding my morality and views I can safely say that I suffered from the lack of knowledge that I thankfully received in this class. I don’t want to sit here and insult myself, but I thought I was a mature, moral person when in reality I wasn’t all the way there yet. After taking this course I see that my sense of morality was very concentrated on my own life, and that it didn’t expand far from that. In fact looking back now I see that when it did expand out it was still a bit immature. As for my views I was extremely unforgiving of the German people. I couldn’t grasp how people even today were not embarrassed to be connected to the people that made The Holocaust happen. I now know that was due to the gaps in information I had about post WWI Germany, and what the German people went through, and what the Third Reich was for them. That was where I stood before completing Facing History and ourselves, and as I think back I remember that I began to change little by little along with the progression of the course.
In the very beginning of the course I remember all the group work and discussions we did. At first I thought they were super tedious because we did them every day, but I now see the purpose of it all. I see that making a person read a paper, and asking them questions will force them to form an opinion. Then when you put that person in a group to discuss it will give them an emotional and moral attachment to their opinion because they will have to defend it. This was the beginning of forming civic agency. It was in this early period that I noticed that I began to feel more strongly in what I believe is right or wrong. I particularly remember when we read “Little Boxes”. This reading really hit home for me because the author spoke about not fitting in to either his Latino or Asian culture, and how hard it was for him to define himself when filling out paper work and having to check a box for ethnicity. I related to him because I often find myself in the same situation. Being born into one culture, but raised in another is a really confusing thing to be when all that the world wants to do is to define you. I’ve been annoyed by those little boxes all my life, and when I read that I understood and became of the opinion that categorizing people is unwise. Though I also understand that it is in our nature to want to categorize and have everything defined that’s a very dangerous thing to do. This was one of the first things I felt strongly about in this class, and what I believe was the first step for me to be able to attain civic agency. I believe that this helped my moral growth in that it awakened in me a passionate stance against categorizing humans. I believe now that this is the first step in dehumanization. That reading helped me begin to expand my limited feelings of morality towards categorizing people to seeing the consequences for the bigger picture, and It prepared me to do the same again as we learned more.
Introduction
My decision to take Facing History and Ourselves was grounded in a few different things. First, the word on the street about this class is that it’s a great course, and when I asked students about the course the answers I received were sincere and overwhelmingly positive. In fact it was almost a surprise because they actually seemed to care about the experience they had in Facing History. That’s something that you don’t often see in school. So, that sparked my curiosity as to what made this course so great, and made me want to take it. Secondly, I happen to really enjoy social and human sciences. It’s where my passion is academically and when it came time to build my schedule for senior year that’s what I wanted to see the most of. Also, the field of study I want to go into, psychology, is going to put me in a lot of social and human science classes. Therefore, considering that fact I wanted put myself in that situation senior year so that I could be completely certain that psychology is the right fit. Finally, I never properly learned about the holocaust. In my education it was pretty much brushed over. Since I knew the basics of what it was I felt like I couldn’t let myself continue on in life without proper understanding of what had happened. I couldn’t let the opportunity pass. Especially now in retrospect that I have taken the class I’m very happy that I didn’t miss the opportunity. This is certainly one of the few classes I’ll remember throughout my life. This course is similar to a language or math in that in builds on information. The ultimate goal of the course is to achieve civic agency, and to understand the consequences of being a bystander. Civic agency is comprised of the mental, emotional, and moral understanding of an event. Achieving civic agency will allow a person to be able to understand and see an event through the eyes of a person in the time the event occurred. The course focuses on topics such as, segregation and racism. All the information learned throughout the course will give you the ability to have a sense of civic agency when at the end of the course you study The Holocaust and how it was possible. This course has no tests or quizzes, and all the information is given through video/film. That is one of the best things about Facing History and Ourselves. The lack of exams allows the individual to determine what information they believe is important. This in itself helps create a very individualized experience for a student. It is my firm belief that even if someone had learned about The Holocaust before this class their understanding of it before this class paled in comparison to their understanding after it. This was certainly true for me. The knowledge and capacity that I feel I have gained from this class is insurmountable. I feel that I have benefited from this class not only from the knowledge, but also in a moral sense. As a person I’ve certainly gotten a greater sense of morality and empathy from my experience in this course.
smiling, and laughing believing that one day they’d be free. This really made me think about
us. It made me really think about humanity. We are so inclined to do the wrong things, rather
than do the good things. Our natural instinct is to do what’s wrong and it’s such a hassle to do
what’s right. I’m not saying all of us, but most. I also thought about us seniors. How we are
older kids and how we handle our everyday lives at school. How we treat others and based on
our thoughts we either make someone feel good or we hurt them with our own words. We need
to think a lot more about what we say so we don’t say ignorant things. There’s that saying “if
you have nothing good to say, then don’t say anything at all”
I remember another thing that we watched in class and it was called “the Milgram Experiment”
where a scientist performed a test on a teacher and student. If the student answered the correct
answer, then he wouldn’t get shocked, but if he didn’t answer correctly, he would. This
experiment got to the point where high level shocking was occurring and the teachers wouldn’t
stop doing it. Some of them after a while of hurting the student would stop and not continue.
Others though did not and there was one where this guy went all the way to the danger zone and
did not stop the experiment because he kept obeying the higher authority. I didn’t believe what I
was seeing. How can someone inflict that much pain into someone else and not be bothered by
it? If it were me, I would’ve given a few shocks but probably wouldn’t pass three at most
because it’s not something funny after a little bit. I’m not saying it’s ok to do it but if it’s just for
fun and not for hurting someone else then I don’t see it as bad; neither two or three shocks is bad
but to keep doing it is something very different. Seeing those men do what they did made me feel
so strange. I didn’t understand why they couldn’t stop even after the student told them to stop
because it was hurting them. Why were they so easily forced to follow the higher authority than
to listen to those were hurting? It really makes me think a lot about morality and to whether or
not do the right thing. I know that to do what’s right requires that next step. It requires another
level of maturity and intelligence to go against what’s wrong and to fight back.
The Freedom Writers is another movie that I enjoyed watching. Seeing those kids living those
horrible lives of death and violence made me realize that I live in a completely different world.
After seeing what they’ve been through and from where they came, when they became a family
it made me happy inside. They got to be close to each other and they all meant something to
each other. They embraced each other’s differences and accepted them for who they were and I
think that’s another thing that this course teaches us. To not only fight to protect others, but to
embrace our differences and enjoy each other. We aren’t from the same family but that doesn’t
mean we can’t be united.
I enjoyed every bit of Facing History and Ourselves. I know that I won’t forget this class because
not only has it made me think so much but it has made me rethink about who I am and what I
care about. We can’t be selfish people because that can lead to so many problems like
discrimination, hate, abusive words and actions and it only creates this atmosphere of negativity.
I am very thankful for the time I’ve spent in Mr. Gallagher’s class. I’ll even thank Mr. Cullen for
putting me into this class. I believe I am more mature now than when I first walked into that
class, thinking that it would suck. I was wrong, very wrong. I’m glad I took and I can personally
say, it is life changing.
Everyone I know mistakenly calls me Sofie. My name is, and always has been, Sofia Jean Ehrenreich Berg, and I hate when people call me by something I’m not. Simple errors such as this are examples of a loss of identity, even if small in comparison to the immense losses faced by the prisoners of concentration camps during the Holocaust. I am currently a senior at Westborough High School and this is my final Facing History and Ourselves blog. I chose to take Facing History and Ourselves this year because I wanted to take the time to understand what the people of my ethnicity endured. The Facing History and Ourselves course at Westborough High School is essentially a selective look at local to global history with a focus on discrimination, war, human rights, genocide, and issues of justice. This class drew heavily on the fields of psychology, sociology, law, biology, literature, humanities, and the arts. After we were asked to pause to reflect on what we had just read or watched onscreen, we would always step into the question of the role of the bystander in history; we began the year looking at the “ourselves” part of Facing History and Ourselves. This class is guaranteed to change the way that you think, the things that you say, and they way that you conduct yourself. Every day I find myself leaving the classroom wondering things such as: How do we define and see our own identities? How we categorize ourselves and others? Where do we fit in the bigger world? And what’s going on in the world beyond Westborough that we may or may not know much about? How do stereotypes and traditional beliefs affect our views of others and what human rights are then guaranteed? After taking this class, I didn’t think about think about myself the way I did before; I thought about others.
If someone described this course as “life changing,” I would say that it was nothing less. Over the semester we began to act more like adults. In January, we focused primarily on racism and segregation, as well as false labeling. At this point in the course, I truly began to reevaluate myself and whether I was allowing these societal norms to persist in our community. Around February, we began to research events which led up to the initial progression of the Holocaust. We viewed propaganda films and experienced the opinions and beliefs that the Nazis were feeding to the European population; at this time, my hatred toward injustice sprouted. In March, we moved to studying the Holocaust in totality and the effects it had on the European trends of civilization. We watched films depicting the ghettos, Jewish oppression, and the death camps. Every single video we watched was tragic and horrific in an individualistic way.
was lost. They gave their all for one another. There was no “every man for themselves”. Another
movie that really stuck to me even though I didn’t watch more than the first 30 minutes of it was
Hotel Rwanda. Seeing all those dead corpses in the fields and on the streets made me feel so
terrible; this unpleasant feeling would come upon me. Sometimes I wanted to be there to help
and fight back because it made me so angry seeing all those innocent people slaughtered without
reason. Even if there was a reason, what good comes out of slaughtering all those lives? It
angered me how I couldn’t do anything and even if it was just a movie, it was based on a true
story.
This course has a purpose to teach people how corrupt morals and insanity are very
dangerous things because they’re tools for destruction. The course shows how and why Hitler
came into power and why he did what he did. The things that made it possible for him to do
what he did. It’s something very interesting to see (in a bad way) how it was so easy for people
to fall into Hitler’s great hypnosis and not be bothered one bit by what they were doing. They fell
for the act and were slaves to the dark power. In class we watched a documentary about
liberating the concentration camps and putting the Nazis to trial. I was happy to finally see action
from other nations to put a stop to them but I think that it would’ve been better if they acted
before. I guess here is an example of bystander where the U.S, Britain, France and other
countries decided not to go and help the people but rather stood aside letting it happen. From this
I can see how it’s truly important to make a stand and fight back because the consequences of not
doing anything could be greater than that of actually doing something.
Facing History and Ourselves has opened up my mind to many things. Before I came to
the course I knew things about the Holocaust and I knew that we need to stand up for others.
What I didn’t know is how things may seem “small” when in fact they aren’t. The Holocaust
shows the magnitude of where bullying can be raised to if not taken care of. Standing up and
saying no can make a huge difference in someone else’s life and also in yours because you
decided to go up against a threat. Seeing what I saw and realizing what people went through in
those camps made me really think about my life. I’m so lucky to live in a place where I don’t
have to worry everyday whether I’ll make it alive or not because as far as I know, I’ll be living
until tomorrow and beyond. We live in a society that’s so much better off than other societies
because I believe that we came together in many ways and that the different cultural beliefs
helped shape our society into a better world.
I remember watching this documentary called “A Class Divided” and it was about this teacher
who decided to conduct experiments on her young first graders. She was trying to teach them
about segregation and about discrimination. I thought it was very interesting to see those kids
turning on each other just after a few words that the teacher says about kids with blue eyes are
better than kids with brown eyes. One minute they were friends and the next, they were acting
like enemies. We know that children are very easily influenced and it wouldn’t be a shock to see
this. When she conducted this experiments on the adults, it was the same thing. It really shocked
me to see that fully matured adults were so easily influenced by this same experiment. I asked
myself, “what about the civil rights movement?” “What about all those people who fought for
equal rights and to end segregation?”. It was as if it never happened. In that one documentary
called “the Children’s March” where there were thousands and thousands and thousands of
young boys and girls who marched to end the segregation; those little kids who went to jail
Introduction
My name is Samuel Hastenreiter. I am currently a senior at Westborough High School
and this is my blog. To be honest, I wasn’t looking to participate at all in this class. I didn’t plan
on entering any history courses senior year and I made sure my history teacher understood that.
I’m sure he understood but I don’t think he listened to me at all because I’m in facing history
now. I don’t mind at all the fact that he put me into this class but I hesitated a little bit when I
found out last semester. I’m a pretty simple guy I guess. I’m not conceded or anything of the like
and I like to learn new things. My favorite sport is soccer and I love playing my keyboard. Music
is a great part of my life and at home I practically have a studio. Hearing about this class was
pretty interesting because people said that it changed their view of things and it really opened up
their minds to understanding more. I figured that it was probably just an overrated class because
it’s school and there shouldn’t be a class that makes people feel such a way. From my many
years of experience, class didn’t prove any life changing things. It was boring and didn’t really
do any “life changing” things. I just wanted it to end fast because I wanted to get out.
What Facing History and Ourselves means to me
This class has taught me many things and I’m grateful to have had the experience that I
did. It wasn’t what I had expected it to be and what people told me in the past, came to be true
in my life as well. The course isn’t just like any other class where you sit down, listen to a
teacher talk, do work and bam, all done. The course takes on a different path where various
people have their stories told through documentaries and even movies. What makes it different
is the fact that it isn’t all about me, it’s all about us. I’m not going into the classroom to earn a
grade to make a better impression on colleges or future careers or in society, I’m going in there
to learn to be respectful of others and protecting those who need help when they can’t help
themselves. It’s not to know that I can get good grades, but to know that I can do something for
someone and not leave them behind.
Something I have learned is that it’s easier to stand up for yourself than standing up for
someone else. What I mean is that when someone is being bullied, it’s easy to be a bystander
and not do anything at all to help the person. That is what I mean by standing up for oneself
because they’re not involving themselves in the situation. I think that those who have the will
to stand up for that person is someone who is very strong and courageous. I wish that I could be
someone strong and assertive but the problem is that I’m someone who is shy and often let
others talk over me but I fight for me to overcome that and express myself because it really
sucks. When we watched those movies I kept rooting for a Jewish person to hit some German
soldier and take him out when he wasn’t noticing. I know that they couldn’t and it pretty much
meant death if they did so but I couldn’t stand how they had to endure such torture.
When I watched the movie Uprising, it really hit me when I saw those people fight for
their lives till the very end. They fought day after day, until they couldn’t fight anymore. It
amazed me to see how they were so strong and how they kept on fighting even when all hope
We watched “The White Man’s Image” in February. It’s a film about the way in which the Native Americans were treated by the “white” people after the Civil War. I found the documentary to be incredibly interesting, especially how the whites tried to conform the Indians into being “civilized,” in their sense of the term. The culture of the white people was more predominant in the area, at the time; this wealth of cultural acceptance allowed the whites to believe that they were superior to the Indians. The Native Americans were being treated as criminals, so no one thought twice about the cruel ways in which they were treated; inadvertently supporting what the whites were doing. Many of the Native Americans adopted the identity of the whites and conformed to their ideas/beliefs, casting away any sense of their old identity as spiritual Native Americans. I don’t believe that the treatment of the Native Americans was in any way fair; they were stripped of their culture, as well as their identities. The Indians should have had the right to live their lives as they so desired, without the consent of anyone else. We also watched “The Children’s March” in February. Before watching this documentary based on the events that took place at the Children’s March, I hadn’t much knowledge about the historical milestone. While watching this film, I gained a greater sense of respect for those who stand up for their beliefs. It showed the cruel brutality that many people endured, and these images not only impacted me but also impacted those who saw them at the time of the event. Dr. King was incredibly wise in the sense that he knew exactly how to present the message of peace among men and women of all races. King asserted the statement that ever person is equally deserving of freedom, and his method of gathering the children to proceed on their march created an uproar that alerted the nation of Birmingham’s social unrest. I found that children hold much more power than we give them credit for, and that their sway can promote a greater change; the kids can be heroes, too. We watched “Mrs. Elliot” in February, too. Mrs. Elliot’s intelligence as an educator was exemplified by her valuable lessons she taught through this experiment. Implementing these values on young children proves positive outcomes in the future of these kids. I truly enjoyed when she took the same experiment and used it on adults; it says something about the variable of age. You can change the minds of human beings at any age; power changes people regardless of how old they might be. This documentary says something about how race amounts to nothing in comparison to how important actions are. What we do and say can affect who we are more so than how we look to ourselves and others.
I see myself addressing questions of why people marginalize, looking at extreme forms of this; from slavery and discrimination toward African Americans, the treatment of native peoples, the treatment of Asians, Latinos, Muslims, homosexual/bisexual/transgendered people, and anti-Semitism toward racism and homophobia. I look around; starting with the people we pass each day in the halls to the minimal segregation between teams, and then apply this nationally and globally. However, historical events cannot take part without the participation of different people with specific roles: perpetrators, victims, bystanders, rescuers, and resisters. Propaganda helps in the encouragement of stereotyping, prejudice, and outright hatreds. I examined propaganda techniques in societies by examining language, film, art, the press, and education.
Another film that stood out to me was The Pianist; I had seen the movie before we watched it in class but watching it a second time was a different experience. When I watched the movie before I did not have the knowledge about what was happening during that time period. I knew what the Warsaw ghetto was but I did not know if the death camps had been created yet or if the Nazi’s had come up with the final solution. A few scenes that stuck out to me most was when an old women has a bowl of soup and another man begins to attack her for it, and while they are fighting the bowl gets knocked out of her hand, the women begins to cry while the man gets on the ground and starts eating the food. This part showed how desperate people were to just get a bowl of food, they were willing to fight each other for the slightest piece of food and would pick things off the ground because it was either that or starve. Another part of the movie that stood out to me was when the pianist is hiding out in the ghetto and a soldier comes in, and at first the pianist thinks that the solider is going to kill him or take him captive, but the man ends up saving him by helping him find a place to hide. The man also comes back and brings him food and gives him his jacket because he is cold. The movie was based on a true story so I looked up to see if that actually happened and it did. Sadly, the solider that helped him died in a labor camp when the Russians came in. I always wondered if any of the soldiers felt guilty for what they were doing or did not believe in the anti-Semitism. I also still wonder why the solider helped out the pianist and if he had done that with other prisoners.
The last documentary that left an effect on me was the real footage of the Nazi concentration camps. While watching the film I actually felt sick and could not believe what I was seeing was real footage. I had seen so many movies about the Holocaust but seeing the actual film of the concentration camps was indescribable. When we watch a movie there are actors that are portraying individuals but when you watch it you know that the person you are seeing is actually okay, but seeing all of the bodies and knowing that those people had died in the way that they did was different. When I watched the Nazi soldiers carrying the bodies of people and throwing them into pits and seeing the thousands of people lying on top of each other with their skulls smashed in or burn marks was disturbing and made me angry to know that these people’s lives were taken for no reason. I also felt sick when I saw some of the survivors and to see how skinny they were because they had been starved for so long. This makes you realize how much these people suffered.
Before taking the class I did not think that the material that we were going to see was going to affect me in the way that it has. Every time we watch a movie I always go home and make my parents watch part of the movie or I will tell them what I have learned. By seeing all these films I have realized that no one can just stand by and watch while injustices happen, and that it takes people to stand up for what they believe in to get things to change and by watching things happen you are just enabling the other person’s behavior.
We watched “The Freedom Writers” in March. I had never seen this movie before, and the profound impact that it made on me afterwards was astonishing. I found myself relating to and sympathizing with characters that I don’t have any direct commonalities with. Mrs. Gruwell taught me what it truly means to be a teacher and the strength and perseverance that it takes to get students to effectively think. I hope that this kind of ripple effect is occurring in many needy communities and that others can also benefit from watching this film. She taught each student that they are their own hero; they are the only ones that will always be there for themselves. But I also believe that she, as a teacher, gained some knowledge from this academic activity. Mrs. Gruwell learned that respect is earned; even if not so easily done. You have to make conscious decisions to do good by others. We also watched “The Longest Hatred” in March. I feel as though I’ve truly gained a greater knowledge after watching this film. The video emphasized, in general, the great length of time in which the Jewish people were hated. Hitler had painted it to seem as though his actions were religiously motivated; that the Catholic and Protestant faiths had been accusing the Jews of being the ones who killed Christ and, therefore, the Jews must suffer consequences. And through his religious preaches, hatred developed and spread throughout nations. Because of this, I found it interesting that the Nazi party had no particular religious affiliation. They claimed to be acting purely in justification of race, not of religion. The hatred that the Nazi party exuded toward the Jews was for the sole reason of promoting their white supremacy and Nazi ideals. Many people have been killed over what they worshiped, especially Jews, where mass killings occurred multiple times in history in multiple different areas of the world. This film highlighted, for me, the fact that people will follow their religious leaders to the death; whether it’s their own, or someone else’s.
But when it comes down to it, I can see that some kids asking themselves, “Why are we asking these questions anyway?” Identity and nationalism are intertwined, when we look beyond the prejudice that clouds judgment. We defined various “isms” and relate them to nationalism. We also asked questions about nationalism- particularly our own. We also examine notions of eugenics, so-called “race science”, and efforts to measure intelligence, ability, and potential through apparently questionable standard tests beginning in the early twentieth century. We then began looking at how genocide peculiarly defines the twentieth century. The twentieth century has been labeled by many historians as “the century of genocide.” Not that genocide was invented in the past 100 years, but it was practiced in the modern era with a captured intensity that is important to identify and understand.
We watched “The Milgram Experiment” in April. Fear of punishment contributes heavily to the act of obedience. I believe that it could, also, be possible that the teachers feared their own punishment; wondering if they would be given an electric shock if they refused to continue with the procedure. It is this simple act of looking out solely for yourself that contributes to obedience. I don’t think that those distributing the shocks were laughing due to extreme amusement of the situation, but because they were uncomfortable and laughing to mask their unsettledness. We, as humans, are expected to obey orders. But once our morals are challenged, the act of obedience becomes increasingly conflicted. Sparing the embarrassment of standing up for your beliefs is easier than asserting yourself, in cases such as the Milgram Experiment. This experiment demonstrates how it is in our nature to conform to widely believed ideas and principles. It showed me how easy it can be for one to turn against their own conscience for the sake of blending in. We also watched “The Pianist” in April. I’d never heard of this movie prior to watching it. I truly got a sense of the atmosphere of the time while watching this movie; the cinematography was incredibly realistic and astounding. While many of the images were absolutely horrific, they were beautifully captured by the videographer. The first scene I saw was of the pianist trying to revive a dead child in the street and, at first, I couldn’t really fathom what was happening. I think it’s human tendency to subconsciously deny what we don’t want to believe to be true. By opening our eyes to the gruesome truths of the world we, ourselves, are enduring a new pain. Our resistance toward accepting the reality of the Holocaust, I believe, stems from our inability to comprehend total disaster and hatred. We watched “America and the Holocaust” in April, too. After seeing this film, I was left disturbed by the actions of our country. It seems implausible that so many countries denied access of Jews with anti-Semitic intentions. I would hope that governments, such as our own, would have been able to formulate some easier way for those in danger to emigrate into safer grounds. I can’t seem to quite understand why those who were well-aware, of the torment that others faced, did nothing to stop the pain they were being forced to endure. While I was disturbed by this film, I also enjoyed watching it. I was taught new information about the Holocaust while watching this film; information that I don’t think I wouldn’t known without viewing it.
The shock level would increase for each word the person got wrong. This test was administered after the Holocaust so I thought that most of the men giving the test would not keep shocking the person when they asked for them to stop. But as we watched the documentary we found out that 50% of the teachers gave the learners the maximum shock value of 450 volts. Some said that they would not continue the experiment because they wanted to make sure that the learner was okay but others just kept on going because they did not want to disappoint the person running the experiment. One man even said that he would not continue because he did not want to have to take responsibility if the learner were to get hurt, however once they were assured that they would not be responsible they kept on going with the experiment. It was apparent that the teachers knew what they were doing was wrong and that they felt guilty but they kept going because a person of authority told them to continue and because they were assured that they were not responsible for the person.
Another movie that stuck with me was the Grey Zone, which was about Auschwitz which was one of the most well-known and brutal death camps that the Nazi’s created. This movie was very hard to watch but I also thought that the movie depicted what was actually happening in the Holocaust. I thought that the most memorable part of the movie was when a group of people were heading for the gas chambers and fellow prisoners were telling them that they would be okay and to take off their clothes that they were just going to take a shower. When watching that part I thought to myself why would the other prisoners do that to each other? Wouldn’t they want to help each other or at least tell each other the truth? Then I thought about what I would do if I was in that situation. I would want to say that I would not lie to other Jews, but at the same time the individuals were put in hopeless situations and all anybody wants to do is survive as long as them because that is human nature. It was awful to watch how hundreds of people would go into the gas chambers thinking that they were going to take a shower and while watching you knew what was going to happen but all you could do was watch. Prior to this movie I did not know a lot about the gas chambers, I knew that they were used by the Nazi’s and was the main way people were killed but I did not know what actually happened when a person was in there. It was awful to learn that it took on average about 20 minutes for the people to die and that they would choke to death and lose control of their bodily functions. After hearing that I cannot believe that people could come up with these methods of killing or be able to carry it out. This movie really opened up my eyes as to the exact horrors of the camp.
Another movie that stuck out to me was Uprising, which was about the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. Prior to seeing the film I had never heard of the Jewish people fighting back against the Nazi’s. I had always wondered why nobody ever tried to get a group together and try to escape or fight back. I thought that this movie was very important to see because it showed how individuals would take such risks in order to stand up for what was right. For instance Tosia Altman was one of the female main characters who would sneak out of the ghetto and smuggle ammo back into the camps. While watching the film you could see how all these people were coming together like a family trying to protect each other and find ways that they could strike back against the Nazi’s. I thought that this movie was empowering, to see people in such an awful situation stand up and fight back even if they died they said that they wanted to die on their own terms and not let the Nazi’s kill them when they wanted too.
Facing History and Ourselves has been my favorite class I have taken all year, perhaps even all four years of my high school career. I have learned so many important lessons that I could have never learned if I hadn’t taken the course. I now feel strongly that every student should take this course. If it is able to change others as much as it changed me, I think it would absolutely have a positive effect on the student body at Westborough High School if everyone were to take it. Many people don’t understand the importance of simply being kind to other people and not judging them. I feel badly for anyone who does not get the opportunity to experience Facing History and Ourselves. They are truly missing out on a life-changing journey that will have lasting effects. The lessons I have learned from Facing History are not temporary. The image of hundreds of dead bodies being bulldozed into a ditch is not temporary. The bloodcurdling screams of the victims being gassed to death in the chambers are not something you forget easily. The fact that 13 million people were murdered in the Holocaust cannot be covered up by history. These are things that I know will stay with me, even haunt me, for the rest of my life.
I would like to wrap up my essay with some words of thanks to Mr. Gallagher. Without you, none of this would be possible. Thank you so much for taking the initiative and being determined to integrate the Facing History and Ourselves course into the Westborough High School curriculum. Your endless knowledge and experience really made an impact on me. To me, I have learned the most valuable lesson a person can ever learn. People can be taught all sorts of facts, equations, definitions, and theories, but without the knowledge of how to be a decent person, they will not go anywhere.
She gave the kids with brown eyes more recess and made the kids with blue eyes wear something around their neck to indicate that they were different. After about 15 minutes of Mrs. Elliot telling the kids that they were better the children began to believe her and the kids with brown eyes began to pick on the kids with blue eyes. It was crazy to watch while these kids turned on each other and became so mean. Mrs. Elliot also did the experiment the next day and told the kids with the blue eyes that she was wrong and that they were now superior to the kids with the brown eyes; the kids with the brown eyes looked like they wanted to cry because they knew that they were going to be subjected to the same things that the blue eyed kids were the day before. The blue eyed kids ripped off the collars and happily placed them onto another student with brown eyes. You could tell that the kids with the blue eyes wanted pay back and that they could not wait to get out off the collar even if it meant that somebody else was going to have to be subjected to the treatment that they had endured the day before. I thought that this experiment was so interesting and important. At the time of the experiment, segregation was prevalent and the children in her class were white so they had never experienced discrimination before since they were the ones that were considered to be superior. When the children were going through the experiment and were considered to be inferior it was the first time that they had experienced people picking on them just because of a physical attribute that they could not change. This documentary showed how when people are told that they are better than others by authority figures over and over again they will being to believe what the person is saying and turn on the people that they had considered to be their friends. When thinking about the Holocaust, before watching this film I did not understand how people would think that they were better than others just based on the fact that they were not Jewish and part of the Arian race. But this experiment showed how when people keep getting told that they are better that they will believe it.
Another documentary that stood out to me was the Milligram Experiment, which I found to be very shocking. During the Milligram Experiment men were asked to come to this experiment and it was said that they would get money. The men were split up and one man would administer the test while the other person was taking the test. The person taking the test was strapped to a machine that administered a shock. The person giving the test had to read a series of words that were paired together. After reading the list the person would read a word and then ask the person taking the test what the other word was and if they got the word wrong they would have to administer a shock.
What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to Me
At the beginning of the class Mr. Gallagher told us that this class was going to change us after viewing the films that we were going to see. At first I did not think that was actually going to happen; I thought that the class was going to inform us about the Holocaust but I did not think it was going to change me. However after taking the class the images and the lessons that I learned will stay with me forever. Prior to taking Facing History I had always been interested in the subject of the Holocaust because I could not understand how it was possible for millions of people to be murdered in the most heinous way, and have nobody try to stop it in the beginning. By watching the documentaries about race science and learning about how scientist were “proving” that certain groups of people were not as good as others, I could begin to see how people thought that they were better and that the Jews and others were inferior and not even human. The movies were incredibly hard to watch; because you would see people that looked so normal murder women, children and men in cruel ways and most of the Nazi’s did not look like it bothered them.
One of the first documentaries that we watched that really stands out to me was the documentary A Class Divided which was about the experiments Mrs. Elliot ran. Mrs. Elliot was a third grade school teacher, who decided to run an experiment regarding how children react when they are told they are better than others due to a physical appearance. Mrs. Elliot decided to split her class up by eye color and on the first day of the experiment she told the kids in her class that the children with brown eyes were more superior to the kids with blue eyes. At first the children thought she was crazy because they were all friends and they had never been told that before, but Mrs. Elliot kept telling the children that if they had brown eyes’ that they were much smarter than the kids with blue eyes.
We naturally spent considerable time looking at the Holocaust and related events. The Holocaust is a worthy focus for us because it is the most well-documented and researched of the past century; we can now see that patterns of behavior that emerge during the period from 1933 to 1945 reappear in history of the past two centuries. We looked at the planting of seeds for Nazism and why they took root in Germany, the Nazi party’s emergence, the sequence of actions the Nazis took, and the transformation of daily life from 1933 onward. Moreover, as the violence in Europe escalated, we considered the responses of citizens of different countries to Nazi policies and actions; the efforts of targeted peoples to escape and the varying responses of others, including the United States, are explored, as are the intensified efforts to degrade and dehumanize peoples through ghettoization and killing squads. We look, as well, at how the Nazis methodically built killing centers – from euthanasia programs to gas chambers, - and succeeded in murdering vast numbers of people on an unprecedented scale. And all the while, we grapple with the many, many individuals who did not act; the bystanders.
While the course examines the Holocaust in Europe as its central case study, it is not the only episode in recent world history that we address. Ethnic cleansings, episodes of rampant discrimination, and genocides in other areas of the world are explored in parallel fashion and we made an effort to understand why these actions continue to happen, despite the lessons of history. Ultimately, we looked at the issue of judgment and reconciliation. What role does reconciliation play in trying to create a society in the aftermath of such events? How do you commemorate the loss of individual lives?
Introduction
My name is Brianna Greene and I am a senior at Westborough High School. Next year I am going to be playing tennis at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York and plan on majoring in business and minoring in psychology. I decided to take Facing History and Ourselves when I was a junior during class selections because I needed to take a history class and only had room for a semester long course. I decided on Facing History because I had friends that had taken the class and said that the class was very interesting and worth taking. The class is not like a traditional class, Mr. Gallagher does not lecture us and we don’t have assessments, instead we watch movies and documentaries and read about different topics. At the beginning of the class we learned about the Native Americans, race science and segregation. We learned about these events so that we would develop civic agency which is when a person has a moral, emotion and intellectual connection to the time period. We were able to use our knowledge to able to understand what was happening in the world when the Nazi’s took over, so that we could focus on the Holocaust
One of the last days of the course was the hardest day for me. We had the chance to watch actual footage of what was happening at the death camps run by the Nazis. This footage was shown at the Nuremberg Trials as evidence to support the case against the Nazis for crimes against humanity. For me, this was the day that sealed up everything I had learned in the course. It had such a huge impact on me; one that I can’t even describe in words. This footage was the most horrible, disgusting, sickening footage I have ever watched. From the first minute in to the last second, I was feeling all kinds of emotions. I was angry, upset, nauseous, sad, and in complete disbelief. It’s easy to watch fictional movies or reenactments of events such as these that occurred at the death camps, but when it comes to actual footage, there is nothing worse. I could not sit still the entire period and my stomach was churning. I wanted to look away but I couldn’t. Despite the difficulty of viewing this material and seeing with my own eyes these poor, innocent people being barbarically treated, I am grateful that I watched it. It solidified everything in the course that led up to that film, and thus for me it confirmed my feelings about how I should act toward other people. I learned that the hatred of a group of people can lead to disastrous, disgusting things. I learned to be compassionate and treat everyone with equal respect. I learned not to judge anyone for any reason at all until I get to know them. I learned to not place people on a hierarchy. Not one person on this Earth is better than another because of the way they dress, who they are friends with, how much money they have, or what they believe in. I learned to never go along with the opinions of a group of people just to avoid being the odd one out. I want to have my own opinions that are based on my own perceptions and fair treatment of others. I want to stand up for what I think is right and not let my opinion be drowned in the flood of others’.
The following day we were able to watch the actual Nuremberg Trials and then read about the outcomes. I was not surprised when most of the Nazis charged for war crimes and crimes against humanity were proven guilty and then hanged. I was relieved that these people were killed because they deserved it, but at the same time I felt like no form of punishment could ever make up for all of the pain, torture, and suffering that those in the Holocaust endured. I feel as if the best punishment would be death, but then they are able to escape the guilt and ridicule that they would face for the rest of their lives if they were kept alive. At the same time, however, none of these people deserved to go on living after what they did. You could hang every Nazi party member, officer, and camp guard and it would still not repair what was done to the millions of people who suffered in the Holocaust.
Another film I really enjoyed watching was The Swing Kids. I never heard of the film before this class and it is definitely one of my favorite movies still. The characters in the movie did a really good job portraying what it was like living in Germany. Music was a big thing to the Jewish and even though the Nazi’s tried extremely hard to take that away from them, it was the one thing they were not able to take away. I really enjoyed one of the characters singing jazz and dancing in the street until the Nazi youth group started beating him until he was hospitalized. After I saw that part in the movie, I was completely disgusted. I couldn’t understand how they were able to do that to such innocent people who did nothing but mind their own business. One part in the movie I thought was important was at the end when the two boys were so close until one of them joined the Nazi youth group and completely turned on his friends and family. This part really showed how people who joined lost a sense of their identity and what they believed in. This movie really stuck with me because for the most part it showed how the teenage boy figured out who he really wanted to be. A film that recently caught my interest was The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. I had always heard about the film and how most people loved it. When I viewed the film, it was very close to having me in tears especially towards the end. Bruno was such a sweet innocent boy who didn’t understand what was happening in the real world. When he met his friend at the camp he did not realize what he was getting himself into which is why the movie was so upsetting to me. Bruno and his friend had been killed in the gas chamber all because Bruno was trying to help him out. That part in the movie has not been able to get out of my head ever since watching it. I was disgusted and upset about everything I saw in these films because the Jew’s did not deserve for any of that to happen to them and it is unfair. Now whenever I see something happening to someone that shouldn’t be happening, I have enough power to go over there and to say stop because I refuse to be a bystander. To end the course we watched horrible footage about what went on inside the death camps. While watching it, I was completely shocked to the point where I really wanted to just keep looking away. All I wanted to do was look away whenever something terrible would come up, but I refused to. I was in Facing History and Ourselves for a reason and that was to be face to face to real life footage during the Holocaust.
By the end of the course I felt like a different person. When Mr. Gallagher would talk about what a bystander is, I never fully understand until after I took this course. Now that I’ve seen what happened during the Holocaust and how many people just stood by and watched what happened, that is not the type of person I am anymore. If I see someone who needs help, I will step in and help. Some of the things I saw throughout the course would make me cringe and look away because of how awful it was. I would also think to myself how it was possible for any of this to happen. Everything I saw and learned in this course has made me into a better person. When I was signing up for my classes and decided to take Facing History and Ourselves, I had no idea it was going to be this life changing. Since the beginning, this course has shaped me into being the person I am today which I was not expecting to happen my senior year of high school. It was one of the best courses I have ever taken and I’m so glad I had the opportunity to be in such a great class.
Throughout the course we watched several documentaries on Germany, Adolf Hitler, and the Nazi party. These movies were particularly helpful in understanding how someone as ruthless as Hitler could come to power and cause so much pain to a group of people. I learned from these documentaries that in times of chaos, people tend to look to the extremes in order to seek quick and drastic change to get out of current situations. It also taught me the great, dangerous power of strong nationalism and propaganda. Because Nazi Germany was based upon nationalism, they wanted to racially purify the nation, which then led to the extermination of the undesirables. That nationalism in combination with the propaganda, which further convinced people that they were better than others, made for prejudices against Jewish people. This made me realized that widespread acceptance of all types of people is the only attitude that any nation should have toward its people.
This idea of differences among people leading to stereotypes and prejudices was a main focus in the film “Freedom Writers” which we also viewed in class. This film features a teacher, Miss Gruwell who starts teaching in a tough school where the students are divided by their races and gangs. Miss Gruwell works with her class and eventually gets them to see the similarities and the same struggles that they are all carrying despite their seemingly large differences. This movie goes to show that even though we do not share the same experiences and situations, we have more in common with each other than we think, and the things that outwardly set us apart should not stop us from coming together.
One major reason this course is so valuable is because in order to avoid mistakes in the future, we must be educated about the past. I think many people assume that nothing as horrible as the Holocaust could ever happen again because it was so gruesome and exceptionally unusual. History has proved this wrong, however. Take the Rwanda Genocide, for instance, which was featured in the movie we viewed in class, “Hotel Rwanda”. This brutal genocide wiped out thousands of people with machetes due to the hatred of one group of people. Hotel Rwanda was a difficult movie to watch, but it was worthwhile because it is another tragic example of why hatred is such a dangerous thing and standing up for what is right is so crucial. We must be educated and learn from the mistakes made in the past that have led to these awful events in order to prevent history from repeating itself once again. People who are not educated often become ignorant which then leads to the fear of the unknown. This is a very dangerous thing because for these people, anything that is different from what they know is seen as a threat or as something bad and strange. Education is key, which I have learned from this course.
What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to Me:
In August when I received my schedule for senior year, I was so happy to see “Facing History and Ourselves” with Mr. Gallagher for my second semester period two block. I have always been interested in the Holocaust and I had heard nothing but great things about the course. Now, being at the end of the semester with only one class left, I can say with complete honesty that everything about Facing History and Ourselves exceeded my expectations. I am so thankful to have had the opportunity to be exposed to such meaningful and relevant issues and lessons that will stay with me forever.
I went into the course very eager to learn and be changed by whatever it was that I was going to experience. One of my peers described the class to me as a class that allows you to “find out who you are”. I remember thinking to myself, how can learning about the Nazis and the Holocaust, which occurred decades ago, help me to discover myself? I expected to see films and read accounts of the Holocaust that would certainly disturb and affect me, but I never thought that the course would give me such a different outlook on life and how I treat other people on a daily basis. As the course progressed, I slowly but surely transformed my perspective on life as a whole.
The beginning of the course was a little bit slow for me. I was very eager to get into the Holocaust movies. I am so fascinated by the Holocaust because I found it extremely hard to believe that anything so cruel and inhumane as the systematic murder of millions of people could happen in our world. However, we started the course with a simple children’s book, The Bear That Wasn’t. Although the book was very simplistic and repetitive, it did contain a lesson that was worthwhile. This children’s picture book instilled the idea that the voice of the individual gets lost in the group, which is why it is so important to stand up for what is right.
The following month in class, we viewed a very memorable video. The video featured Mrs. Elliot and her second grade class. Mrs. Elliot was an inspirational teacher who was deeply concerned about her students’ learning. She organized an activity in which the classroom was divided between blue eye and brown eye students, and she told one group that they were better than the other and gave them special privileges. It allowed the young children to understand that one person isn’t better than another because of physical characteristics such as eye color or skin color. I admire Mrs. Elliot for this. By directly involving the children in the situation, they were able to understand how it felt to be treated unequally because of being different. Her lesson stresses the invalidity of these prejudices because what truly matters about a person is not their appearance, but it is their character.
Introduction:
My name is Kathryn Hally and I’m currently a senior at Westborough High School. I am 18 years old and I will be attending Providence College in the fall. I decided to take Facing History and Ourselves because everyone I know who had taken it in the past recommended it to me, claiming that it would change me and the way that I think in a positive way. Facing History and Ourselves is a half year course offered here at WHS taught by Mr. Gallagher. The course focuses on several topics such as Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, the Rwanda Genocide, the segregation of African Americans, and more. These topics are introduced and explained mostly by movies, documentaries, and readings. Class discussions of these readings and videos also take place throughout the course, as well as an online blog where students react and respond to the material gone over in class that day. The course is meant to reach the bystander and urge he or she to take a stand and fight for what is right. It is also meant to give students civic agency, which is having a moral, emotional, and intellectual sense of what was happening at a specific period in time. After completing the course, I can say with confidence that it has taught me some of the most valuable lessons that a person can ever learn in their life.
We then focused on how the Nazis were able to come to power and how they treated the Jewish like animals and how the Nazis were able to change people’s views on how Jewish weren’t real human beings. I really wasn’t sure how the Nazis could have taken over or just why Jews wouldn’t leave there country. We watched a film called America and The Holocaust, this film answered all my questions on how Jews couldn’t just leave if they knew what the Nazis were beginning to do. I couldn’t believe how it was like the civil rights movements in Europe as people started to have these bad ideas about Jews just because they were Jewish and someone in power “Adolf Hitler” told them how these Jewish weren’t allowed in certain jobs or could live with everyone else but had to be put in ghettos. I also was in shock to learn that America the land of opportunity would not allow Jews into the country during this time and they knew what was happening in Germany. This film taught me a lot about how the Nazis made the holocaust happen. The film The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was a film that I would recommend to everyone to see. This film was about a 8 year old boy named Bruno, whos father is a Nazi commandant who moves his family out of Berlin into a home in the country near a famous death camp called Auschwitz. Bruno likes to explore and one day finds himself outside the death camp and sees a kid on the other side of the fence that he is surrounded by. Bruno and the called in the Nazi camp called Shmole become friends and Bruno visits him as well interact in games through the fence without knowing the massacre of killings happening inside Auschwitz. Shmole is brought to Bruno house to work and Bruno gives him a piece of bread a Nazi guard sees that shmole and Bruno are talking and is told by shmole that Brunos his friend. Bruno being afraid of the guard tells him he’s never seen him in his life and he caught shmole stealing the piece of bread. This proves that during this time there were a lot of bystanders that were afraid to act due to punishments by the Nazis. At the end of the film Bruno gets into Auschwitz to help Shmole look for his father that has gone missing. Shmole and Bruno are caught in a pack of men being led into the gas chamber and aren’t able to escape. Brunos family searches for him and end up at the camp and see Brunos clothes and know that something bad has happen to him. This showed how innocent people were killed by the Nazi party because of bystanders not standing up for what they believed in.
I can say Facing history is a course that has taught me not only on not to be a bystander and not letting other change our identity but to stand up for what we believe and to never judge someone based on their appearance. I would say everyone that told me this course would change my views and life was rite. This class should be a mandatory class for everyone to take. If people could just get to know someone before judging they could end up finding someone that could change their life forever. This course has been a friend to me by teaching me many lessons and reminding me that no matter whom we are we or where we come from we shouldn’t let others change that. Facing history is a one in a life time opportunity that I can say am grateful for and was able to sit in a class and learned to never to be a bystander as well to learn more about who I want to be and not who people want me to be. I am thankful for all the knowledge that this course taught me about the holocaust and now my questions have been answered.
What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to me
I remember walking into the room that day it seemed if it had changed so much from the previous year. I saw that many of the quotes behind Mr.Gallaghers were still there but I remember reading them and they made more sense to me then when I was a sophomore. In January we started off by doing some readings on identity. We read a story call the Bear that wasn’t it talked about a bear that had gone into a factory and men told him he wasn’t a bear but a man with a fur coat, although he knew he really was a bear. Whether he would let people’s opinions change his of being a bear. The bear tried to prove the men that he was a true bear but they wouldn’t believe him, after some time the bear started to question his true identity of whether was he a real bear or just a man with a fur coat that needed to shave. This story shows how after being told by someone that you aren’t something you can start to question your identity based on someone’s opinion
As we continued with the course we talked about the Civil Rights Movement I didn’t really know much about what had happened during this time. I was shocked about how Blacks were treated by the whites; I couldn’t believe how whites thought not interacting with blacks based on their color of skin was the proper idea of living life. . We watched a documentary in class about an elementary school teacher, Mrs. Elliot how she did an experiment with her class. Mrs. Elliot experiment was to tell her students that children with brown eyes were inferior to children with blue eyes and gave privileges to the kids with blue eyes. Then she took them away from the kids with brown eyes. Then she observed the ways that children began treating each other during class and at recess. It was amazing to view how easily the kids would change their way of thinking simply because an adult figure told them to. This really touched me because it made me think of how me being an immigrant, my type of people are judged everyday by all types of people. Hearing people saying immigrants don’t belong in America and they should go back to their country and that we only come to steal people’s jobs in America. I could relate as to how Black’s must have felt during this time period of ignorance from whites as to the children with brown eyes must of felt like looked differently based on eye color by the other children. It also proved that people don’t know what it feels to be like in someone else’s shows because of where they might come from. We also watched a film called the freedom writers I had seen this film before but when I watched it this time I looked at it completely differently than I had the first time. It talked about a group of kids in LA that live in poor areas and they are involved in gangs. People have gotten the idea of these kids being a minority so there hope of being successful in life or school isn’t worth trying to help them in order to succeed and give them a different mentality. Ms.Gruwell there English teacher shows these kids how it feels like to have someone give you hope on being able to succeed and really care about them and someone they can look up to.
Introduction
My name is Carlos Vivar. I am a senior at Westborough High School and this is my Facing History and Ourselves blog. I wasn’t sure what Facing and ourselves was going to teach me. I had heard from some off my senior friends and teachers that it was a good course to take that it were a one in a life time opportunity. My friends that had taken the course told me that it changed their views on certain things and they recommend I take it. Plus they told me there was no homework and that all you did was watch videos and I would have to blog about the film we watched in class that night. All I knew about Facing History and ourselves was it was taught by Mr. Gallagher a teacher that I had sophomore year and was liked by everyone and respected. I am able to say taking History has been a one in a lifetime experience, which I am thankful to have had the opportunity to take thanks to Mr. Gallagher for teaching the course.I remember looking at the course sheet junior year and thinking to myself I do not want to take a history course in my senior year. Due to the fact I didn’t like history. I remember sitting with Mr.O’ Brian and telling him I wasn’t going to take a history class next year, but he recommend me to take a course called Facing History in ourselves he said he had heard from former students that it was a good course and he recommend it to me. Mr.O’Brian told me it was about the Holocaust, I didn’t know much about what the Holocaust so I decided to take the course.
Another topic that was introduced in our Facing History class was about discrimination and how it occurred. A film that portrayed the idea of what discrimination was, “Mrs. Elliot.” Mrs. Elliot was a third grade teacher trying to teach her students a valuable lesson. The exercise took course over a couple of days. Mrs. Elliot would pick all of the children with blue eyes and tell the class that blue eyed people are better than the green eyed people and then the next day she would explain to the class how green eyed people are actually better than the blue eyed people. Mrs. Elliot did a great job explaining to her class about what segregation and discrimination was in a way they could understand and relate to. This was one of my favorite films because segregation was a huge part in history and it is important to understand how it was to be a black and trying to live through it all. Another film we watched depicting discrimination between the blacks and the whites would be, “The Children’s March.” It’s an amazing video about how African American’s from Birmingham, Alabama stood up for themselves and of their race. I really enjoyed seeing the black children walk in the march and how were strong enough to get arrested for it. The African Americans did this in order to make a point about how they will not let anyone walk all over them just like they are not real human beings. This film showed me how even if people are going through a tough situation, they always stand up for what they believe in. This message was very important for Facing History and Ourselves because it taught me how to stand up for myself even if it is a hard thing to do.
When the course’s main focus was the Holocaust, that’s when it all started to hit me. To be honest, I never knew much about the Holocaust at all or about how awful and serious it was. At first we watched films about the hatred of the Jews to get some background knowledge about how and why the Holocaust could have occurred. Then we moved onto what the Holocaust actually was. We watched films about the Warsaw ghetto, what it was like for the Jew’s, and one of the harder things, the death camps. These films were tragic, horrifying, and some of them you could say were, inspirational. One of the films we watched was The Pianist. It was about Jew’s who stood up against the Nazi’s in Poland. In most films you would see how the Nazi’s would just get terrible hurt and wouldn’t put up a fight against the Nazi’s since they’re so powerful. It was a different viewpoint toward how the Jew’s did as much as they could for themselves instead of just giving up. This was an important film to watch because it showed how they wouldn’t give up the fight and they didn’t let the Nazi’s take over.
What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to Me
At the beginning of this course, one of the very first things we were introduced about was self-identity. I feel that this is a very important concept to understand because it’s all about knowing who you are as a person. The first short story we read and blogged about was called, “The Bear that Wasn’t.” I thought this was a great story to read first because it had such a simple yet important message to it. The story was about a bear who knew who he was but along comes a group with a higher power and he then lost a sense of who he was. This proves that people are so willing to do whatever they can to fit in with the rest of the group that it doesn’t matter what it takes to do that. Most of the time when someone wants to fit in, they lose who they are as a person. I feel that this story is very relevant to teenagers in high school because through all four years you are trying to figure out who you are as a person and while you are in that process, you shouldn’t let someone else tell you who you are or even who you’re becoming. The most important message of the story is that you are the only person in charge of yourself and how you want to live your life so don’t let someone else try and tell you. Another facet that I thought had an important message to it was the short video, “After the First.” It was mainly about how hard it can be to stand up for what you believe in and go against the crown or an authority figure. The video was about a young boy named Steve who was going hunting with his dad, and learning how to shoot a gun. Although he liked having the power of holding and shooting the gun, he only wanted to do it for the right reasons which was the opposite of what his father used it for. After Steve ended up shooting the innocent rabbit, he realized that it was the wrong thing to do. This can be compared to how society acts nowadays which is to conform to society’s thoughts and beliefs because people feel as though their ideas will be rejected. The main message of the film was that you should always stick to your morals and your values because at the end of the day that is all that matters. This video was a really good way to show a simple message about how it is important to stay true to yourself and that’s why it’s one of my favorite short films we’ve watched all semester. These two facets were closely related since they are both about how an individual shouldn’t give up on who they are as a person just because a person with higher power/authority told them to. Also, nobody should ever give up in what they believe in even if it may not be what’s expected of them.
Introduction
My name is Kelley Falanga. I am currently a senior at Westborough High School and I plan on majoring in Early Education. I’m going to talk about what Facing History and Ourselves meant to me. When I first heard of the course, “Facing History and Ourselves” I didn’t really know much about it. When I would talk to all of seniors about picking my classes everyone would say that they really enjoyed the course because it taught them a lot about themselves and also gave them the view point about what happened during the Holocaust because that’s what the course is mainly focused upon. I also decided to take this course because I also had Mr. Gallagher as a history teacher sophomore year. I really liked the way he thought of his students as adults which made me feel like I had more freedom in his class than any of my other classes. Throughout all of my high school years, most teachers I’ve had have always thought of their students as just regular teenagers who come to school just because they have to. For me however, that is not the case. I like to get something out of the classes that I’m taking because I don’t see the point of sitting in a room for an hour listening to something that you’re not interested in. Enjoying going to class is a big thing because it ends up making the class much more interesting and makes me actually want to learn something. In “Facing History and Ourselves” that is exactly the type of experience I got. Now that I’m a senior in high school and close to graduating, I feel that some of the courses taught at Westborough High School should have more meaning to them. In Facing History I learned a lot about who I am as a person and I’ve definitely grown up a little bit from when I started the course in January
Perhaps one of the most shocking things I learned in this class was Americans role in the Holocaust. I was baffled after watching the film America and the Holocaust. Initially I believed America to be the savior, the ones who liberated the camps and drove out the evil Nazis. This is only partially the truth. The truth is America could have saved thousands of Jewish people, but at the time period, Americans were commonly not found of the Jewish. Franklin Roosevelt in particular was not a fan of the Jews himself, and didn’t fully strive to help the Jewish people in Europe. Furthermore, the State Department ordered that no further reports of Jewish people being slaughtered be reported to them. When Jews applied for visas they were turned down by America. The lack of America to rally to the aid of the Jews in Europe contributed directly to the amount of Jews that were killed by Germans. Learning this made me upset to be an American, probably the only event that ever will make me upset to be who I am. Thousands of people reached their hands out for help to America and America turned a blind eye.
One of my favorite films was Mrs. Elliot. The story of Mrs. Elliot is another shocking example of human nature. Mrs. Elliot was able to accurately test the natural behavior of humans by running a simple test on children in her kindergarten class. I had never heard of this story before which is a shame because it taught me so much. I learned that humans are naturally able to identify each other as different by minor details and are able to use these details to create groups. Mrs. Elliot created an environment where one group was better than the other based off their eye color, similar to black and white skin color. In society at the time (1960) and still today, white people are viewed as far superior to black people but it was more than just a black and white issue. Black people and other minorities were treated as second class citizens during this time and Mrs. Elliot knew it was wrong to treat people like this. To put a dent in prejudice Mrs. Elliot taught these children that just because they have a different physical feature doesn’t mean they should be treated different than anyone else. Mrs. Elliot’s actions were highlighted as wrong and evil during her time period because she was one of the first people to stand up against prejudice. Nevertheless she continued to teach and go up against prejudice. This is very admirable to me. Yet again someone is standing up against the group, not being a bystander. Prejudice is a weapon the Nazis were able to use to successfully carry out the Holocaust. They were actually able to convince the German people Jews were far in superior to them and were dirt. The dangers of letting a prejudice get popular are that it can lead to extreme cases what happened in Nazi German. This was a huge awakening for me. I realized I had taken part in many prejudices myself and see it go on around me all the time. I truly understand the harm bystander’s cause to humanity.
I honestly feel like a changed person now that the course is over. I have matured, and value life much more sacred. I feel my attitude as changed after seeing how similar it was to the Nazis. I can’t believe me signing a piece of paper requesting to take this class changed my life. I honestly am so glad I took this course and witnessed everything I saw. I think about this class constantly and made it a point to have perfect attendance. This class means a lot to me and I feel it necessary to argue that every high school student should take the course. I feel this half year class is something I will always remember in my lifetime and the things I learned here I will carry with me as long as I live.
start journals on their lives. These journals were published, proving that all the administration at the school was wrong about the kids and Mrs. Gruwell was right. Mrs. Gruwell was able to successfully make a difference because she fully believed in what she was doing. Had Mrs. Gruwell molded into the group, she would had been no better than the other teachers, she would have been a bystander. I admire Mrs. Gruwell because of what she did. She proved that not everyone forms to a group and a very select few are able to find the strength to stand up by themselves among the group. The group went against her but she continued to press on for herself. People like Mrs. Gruwell are amazing and unfortunately very hard to come by.
Midway through the course, we watched a popular film called the Milgrim experiment. This film showed how people of higher authority can intimate people who believe to be “lower” than the person of high authority. This film teaches us that as humans our desire to obey is encouraged from fear of punishment, desire to please, and need to go along with the group.
Humans in their natural state will do anything, yes anything to avoid physical punishment, to please a higher authority, and to go along with the group. Humans don’t want to be left out and have a mental fear of being left out, being alone. I never even thought of this mindset before. I have indeed heard of the experiment and seen the video before this class but never before saw it quite like I had in this class. It was at this point where I began to question myself. I thought to myself, “have I done these things?’, and felt guilty immediately. I most importantly was able to get civic agency from this film. This film helped me understand a lot about Nazi Germany. By the end of the course I learned how it was possible for Nazis to carry out successfully the killing of fourteen million Jews simply by watching this film.
When we really jumped into talking about the Holocaust, we watched a film called Sophie’s Choice. Sophie’s Choice is one of the most disturbing films I have ever seen. This is simply because I am horrified to think of what I would have done in her place. Sophie was given a choice at gun point; choose one of your two children to live and one to die. Sophie made a choice she will regret for the rest of life. She made the decision to give up one of her children to save herself and one of her other children. What a total nightmare. I felt like I was staring the devil in the eyes when I looked at the SS officer ordering her around. How could it be possible for a human being to put such a horrible decision onto another human? This made me truly understand how the Nazis viewed the “cattle” they hoarded into the box cars. They viewed them as legitimate parasites, nothing worth more than an animal. To the Nazis, all the beating, murder, and torture was ok because the people were “lower” than them and therefore it was justified. The Nazis’ proved to the world that humans are capable of carrying out horrific acts against other humans, disregarding innocence.
What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to Me
On the first day of class I observed music playing from the front of the room. I found this very odd and distasteful of Mr. Gallagher because no other teacher did such a thing. I didn’t understand it at the time, but it was one of many of Mr. Gallagher’s techniques. He later introduced us to the song called Human by the Killers. I said to myself “I thought this class was about the Holocaust, not this guy’s favorite song”. It wasn’t till later on into the course I understood why Mr. Gallagher played it for us. I listened to the lyrics again closely and was able to appreciate what the message Mr. Gallagher wanted us to get. Through this song, we were indirectly asked; are we human? Or are we dancer? The question is asking are people individuals; those who have their own beliefs or are people dancer; a puppet who molds into a “group” and is controlled through that groups actions. I connected this directly with the documentary we watched called The Rise of Nazis- A Warning from History. In this film an interviewer had a piece of written evidence that a lady named Resi Kraus had accused a neighbor of being a Jew during the late 1930’s in Germany. The accused Jew, who wasn’t actually a Jew, was swiftly taken away by the Gestapo and never seen again. The accusation report Kraus wrote during the 1930’s was shown to Kraus again twenty years or so later, yet she denied writing the report. This is an example of how people as individuals during the Nazi movement simply joined a group (the Nazis) and allowed them to determine their every move. Kraus turning her neighbor in was the overwhelming control the group had on her. My first lesson learned was it is human nature to desire to be part of the group; the bystander will do anything to be part of the group. I ended up appreciating the music and feeling like a fool for despising t.
One of the best films we watched was called Freedom Writers. This film is about equality, and how a single person can make a difference. Based on a true story the film depicts a teacher named Mrs. Gruwell who is given a class of “stupid” kids to teach. These kids were treated like second class citizens among the teaching staff at the school and are always given low quality materials. They were looked down upon and viewed as an unsolvable problem. Most of the kids came from a tough background and have given up on school. They were ready to join gangs and live amongst the streets. Mrs. Gruwell however had a different outlook for these kids. She looked out amongst her class and recognized that she was going to treat them all equal. She treated them the way she would want to be treated, it was that simple. Right away other teachers rebelled against what she was doing and it seemed that it was Mrs. Gruwell against the rest of the staff in the school. However this didn’t deter Mrs. Gruwell, she didn’t have the desire to be part of a group like others did. She stood up for her beliefs and stood out among the crowd. Mrs. Gruwell went on to defy authority and fight so that her view of equality would prevail. She bought her students high quality materials and motivated them to stay in school and even
Introduction
My name is Nicholas Graham, I am currently a junior at Westborough High School. This year I decided to take the course Facing History and Ourselves taught by Mr. Gallagher. This course depicts film footage, written sources, and commentary regarding the topics of racism, prejudice, the Holocaust, and most importantly the human bystander. I took this course because I was interested in taking a history elective. I had heard about this elective from previous students, all who talked highly about it and suggested I take it. This course is able to successfully put students into a specific time period, giving them civic agency. Civic agency leads to a greater understanding of the topic at hand. This class is unique because it is comprised of mostly films and doesn’t have any test or quizzes. The only homework is to blog about the films watched in class. The films in the class can be difficult to watch and are often shocking. This class is life changing, and only someone who has taken it can understand how true that is. After taking this class the way you think and act will be altered in a positive way. 98% of all students who take this class are able to successfully understand the mission of the class while 2% are unaffected. It’s hard for me to fathom that this class isn’t required for a basic high school education because it has the ability to transform students for the better.
Schmol, the little Jewish boy eat the chocolate that the little German boy gave him. This was a shocker because he was so appreciative and he was thrilled to know that he had food that no one would steal. Another aspect about this movie that was astonishing was when Bruno told the German soldier that he didn’t know Schmol when he really did. Bruno must have been very scared and this showed that even if German boys are scared of the soldiers then they must really be mean and cruel people. The facet of this class that I benefitted from was the class reflection work and class discussion on Sophie’s Choice. I learned something very valuable about myself in that video and that is that I’m not as confident and secure about my decisions when making big decisions. If I had 2 children and I had to pick which one to keep and which one to let go, I would never be able to decide. Life throws you many challenges and this is evident in the Holocaust, every day was a huge decision. I think that Sophie’s Choice is something that no one ever again should have to face and there are little lessons that you can pull away and I believe I know myself better after watching that.
Facing History and Ourselves taught me lessons that I will carry for the rest of my life. I truthfully enjoyed this course and the lens that it was taught through because it taught me so many things that no other class could have taught me. For example, the triangle of Civic Agency, to see things through a moral, intellectual and emotion lens. It twists many things in life and the scope you look through it altered after this course. I have walked in the door to this class now for 3 and a half months now, every day and come out slightly more changed every time. The enhancements that I have made a person and a student have been increasing so much from this class. I don’t realize it truly until I reflect on it. As a person, I learned so much about how to treat others. From seeing the Jewish people doing manual labor to them loading burning ovens to shove other Jews into, there is one take away that seems to almost be a big secret to life. The key is to speak up and to live with no regrets. The Holocaust could have been stopped if people stepped up and worked against the Germans. Their help came later than it should have and so the damage had been done. This moral teaches you to live with no regrets. If you act on something and make a bad decision, you can learn from it, but if you don’t speak up and present your opinion, you will get washed into the crowd. Each movie shows a different part of the Holocaust or relates to it in some manner. I mainly enjoy the movies because it is visually seeing events taking place, as well as what is left behind. When Mr. Gallagher pauses the movie and stops to explain something, he does it in a way that always leaves you thinking. My most knowledge gaining moments are when I think about what is said then see it happen and am able to see the facial expressions and reactions. It blows me away to see the harm and torture that someone can do to another human right in their face. I’ve loved the journey through the Holocaust because I have gained the power of knowledge from it. I am looking forward to the day that I use a skill or lesson that I learned from this class in a real world situation. I am the only one who lives my life and I want to live with no regrets, just like this class has taught me.
“Facing History and Ourselves provides ideas, methods, and tools that support the practical needs, and the spirits, of educators worldwide who share the goal of creating a better, more informed, and more thoughtful society.”
Mrs. Elliot: This was another great example of how a teacher can change the life of people. Mrs. Elliot a simple teacher performed a very easy and logical experiment. She performed this experiment because she herself was completely aware that children of 3rd grade cannot be taught to stop discriminating anyone when their minds are already too filled with rubbish. Nothing could be gained without pain. Though Mrs. Elliot’s experiment was hurting and painful but it left a deep impression on the minds and hearts of her students. This moral or teaching remained their major ideals for all their lives and were a main criteria to choose their partners or be chosen as one. I was really astonished that how a simple teacher can have such an excellent plan which not only effects small children but also big, experienced adults. Thus I now definitely feel that teachers do create miracles. Mrs. Elliot was an eye-opening documentary.The pianist: This was a film of about a man, a famous pianist who survived amongst hard situations. This film portrayed the uncountable and ruthless harassment and torture done by the Nazis. They only wanted that the Jews should not have a proper healthy and stable living. They kept shifting Jews from one place to another. Through this film I could actually understand the amount of cruelty the Nazis had. The first half of the film shows the hardships the protagonist and his family faces while saving themselves from the Nazis and trying all possible ways to remain safe. This movie taught me a great lesson of life. It taught me that if we are with our family nothing can fear us. If everybody is together, then prison, torture, beating and even death cannot harm us. I feel this was a great film. Hotel Rwanda: This was a film which marked humanity, wit and selflessness. This film was about a mere hotel manager with limited money and resource but lot of potentiality and humanity. During the genocide in Rwanda everybody again became cruel, selfish and unfaithful. The Hutus were considered worse than cockroaches. The genocide made the series of discrimination between blacks and whites start over again. Though some help was provided, it didn’t matter because it was only provided for the whites and not for blacks who really needed it. But every generation has a hero. The protagonist in this film truly proved the word “hero”. Heroism is not showing the power but it is in knowing the power and using it wisely. Paul was not only a noble man but also an intelligent person too. He, through bribing in cash and kind was successful in saving many lives. Though he got many chances to leave safely with his family, he chose to be there and help others. This film really taught me the meaning of being a hero. Though there are chances in our lives when we can escape safely by being a bystander but this man showed me that we have to think about everyone and be a rescuer. This film was really an inspiration. Sophie’s choice: Though we watched only a portion of the film but I feel that only that portion was enough to open my eye. This film showed me the difficult situations millions of Jews had to face. This was a situation which no one would ever dream about. It had affected me deeply because if I had the similar situation in my life I don’t know if I could make any decision or not. This film brought in a lot of fear and disturbance in me.
Freedom Writer’s: “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” Yes Ms. Gruwell was indeed a teacher who inspired not only her own students but also millions of people around the world. She was a great example of the fact that one person is enough to change the mindset of millions of people. School is a place where we are taught not to discriminate on the basis of anything. But in the school which was shown in the film the teachers were themselves discriminating among the students. The students were termed as unteachables and dangerous. They were provided with bad classrooms, broken benches and an inexperienced teacher. Later the story reveals that this inexperienced teacher changed the life of those students. Although the teacher was totally inexperienced but she had morality, emotion, empathy and a sense that the students who are already excluded by the society should be given a fair chance to prove them instead of again discriminating between them so that they turn out to be criminals. Ms. Gruwell was a very inspiring lady. She not only completely dedicated her entire time to her students but also lost her relationship to give a proper social life to her students. Watching this movie I felt the importance of being a teacher. Teachers really change lives. I believe this was a film which was very influential and forced me to see myself as a teacher. This was indeed one of the greatest films I have watched in my life.
reflect on it or develop a main moral or lesson. The visual aspect had helped me grasp what was exactly going on because it wasn’t just words that I had to paint a picture in my head of but it showed me exactly what was happening. When watching films on the concentration camps, such as the film, Auschwitz, I got to see what the buildings and people and room actually looked like. I also got to see the faces of these people and it allowed me to connect more to them than if it was taught to me by talking. Each movie required a reflection worksheet where I put things I learned and what I thought the message was. Another facet of this class that I thoroughly enjoyed was that when the movies were playing, Mr. Gallagher would stop it and explain whatever he needed to. He did this in a way that always left you thinking. This method provided me an opportunity to ask questions and see events in video form. I think that this was a very effective technique. One specific lesson that this relates to was the Milgram Experiment one where we couldn’t tell exactly what was happening but Mr. Gallagher would tell us and it enhanced the meaning of the movie so much more. This video wasn’t able to get across detail very well but with his background, he could tell us so we could understand completely. Next, I believe that the videos were so helpful because of the sounds or the audio because I was able to hear and visualize events which allowed me to connect better with them. The next lesson that strengthened me as a person was the “Swing Kids" film. This film shows a lot more then the Nazi takeover of Germany. It shows natural human behavior. Prior to this film I had no idea that the Nazis were completely able to brainwash the youth. It is scary to see how the majority of people were convinced a certain way. People turned on their neighbors, friends, and even family just to be part of the group. Only a select few people realized the evil within the Nazis and were able to rebel. These people were promptly swept away by the Nazis. The most important message of this film is that what is in style is not necessarily good. The main group doesn't always know best, it’s the individual who needs to analyze a situation and make a decision for themselves. In addition, I benefitted from “The Pianist” which I found to be one of the most clear and vivid depiction of what truly happened to the Jews in Germany at the time. This video allowed me to experience what the streets were like during these impossible times. The characters struggled to stay alive each day and they could be killed for any reason at any point. This video showed me what the Nazi soldiers did and gave me specific reasons as to why, which I still don't understand. This video changed my views on living in Westborough because I know that I live somewhere I am not in danger. I learned a lot of things from this film that had enhanced my knowledge on this topic. Class discussion about The Boy in The Striped Pajamas was so meaningful because some of the things that the little German boy did were shocking. It was good to see these characters together because they were both so young and innocent. They didn’t know what was going on and they were just going with the flow. The lesson showed us a lot about the camps during the Holocaust times, and provided evidence that showed me how much food these people actually got. It really hit me about halfway through this film, to see that
What Facing History in Ourselves Meant to Me
Facing History and Ourselves is a class that has a name that must make you think. Facing History has a very intriguing sound to it because facing means standing in front of or have experienced and that’s exactly how this class works with the Holocaust. The “and ourselves” part is interesting in its own because you rarely are put in a personal lens when talking about history, and this class allows you and forces you to do that. As a junior I am eligible to take the class. I wanted get involved in a class that has been changing kid’s lives. This year, I had not signed up in time to take the class so I was stuck with gym and photography. I was disappointed. I went through the first half of the school year hearing 3 of my best friends talking about what they had watched in ‘Facing History’ and heard nothing but great comments. This gave me the incentive to go talk to my guidance counselor and change classes. I had to figure out a way to get myself into this class. It wasn’t an easy process. It involved changing my math class from period 2 to period 3 because it wasn’t offered period 3. I talked to my math teacher and he was fine with my changing because he taught the same math class period 3. As luck would have it, there was one spot left in the class. It was meant for me! I changed my schedule and couldn’t be happier with my decision in taking this class. This class was all about learning how it was possible for the Holocaust to happen. It allowed me to understand everything that was going on if I were put on a street in Berlin. In addition, it taught to never be a bystander and to speak my voice. It changed me as a person because the way people were treated was something I never want to see firsthand. For the rest of my life I will do whatever I can to help someone who is in pain or being bullied or in trouble. This course helped me grow as a person and student. I learned a lot about how people should and shouldn’t be treated. Thus far, I have lived a very special life with all the things that I have been blessed with. I think that it’s bad that I don’t have the best phone, when I could have way bigger problems. This class has truly forced me to think of how incredibly lucky and fortunate I am. Being a 3 sport athlete, I know there are a lot of lessons learned within each season. However, during this class I have learned more about myself that I could in any sport. I learned the value of life and helping others, as well as the importance of sticking up for what you believe and feel. Facing history is a class for people who are mainly interested in learning about the Holocaust, but also to see how it was all possible and to get a lot of background information. The class is taught mainly through movies and films that show very specifically what was going on. A reflection sheet it passed out before every movie and it must be filled out. The reflections are seen by only you and they can be about anything. Some of the greatest reflections that I had were to movies like the “Swing Kids” and “The Boy In the Striped Pajamas”, just to name a few. I benefitted greatly from the way this class was taught and have reflected on myself and seen who and what I want to be. There wasn’t a better class to take as a junior than this one.
This course was taught by watching movies and reflecting on them, which was a method I have never been taught before. The class truly teaches you to have to be able to watch something then
Choosing this life changing course was definitely one of the best decisions of my student life.There were many films and documentaries which we saw during this course. But there are six of them which I feel created a greater impact. They are ; Freedom Writers, Mrs. Elliot, The Pianist , Hotel Rwanda , the death camps and the boy in the stripped pajamas . “Freedom writers” was a great film which showed how a teacher could change life of students who were victims of racism in school and were considered “Unteachables”. The next was a documentary similar to the above film. This was also about a teacher who changed life of many students but through a different and interesting way. Through a simple experiment of provoking some student against others in terms of superiority she could bring in a very big and permanent change in lives of several people. These two films made me realize what role a teacher has in our life. The next film was about a famous pianist , his life and the how he dwelled among the difficulties of Nazi rule. But this film also portrays the cruel and inhuman way the Nazis treated The Jews and the immeasurable torture done by them. The fourth film was a great example of humanity and selflessness. Paul, the protagonist of the film tries every single way , not only to save him and his family but also his entire community with his wit, all money he has and undying efforts. The next film is “Sophie’s choice”. This was a film which touched me. We all know that to a mother there is no one more precious than her children. A mother cannot differentiate between her kids, but in this situation a mother was forced to choose between her son and daughter. Her choice was either one of them saved or both dead. In this case where everyone is waiting for a chance to be saved, Sophie did a thing which is a sin as well as goodness, curse as well as blessing. A mother had to choose one of her children, which was similar to killing herself. This film was a real documentary on the death camps. This documentary portrayed the actual dead and decayed bodies of prisoners who were the evidence of the amount of torture . The last film I feel was the most influencing one. It showed the meaning of friendship and humanity.courses I have taken so far, this course definitely introduced me to a world which changed my outlook
“Hotel Rwanda” was a tough movie to watch the genocide take place not too long ago between the Hutus and the Tutsis. I saw this movie twice in the same week and was able to learn more the second time viewing it. People were slaughtered in their homes and on the streets and treated like animals. Just like the Holocaust it had me thinking of many tough questions that didn’t have easy answers. This movie helped me understand how easily genocides can occur when there is a flaw in the government or through the people. Understanding what happened and the connections we have at Westborough High School have encouraged me to help and make a difference. I have been fortunate enough to hand-make fleece blankets to donate to these kids in Rwanda still suffering today the city has not fully recovered. When the wrong person takes over, everything can turn into chaos. Paul was another hero in this movie and saved the lives of many. He took chances but was ready to do whatever he could to protect his family and everyone at his hotel. A common theme throughout these movies is not conforming to society, being a leader and a believer in you and that can make huge difference. History repeats itself over and over again with common aspects and common themes.
This next short clip we watched from a movie brought up insane questions almost impossible to answer, “Sophie’s Choice”. Sophie was a young mother who faced a very difficult situation with absolutely no time to think; the choice would change her life forever and haunt her every day. Sophie was stuck in a tough situation as for many Jews at the time where a German soldier forced her to pick one of her children to keep and the other was going to be taken away and killed. Ask any parent to pick their child and they most likely can’t either. It is a choice that really cannot be made. She ran out of time before she could pick one and the soldier took both kids away. After, as a class, we discussed what some of the kids would have done in this situation and many later agreed with Sophie to take the girl. I can understand how Sophie and others decided to keep the son and give away the girl because the boy would have a better chance in their world at the time they were living. It’s extremely hard to believe a mother would pick one child over the other; however, as part of the course and viewing these films through a different lens it is realistic for the time. The decision still remains inhumane but those are the types of situations people had to face, even if it was wrong.
As the course continues the movies leave remarkable impacts and images in my brain. For example we have just seen some real footage of real people at the time living at the different concentration camps and the images are unimaginable that a human being could ever do such a thing to a fellow human. It was grim, ghastly, and gruesome to watch. Although the footage was horrific to bare I sadly understood how it happened and how it was possible. If I saw the footage at any other time before the course or anyone says it without taking the course, we would agree that we don’t understand. I still find it extremely hard to say I understand because of how coldhearted and inhumane the Holocaust was. This course has taken me on a long, hard journey of understanding the thought-processes and steps taken for the Holocaust to happen. This course has allowed me to understand the world around me and realize my place in life. I have been able to understand the kind of day to day person I am and it has made me want to be a better person, creating a better world to live in. No one can ever tell me that the Holocaust didn’t happen or it wasn’t that bad after what I have just witnessed throughout this course. Facing History and Ourselves has been an inspirational course and helped me understand the world we live in toady.
What has facing history and ourselves meant to you?
Facing history and ourselves, a course that benefits you intellectually, morally and emotionally. Out of all other on things and made me a rational person. This course, as promised by Mr. Gallagher inculcated in me the “Civic Agency”. Previously any social science class to me was a tool to score good grades. I honestly never connected personally to any course as I did for this one. This is definitely not a meager course to fill up the schedule and get grades, but to me and perhaps anybody who has taken this course, this is a life changing journey. The experience in this journey is something which leaves a strong impression on our minds which will not fade even with age, experience, success, or relationships. Mr. Gallagher was not our instructor or teacher instead he was a guide. He did not use regular methods of teaching that is lecturing, pen, paper, notes, homework, tests or quizzes. Yet he was able to build a civic agency in us, which would definitely help us in the long run. Through various films and documentaries, he threw light on the genocides all over the world especially “The Holocaust”. The films were so emphatic that it made us feel that we are actually present in that era instead of a student of 2014. Before starting this course I was a girl who was a passerby. But now, after this course I feel I am no longer going to be a bystander. I would definitely become a rescuer and would at least try to stand up against something wrong. I seriously feel this change in me is definitely going to help me in the long run. In the starting , I seriously knew nothing about this course. But now I feel I can actually describe this course to anybody with all the experiences I had from this course. This course gave me a lot more than it committed
The next film we watched was the “Freedom Writers”. At the beginning I didn’t know it would leave the impact it did on me. This movie taught me how just one person with a heart and some determination can really make a difference in so many lives. Mrs. Gruwell was a strong women who was able to stand up for herself, make her own choices and fight for what she wanted. In a way she can be viewed as a hero and an inspiration to her students and anyone who watches the movie. She did not conform to society or take no for an answer because anything is possible if you try. Sometimes in order to reach your goal you have to make sacrifices along the way and just believe you can make a different. Even if it is only one person, it’s still one person more that is better off now than they were before. Mrs. Gruwell did great things for her kids that many were not expecting. A little hope and determination can make a huge difference through hard times and can be all you need to get through them.
After finishing up discrimination and racism in the course we learned how Hitler came to power. We learned how German suffered from World War I and the Great Depression and Hitler was going to be their only way out. We learned how he basically took advantage of this to get Germany out of these hard times where he only helped about half of Germany’s population. Discrimination continued against the Jews and others but to the point of genocide and mass murders. Nothing like this has ever happened in the world before and most people don’t even realize it happened. “The Swing Kids” was another film we watched that showed the beginning of the Holocaust: how Jews were treated, how Nazi’s were brainwashed and brainwashed others with power, and how conformity took over society. This movie showed how hard it can be to stay true to oneself during difficult times and most people will chose the easy way out and go with whatever society tells them. I really enjoyed this film because it helped me understand how the Nazi party became so big and were able to gain so much power. Slowly the discrimination against Jews only got worse.
Just to show how easily it was to mistreat people when granted a little power was “The Milgram Experiment”. This film only made me very angry. Just because one person was granted the title of being a teacher rather than a student, they would zap the student for a wrong answer. When instructions were given from authority, not many questions were asked when the adults really had no idea what they were doing or why. No one objected to the experiment. One important lesson I was taught at the beginning of this course was to always ask questions before agreeing to do something and understand why you are doing it. In this experiment the student was being put in pain over and over again and what angered me the most was when the teacher would just laugh at it. It was an exact replica of the Holocaust and a situation between and German soldier and a Jew but not to the same extremes. There were few people who refused to do the experiment and took multiple cries of pain from the student before they stopped. The same thing would happen during the Holocaust where the soldier may be human for a moment and have feelings but many times be pushed to the side because of society’s ideas. This film helped me grasp a good idea of situations during the Holocaust and how easy it was for the soldiers to be so cruel and do the harmful things they did.
and the cause of all German’s problems have made the Holocaust and the killing of over 11 million people possible. As a student this course educated me much more than before and most other people about the Holocaust and allowed me to understand it more than anything. It expanded my knowledge and interest allowing me to appreciate the world the way it is today and how far we have come from the past. As a person I have learned how easy it is for someone to conform to society and how important it is to not be a bystander in life. The course has made me want to help keep the world a better place and make tomorrow even better than today. The lessons I learned throughout the course, including discussions and films, have shown me that small actions can make a big difference in this world.
One of the first films we watched in class was “Ms. Elliot”. Ms. Elliot was one of the first lessons I learned in this class about conformity. So many people will say that discrimination is bad and no one should participate in it but it happens so frequently. In history we learn about the times of discrimination and slavery at a young age and learn that it was wrong. We learn what can happen to a person when they gain power like Hitler and the whites. Ms. Elliot began to teach her kids about discrimination like any other teacher but changed her lesson plans to show exactly how discrimination worked. When third graders were told the blued eyed kids were better than the brown eyed kids they jumped at the idea. The kids were best friends one minute and once they gained a little power they were mean and separated from one another. Adults did the same thing just like society did during the times of discrimination and slavery and even the Holocaust. It’s easy to understand what discrimination and segregation are and how it was used but not many people get to experience it the same way Ms. Elliot’s kids and the adults got to. The lesson I took away from the video and her lesson was "to not judge someone from their outside and the way the look, but rather the inside of them".
What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to Me:
“Facing History and Ourselves provides ideas, methods, and tools that support the practical needs, and the spirits, of educators worldwide who share the goal of creating a better, more informed, and more thoughtful society.”
At first facing history started out as just another elective to take that sounded interesting and allow me to further learn about the Holocaust. Little did I know the journey that would lie ahead of me. Over the years I have not been one to be extremely interested in history, nor has it ever been my favorite subject in school; however, this course opened my eyes to the past and how it has shaped our world to the way it is today. Right from the start, the course had me thinking of questions that never crossed my mind before like whom I really was, what other people really like, etc. It made me wonder more about the type of person I am in my everyday life, by myself and towards others. I come from a stable home of four and have lived a pretty good life, investing my time in dance and gymnastics over the years leaving little time for many other activities. Not everyone is cut out to do these sports but after sticking with them for about 14 years, they have taught me valuable life lessons. I have been disciplined and pushed to my limits countless times, over and over again. I can only imagine what the Jews went through as they were pushed passed their limits. After taking the course and understanding what happened in the past, I have realized how fortunate I am and learned to appreciate all I have. After seeing what I saw throughout this course it’s still hard to understand how inhumane people can be and what brainwashing people can do to others. As I watched the films in chronological order and viewed them through a different lens than I had before, they gave me emotional responses that ranged from anger to fear and to sadness. I was able to grasp a better understand of how the Holocaust was possible. The course allowed me to have civic agency and a shared experience with others expanding my knowledge and the class’s. Blogging after viewing each film was a great way to connect with the rest of the class. It gave us time for the film to sink in and really think about it, and then share our own thoughts. Sometimes it can be hard to share your thoughts right after watching the film in front of the class; however the blog made it easy to respond and have a voice while still sharing the same experience with your peers. Walking away from this course I have become more aware of my surroundings and what goes on outside Westborough, Massachusetts and even the United States. Although I do not agree with the Holocaust along with most people, I was able to understand exactly how it was possible by the way in which the events took place. Following Hitler come to power, creating the Nazi party, brainwashing them and all other Germans to believe that they are the superior race, discriminating against Jews, gypsies, etc., having extreme hatred towards the “different” human beings and blaming them for the World War I
Towards the end of the semester we were shown photographs called “The Scrapbook from Hell”, also known as the Ramp. These pictures shocked and angered me. Part of the reason could have been that I never thought of what the Nazis were doing on their free time. Another reason could be how I could not fathom the thought that after putting millions of Jews through Gas chambers you could just go on with your daily life. The Nazis would go to parties, drink their scotch, and act as if what they were doing was a positive thing. I wonder how the Nazis felt when they each killed their first Jew. Did they feel guilty at first then get used to it?
Lastly, this course has taught me to be an individual. I am much more aware of what people are talking about and if they are a real person or not. In our generation instead of saying Bystander we call a person fake or real. The sad thing is that even if the people are real they still conform to how everyone else is. I do feel that when students reach their senior year of high school they become more of an individual. Before taking this course my interest in history was at about a zero. After this course I can say that I am interested and understand why we need to know history. I was at the Brim Field Flee market the other week with my dad. In a few of the booths there were Nazi pins and posters. I was annoyed, I asked my dad why is there stuff for remembering them? He said unfortunately there are still people who want to remember them and its history. As that comment by my dad bothered me I came to my senses that it is him being realistic. If it was up to me I would have every Nazi pin and sign taken down. If I had not taken this course I wouldn’t have even noticed those pins at the flee market. If I had to pick one thing that changed about me after this course I would say that it made me more aware of the people I surround myself with. People still make Jewish jokes thinking there funny. As the bystander I was I would’ve laughed with everyone else, now I know I would stand up for my heritage. I hope that when this class is taught by different a teacher, students will still be able to take something away from it. I would not have learned such a valuable lesson if it wasn’t for Mr. Gallagher.
After watching The Swing Kids I realized how brainwashed the Nazis were. It was disgusting how much Thomas changed when he became part of the Hitler youth. I’m glad Peter kept his identity throughout the whole movie. I was angry for him, nobody would listen to him when he was 100% right. Nazis are stuck up and think they have all of the control. Good for peter for being strong. This movie was easily my favorite movie we watched. It was one of the more unique holocaust movies I had ever seen. I liked how it was very realistic; it showed how much people change once they are surrounded a group of people. Thomas was one person at the beginning on the movie and was a completely different person at the end of the movie. The part in the movie that I remember the most is when peter was in the club dancing and Thomas came and tried beating Peter up. The message I got from this film to stay true to your identity and don’t follow society. The reason why the holocaust happened was because more people than not followed society.
“The Pianist” was a movie that I had seen several times before watching it in this class. Every time I watched it I picked up on something new that was happening. There arn't many movies I like to see more than once but The Pianist was one where I learned new things watching it the second time. There were so many powerful moments in this movie that made me so angry. It made me realize how lucky I am to have my family. Picturing my grandparents having to go through what the other elders had to go through was the hardest thing for me to imagine. The Nazis had all the power and could do anything they wanted, that’s the sad part. If they saw a Jew walking they just shot them. If a Jew asked a question they just shot them. The Jews were never thanked for the physical labor they were doing. I think that one thing everyone should realize is how strong the Jews are, Instead of focusing on the terrible people the Nazis were. I hate that people can't stand up for what they think is right, including me. I can stand up for someone if I disagree with what people are saying but I could never change a situation like this and that’s the unfortunate part. Watching these movies there’s a part of me that wonders did this really happen or are the play writers exaggerating. I wish that that was the case but unfortunately everything is true. When the innocent Jews were just standing the Nazis would randomly selected which ones they were going to shoot. Seeing this was the hardest part, I just don’t understand how a human being could shoot another human being. According to the Nazis the Jews weren’t human, we were animals.
their identity when they are in a group setting. This story showed that the bear didn’t know who he was because an outside empowering group told him he wasn’t a bear. This was an introduction to the main theme of the class, which was to not be a bystander. If someone had stepped in and told the bear not to listen to them stood up for him the bear would not have been so down on himself. I think this was a good lesson for our age group because of the issues kids have with finding their own identity at this age. The first non-holocaust movie we watched was Freedom Writers. This was one of my favorites, to see how much the kids matured because of one teacher truly amazed me. Mrs. G is the exact opposite of a bystander. She pushed even when things weren’t looking up for her. This true story proved that one person can make a difference in so many people’s lives. The message I got from this film is to never give up no matter how far-fetched an idea may seem. Mrs. G wanted this more than anything, she risked her marriage and job which are two things that benefited her. Another key quality about Mrs. G was that she wasn’t selfish, you can’t be selfish to do such a big thing by helping her. One time in class Mr. Gallagher said the best kind to happiness is when you give something from the heart. After hearing him say that, it made me think of how true that statement was.
Another movie that didn’t have to do with the holocaust but had the same issue as people being bystanders was Hotel Rwanda. In this movie the Hutu wanted to get rid of all the Tutsis. The way they did this was horrible; they slaughtered every Tutsi, got hacked by machetes, and called them and called them cockroaches. Paul, the owner of the hotel was a hero; he let a majority of the Tutsi families stay in his hotel for as long as they needed. The main goal for the Hutus was to get rid of all the children so there was no younger generation. To see how much Paul changed from the beginning of the movie to the end is how much us students changed in the Facing History class. Paul started off as a bystander but as the movie went on he started to think of ways of how he could protect the Tutsis.
Some movies we watched in Facing History irritated me, others we watched made me sad, and some made me angry. “The Gestapo” was one of those movies that angered me. Resi Kraus was straight rude and dishonest to the person interviewing her. It amazes me how she could be so naïve to think she didn’t do anything wrong. She killed innocent women, you can’t do much worse than that. Her attitude was what really bugged me, she thought it was funny that she was getting confronted. Resi is a lady whom is a bystander, she’ll do whatever the crowd does, she’ll hate whomever everyone else hates. She felt the need to deny killing this lady because that wasn’t the popular thing to be doing at the time she got interviewed. If she had gotten interviewed at the time of the holocaust she would have been more than proud to say, “I killed a Jew!”
The main lesson to learn in this class is how it happened. A great portion of this class is questioning ourselves, would we do it? This may sound cliché, but this class will alter your opinions and change you as a person. As Mr. Gallagher said on the first day of class “This is a politically incorrect class”. It made it more interesting and personable. In every other class at the high school it is about just knowing the information. Many teachers are careful with what they say because they don’t want to offend anyone, but by Mr. Gallagher being upfront and honest it makes it an experience in his classroom not just a raise your hand and answer the question type of class. At the beginning of the course it started out with several group discussions and readings. Towards the middle/ end we watch movies and documentaries on the holocaust. Mostly all of the films we watch are very disturbing and surreal.
What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to Me
Being able to sit at a Passover dinner with knowledge about the Holocaust may have been the greatest feeling. My aunt went on a two week trip with her temple to visit the concentration camps and was telling us about her experience. I felt pretty lucky that I knew exactly what she was talking about. My family was very surprised that I got something out of a history class since history has never been strength of mine. This meant that I had thoroughly enjoyed this class and listened. Being able to talk intelligently with my family about an event that affected millions of Jews made me realize my interest in the holocaust. As my dad once told me, people with simple minds talk about other people and people with complex minds talk about events. As a student I feel that I became more knowledgeable and that I could talk about the holocaust with anyone. Being able to say I feel confident in a topic feels pretty good because it doesn’t come easy. If it wasn’t for the way Mr. Gallagher taught this class I wouldn’t have been able to achieve that. For the first few months we got comfortable with each other in the class and read short stories then discussed them. The first short story we read, “The Bear That Wasn’t” contained an important message to everyone. The lesson to be learned was that people lose
Introduction:
Bystander: A person who is present at an event or incident but does not take part. If I were to take one thing away from this class it would be to never be a bystander. My name is Tori Handell and I am a senior at the Westborough High School who will be attending the University of Arizona in the fall. Walking into this class on the first day I didn’t expect it to be half as interesting as it was. I knew I had wanted to take this class all along but I never knew it would actually be as deep as people say it is. Besides the incredible reputation this class has, I wanted to take it because I’m Jewish. Being a Jewish girl who dropped out of Hebrew school and who was never part of a Jewish group, I felt I should become more educated about the Holocaust. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this class, one day during my sophomore year when I was in Mr. Gallaghers second period U.S history class he calmly told all of his students to please be quiet and work independently. He told us he had just watched a disturbing movie and isn’t in the mood to talk. I was confused at first because I couldn’t see how someone could take a movie so personally. After taking a semester in this class I can 100% understand why he made that request sophomore year. I also understand why you have to be an upperclassman to take this class. You have to have some sort of maturity to grasp the concept. In this class it’s not about knowing the facts and the numbers it’s about how issues arise. A big reason as to why this class is a success, and is the most wanted class on kids schedule Is because of how it is taught. There’s no busy work, homework, or projects. It is truly a conversational based class. That’s what makes it unique compared to all other history classes. Every day there is some sort of lesson that is learned. Facing History and Ourselves is a class where we learn about the events leading up to the holocaust, and the events taken place during the holocaust.
The film about Mrs. Elliot was a wonderful thing to see. She taught such young children about discrimination in a creative way which no one thought of before. This is meaningful to me in a few different ways. One is because I want to be a teacher and seeing teachers doing such great things gives me motivation to become a teacher who does the same. Along with Freedom Writers this shows that teachers can make a change and large influence which is what I have believed in all alone. She divided the classroom and had some student’s superior than others and then switched off the next day. The psychology of the experiment led to the students who were on top to do better on assessments and it shows how being “superior” can change how you act whether you realize it or not. Discrimination is an important subject and you can’t be too young to start learning about it.
The Children’s March was an inspirational film to watch. The African Americans in Birmingham, Alabama suffered through too much unfair treatment and always used peaceful resistance. I knew there were several marches and boycotts done by the African Americans but I thought they were all adults. I never heard about the Children’s March before this class and it was an amazing idea. I can’t believe how willing the children were to do this, they were brave and persistent. The boycotts and non-violent civil disobedience ended up helping the African Americans in the long run. Watching the films rather than talking about the subjects is the most important part about this class to me. If I hadn’t seen the things I did then I wouldn’t have any civic agency or understand the level of seriousness with each topic.
Facing History was one of my favorite classes that I took during high school. I like how instead of using any textbooks we learned through discussions, readings, and films. I know a lot of effort was put in by Mr. Gallagher to make this course what it is today. I can’t imagine all of the readings, films, and photos looked at to find the best ones used. I feel that with just listening and reading along in class before films and then watching films, I learned better than I would have any other way. Mr. Gallagher knows what information is needed in order to watch and understand the films. Even watching films in a different language helped me learn which I never thought I would say. Since last summer I started becoming really serious about things in my life because senior year is so important and it’s the last step before the “real world”. As the year went on I have been growing more and more into who I am. I believe that everything happens for a reason, which is what I wrote my college essay about. This course has helped me become who I am even more and I believe I got into this class for a reason. This class is always filled because everyone requests this elective, but there was only one spot left. I am so happy about this course and everything it has taught me. Whoever takes this course owes Mr. Gallagher a big thank you. If this course doesn’t change your way of thinking about things then you must have been sleeping every day.
The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was one of my favorite things to learn about in class. At the time, I still didn’t know that much about ghettos or how they worked. This film was meaningful to me because if I was stuck in their situation I would not just sit there and let it happen. The more I thought about this film the happier I was for the people that created the Jewish Combat Organization. Being in this time period and reflecting upon it may be biased and maybe at the time I wouldn’t be strong enough of a person to do so or too scared to do so, but I am proud of those people who did. Before watching this film I wondered in my head, “why is no one resisting”. The answer may seem obvious but once you realize that everybody is going to die, you might as well try to hurt the enemy. The best part about the Warsaw uprising is that instead of being defeated quickly, the Jews lasted over a month. This shows that even with the best machinery and skills you will not necessarily win easily.
The clip Sophie’s Choice was meaningful to me because it brought emotions into the situation rather than physical harms. This stood out to me because as a teenage girl I know that I could be in Sophie’s shoes one day. I didn’t think much about the emotions of the people who were brought to concentration camps because I was so focused on all of the physical harms they faced. Being forced to make a decision on which child to kill and which one to keep is one of the scariest things I’ve ever heard. There is no right answer and living with the guilt of choosing would kill me over time. This film brings the thought into my head about all of the families the Nazi’s tore apart and killed, not just calling them “people”. After seeing this film I told my grandmother about it. I usually only tell her about the important stuff during school and I often would tell her about this course. She agrees that the decision she had to make on spot is one of the worst things she has ever heard.
Learning about Dr. Josef Mengele and his twin experiments was one topic that stands out to me from the course. The Nazi’s would pull aside all twins off the trains and set them aside in a different place to start their new life. They were called Mengele’s children and some of them called him “Uncle Mengele”. He would then preform horrible experiments/tests on the children after tattooing and feeding them. The children had blood drawn every day along with other varying experiments. Many children died in this process while some were killed solely for the purpose of after death experiments. I find this particularly disturbing because the children are looking up to this man and calling him “uncle”. They think this is normal and the way life works because they are too young to understand the situation. Dr. Mengele was a horrible man for ruining and ending the lives of these young children in a worse way which they already would have.
Freedom Writers was very meaningful to me and is now my personal favorite movie. The main character, Mrs. Gruwell, is set on her ideas to make her class succeed and won’t let anything stop her. She wears a pearl necklace to school when she is told not to by her department head and it turns out to be okay, as she thought it would. Freedom Writers takes place at a disadvantaged school where the students usually stop showing up once the weather gets nice. Mrs. Gruwell is an awesome teacher like I hope to be one day. She tries anything she can to grab the students attention and it completely works. This shows that one person can make a huge change. She goes to the department head, principal, and superintendent with issues because once she gets shot down she tries another way to complete her goals. People need the power that Mrs. Gruwell has because without it nothing will be changed. After borrowing this film and showing it to my grandmother, it influenced me to consider teaching at a similar school. I wouldn’t be scared of the students, but I don’t know if I would wear a pearl necklace. I know that I will take some similar path as she did.
Introduction
I was told to take Facing History since freshman year. Everyone I know who has taken this course recommended it to me, but they never really gave details. I knew I wanted to take it when I was an upperclassman and I looked forward to it during those years. Last year, I thought Mr. Gallagher was going to retire. Therefore, I didn’t put the course on my electives list because I thought it would be with some “bad teacher”. Once I learned that Mr. Gallagher was not retiring, I wanted to find a way into the class. I was automatically scheduled into an art class which I didn’t want to be in for second semester, so I went down to the office to make an appointment with Mr. Callaghan. Once I met with him, he pointed out that there was one opening for period two facing history. I was so happy and thanked him for giving me the last space. As a senior, I’m really excited to graduate and move on to the next steps in my life. I’m attending High Point University next year as a psychology major. Psychology is my favorite subject and I will either be a college professor or high school teacher. As my high school years come to an end, I realize how much other people have helped shape my personality. This course has also taught me a lot about life. This course is different than any other. There is no planned schedule, tests, or homework unless it’s to blog. A blog cannot be graded on a scale because it is all opinions/reflections. This course shows you how the Holocaust happened, not only what happened during it. My favorite class discussion from the beginning of the course is when we were told to question authority. The more I thought about it and the more time went on, it made sense. I am about to be a legal adult and didn’t think of how independent I am. Following authority/rules/laws is the ‘norm’ but if you don’t agree with something, it’s best to either ask authority about it or do what you want to do. I feel that senior year, along with the help of facing history, has shaped me into who I am going to be. I have strong opinions and reasoning for almost all things, and I know what I want to do.
What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to Me
During this course we covered a lot of different subjects and learned to think in different ways. Civic agency is a way to think about a historical event morally, intellectually, and emotionally, as a way to understand how it was possible to happen at the time. This was a difficult thing for me especially near the end of the course when we would watch the films of the concentration camps. Watching these films made me sick to my stomach because my least favorite thing to see is people getting hurt. It was hard to stay in the room at times, but it was all worth watching. Now that I’m not in the moment I see how much it benefitted me and now I understand a whole lot about the Holocaust. Entering into the course I will admit that I barely know anything at all. I was one of “those people” who didn’t understand the extent of how bad the Holocaust was. People have gotten very upset about it in front of me before but I had no idea about how horrible the things were during those times. I still can’t put into words how horrible those times were. All of the films I watched helped me understand and it changed my opinion on a lot of things. Everybody should take this course especially as a way to prevent something like the Holocaust from happening ever again. Also, everybody should be aware of how it wasn’t just the Jewish people that were harmed and the Nazi’s didn’t care about anything but themselves.
Before I had first watched The Pianist, I had some knowledge of the brutal conditions that the Jewish people in the Warsaw ghetto lived in, though to see the displacement of the Polish Jews from their homes and confinement in the ghetto depicted as it had happened is an eye-opener. I was not aware before watching the film that the intentions of the Nazi's in putting the Jewish people in the ghetto was to starve them, rather than to simply separate them from the rest of society. To see innocent people dying in the street because they can't afford food once the Nazi's have taken everything from them, and soldiers shooting people in the street or in their homes simply because they have the power to do so is sickening. At the same time, the film's depiction of this brutality is amazing because this violence was a reality of the time, and it is necessary to see this raw depiction of this violence to truly understand the conditions for Jewish people living in the Warsaw ghetto. Another important facet of the Facing History course was the showing of the film Hotel Rwanda. Prior to seeing the film Hotel Rwanda in class, I had read some information about the Rwandan Genocide in the past and educated myself on the event, but seeing the events acted out on screen in the motion picture gave me another perspective on the violence. It’s appalling to see that Rwandan society allowed for this massacre of innocent Tutsi's by the larger Hutu population, and that figures of authority in the country seemed to do nothing to stop it. I admired the heroic acts of the protagonist Paul, in his protection of Tutsi's and Hutu's who were targeted by the Hutu power group. I'm glad I got the chance to watch this film in class, as I hadn’t seen it prior to watching it in Facing History class. The film did a brilliant job of portraying both the terrible violence of the Rwandan Genocide as well as the honorable actions of the protagonist to save the lives of over a thousand innocent Rwandans. This indiscriminant killing of the Tutsi population in Rwandan society during the genocide, similarly to the killing of European Jews by the Nazis, is a display of why it is absolutely necessary to teach all people, young and old, about the risks of prejudice and discrimination and how it can lead to mass violence and hatred in any society.
Facing History and Ourselves is a course that I will always remember as having a powerful effect on me as a person. After having taken Facing History, I have a greater knowledge of the events of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution of Jewish people in Europe from the early 1930’s to the mid 1940’s. Equally important though, is the broadened perspective on humanity and open-mindedness I have gained. I’ve learned a significant amount of information about human nature and the tendency of individuals to blindly accept the commands of authority, to have an innate desire to please others, and to follow the group ideology. Facing History has taught me about the importance of keeping one’s individual ideals intact, and that individuals should not be influenced by a larger group to abandon one’s ideas. I’m glad that I made the decision to participate in this course, and feel that through the knowledge gained through Facing History and Ourselves I’ve grown as an individual.
A filmed experiment known as the “Milgram Experiment” was shown during class, which was equally interesting and disturbing. The test subjects, designated as teacher and student, were introduced to one another, and the student was then taken into a nearby room and supposedly strapped with electrodes, while the subject playing the role of teacher was told to ask questions to the student. Each time the student got an answer wrong, the scientist conducting the experiment insisted continuously that the teacher should shock the student with increasing voltages. The result of the experiment showed that the test subjects were extremely likely to be obedient to the figure of authority. This is even the case when the voltage was raised to the point where it could kill the fellow test subject. The result of the experiment was alarming to me, especially since the experiment was filmed, so the class was able to watch the actions of the test subjects and their reactions to the events of the test as it was being conducted. It is troubling to see that humans naturally seemed to be compelled to blindly accept the orders of an authority, regardless of the command. Certain factors were likely to have contributed to the various test subjects’ almost unquestioned obedience to the researcher during the Milgram experiment, and these main factors were need to go along with the group, a desire to please, and a fear of punishment. In the case of the Milgram experiment, I think that the desire to please was likely most powerful factor encouraging obedience, as the researcher insisted continuously that the subjects should continue the test when they began to worry about the other participant. Some subjects began laughing while they were administering shock punishments to the students, but I feel that laughter can commonly relieve one’s nervousness, so this may be why some test subjects laughed during the experiment. At the same time, some people do laugh at the displeasure of others, but I hope that this was not the case among the students watching the film. An additional factor encouraging the obedience of the test subjects to the researcher during the Milgram Experiment could have been that the test subjects believed that the figure of authority, in this instance the scientist or researcher, would accept the responsibility for what happens to the test subject being shocked, as when the subjects began to refuse the orders of the scientist he began telling them that they weren’t responsible for what happened to the students, and they would then reluctantly continue. After watching the Milgram Experiment, I learned a lesson on human nature and the inherent force that compels humans to obey figures of authority, and that it is important that people think make sure to think before they act and question irrational or inhumane commands given to them by figures of authority, especially authorities whose motives may not be morally acceptable.
Another facet of the course that was particularly powerful was a documentary entitled “A Class Divided” which covered a third grade teacher’s lesson to her students about discrimination. Jane Elliot found a very clever way to teach her third grade children about the dangers of discrimination and showed each of them what it feels like to be the subject of discrimination. Since the students were all white children and likely had never been subject to any sort of prejudice before, Mrs. Elliot divided the class by blue and brown eye color, and showed her students what it was like to be judged based on their physical appearances. The experiment conducted by Jane Elliot on her class was innovative and the lesson she taught to her young students was incredibly valuable. Mrs. Elliot was very courageous to have conducted this particular experiment on her third graders, as it was quite controversial among parents of children attending school and educators alike. The students themselves, though, seemed to have no objection at all to their third grade teacher’s method of teaching them about discrimination, as when the students of the class returned for a reunion with the classmates and their former teacher, they recalled on the value of the lesson they had learned years ago. An additional facet of the course that was meaningful to me and one of my favorite lessons throughout Facing History was a film shown in class entitled “Freedom Writers”. The film features a young teacher named Erin Gruwell’s teaching of at-risk teenagers about tolerance, and more specifically the events of the Holocaust. When Ms. Gruwell first arrives to begin teaching, a scene is shown in which the English department head at the high school tells Ms. Gruwell not to wear her pearl necklace to class. She is told not to wear the pearls because of the fact that her coworkers had already stereotyped the children she was teaching as criminals. Mrs. Gruwell ignored the advice given to her by the department head and chose to wear them to class anyway, as she did not know those children yet, and wouldn't categorize people she hadn't yet interacted with as criminals. One scene that left me thinking about this film long after it was done being shown in class was the conversation between Ms. Gruwell and the department chair about the new books that she was not allowed to give to her students. The fellow educator shows that she is a racist by telling Erin Gruwell that she thinks the students will destroy the books if allowed to borrow the new ones, and instead are only allowed to use the books that are in poor condition. Mrs. Gruwell's conversation with the department head reveals she’s not concerned with the education of the disadvantaged students. The decision by Mrs. Gruwell in this situation to go around her department head and give the books to her students anyway shows her will to make a difference in the lives of her students. One of the most important messages of the film is exemplified in this situation, that one individual has the power to make a difference in the lives of many people, just as Erin Gruwell had a significant impact on the lives of her students.
Before discussing the actual events of discrimination in history documented in this course, it is important to discuss the facets of the course used to enlighten the class on the formation of one’s attitudes. One book, The Bear That Wasn’t, is a story with a message for both children and adults alike. It tells of a bear who is convinced by those around him that he is simply a silly man wearing a fur coat and needs a shave. After repeatedly hearing that he is not a bear like he had thought, he eventually believes that he is just a silly man like the people around him had said. The author's intention, in terms of a theme, is to show the audience that individuals will change their views without much resistance when those around them say something is true, regardless of whether it's a matter of fact or not. Similarly, on the issue of attitudes, The "Little Boxes" essay is the story of a teenager whose ethnic origin is Hispanic, Asian, English, and Irish, who struggles when asked to check one box to describe his ethnic group. His problems don’t end there, as he also has the challenge of classifying himself as to class and religion. Like many families, his parents have worked hard to rise out of the poor or lower class, but haven’t quite arrived at middle class. The story gives me a different perspective in the experience of filling out the boxes on an application form. I have never been in a position of confusion when I have to fill out a document of that kind. I'm of White European heritage, but it is interesting to get a sense of what it would be like when asked about my race if I couldn't simply select the "white" box every time. The author makes a good point of showing his audience that these little boxes' choices can be too general, and as they did for him, their use can result in a loss of one's identity.
Certain facets of the course gave the class a close-up look at some of the history of the prejudice against African-Americans in our own American society. While I knew of and had previously read about the children’s march in Birmingham, I had never watched any first-hand accounts of the event itself like those that were shown in the film about the famous children’s’ protests. I was staggered by the images and film of large amounts of children being arrested by Birmingham police and put in jail together for protesting. I thought that the measures that Birmingham authorities took to stop the protests were brutal, like sending dogs to attack protesters and firing high pressure water hoses at crowds of black children. The showing of the film in class and refreshing my memory on this historical event reminds me of the fact that the kind of bigotry and racism existent in a society that can allow for an event like the Holocaust to take place very well can exist even in our own American society.
Initially, when signing up for the course “Facing History and Ourselves”, I chose the course because I am particularly interested in history, and I knew the course had a good reputation. Though, before I entered the Facing History class, I didn’t know much about the subject material, only that the class included the study of World War II and the Holocaust. At the time, I had no idea that this course would broaden my understanding of the world in a way that would otherwise require worldwide travel in addition to time travel. As a light skinned, fair haired, blue eyed lifelong resident of a fairly affluent suburb, my personal experience with racism and discrimination was virtually nonexistent. In addition, although the Westborough schools gave me the opportunity through many history and social studies classes to know that racism and discrimination are rampant in the world, it was not until I took this course that I could actually appreciate the manner in which persecuted individuals have had to struggle through desperate periods of their lives. Facing History and Ourselves made me a witness to history-the history of Nazi persecution and internment of the Jewish people of Europe. Perhaps even more importantly, the course showed me numerous documents and films with convincing evidence that the formation of individual and societal attitudes is a complex process which, if left in the wrong hands, could result in the promotion of a world of violence and hatred.
Another thing that we watched in class and it was called “the Milgram Experiment” where a scientist performed a test on a teacher and student. If the student answered the correct answer, then he wouldn’t get shocked, but if he didn’t answer correctly, he would. This experiment got to the point where high level shocking was occurring and the teachers wouldn’t stop doing it. Some of them after a while of hurting the student would stop and not continue. Others though did not and there was one where this guy went all the way to the danger zone and did not stop the experiment because he kept obeying the higher authority. I couldn’t understand how some of the teachers were laughing at the people who were in so much pain. I’d like to believe that if it were me, I would’ve only given a few shocks but when heard the student screaming I would stop. Seeing those men do what they did made me feel so angry. I didn’t understand why they couldn’t stop even after the student told them to stop because it was hurting them. It really made me think if I were put in that position what I would do because you never really know what you would do until you are actually forced to hurt a person. Everyone would like to say that they would do the right thing stop but until you are forced to put it to the test you don’t actually know. It requires a very strong maturity to go against what’s wrong and to fight back.
The movie that we watched that had the biggest effect on me during the class was The Pianist. When we didn’t finish the whole movie in class I knew I had to finish it at home. I feel like this movie showed me that even with all the horrible things that happen there were some happy endings. This movie ending reminded me that even with the worst tragedies amazing things still came about and I believe this is true in everyday life as well.
Another movie that had a major effect on the way I think was Freedom Writers. This movie was one that I looked forward to watch each day. I liked how it showed how one person could change a group of people in such a positive way. I think everything we did during this course benefited me not only as a person but also as a student. I was able to learn about more about the Holocaust and the Nazis in a few months then I have in all the years I’ve been in school. I also got to learn things I feel like aren’t taught in a textbook about what happened in the death camps and in the Ghettos. Learning about Germany and Hitler allowed me to understand the Holocaust more clearly. I felt like every lesson we learned had a purpose to teach me something new, the different packets we got allowed me to read up on more topics and gain more knowledge on the topic. I think that this class benefited my knowledge on World War II better than any other history class could.
The thing that benefited me the most about this class was being able to talk to people outside the class and tell them what we were watching or talking about. I also think what benefited me was being able to talk about the movies after we watched them and being able to blog about what we saw. I think both of these allowed us to think about what we watched and understand what happened.
I am extremely grateful that I was able to take this class this year. I never thought a class could have such an effect on me. Facing History and ourselves allowed me to understand who I am as a person. Seeing the horrible things that happened during the Holocaust made me think about what I would do in certain situations and of the people who had to live through it. I believe this class should be taught for everyone in every school. This class benefited me in ways that will last me throughout my life. I am truly sad that this class is only one semester and not a full year.
One of the videos we watch was Mrs. Elliot’s experiment. The activity Mrs. Elliot came up with informed the kids in her class about segregation and racism and it was very effective. The class was made up completely of white kids so none of them really felt what is was like to be discriminated against. The half the kids took turns wearing these collars which showed they were inferior to the others. When the kids had worn the collars and were looked down upon it had a big impact on their attitude toward how they treat other people. At the end of the two day experiment the children realized you shouldn't treat someone different just because someone tells you they are lesser of a person than you are. Mrs. Elliot proved that it isn't just children you can have an impact on and change the way they think but she also did this same type of experiment with adults and they were just as quick to turn on each other and treat the targeted people as much, much lesser humans. The overall message and what they got out of it was the same. This experiment is very affective and it can make you take a second look at situations you are in and maybe act in a better way. Watching this test showed how easy it was for the Nazi’s in the Holocaust to be able to turn on the Jewish people and treat them as less than human.
I was a little disappointed to watch some of the films that we did and hear the stories of how the people acted toward one another. In The Road to Treblinka, it was uncomfortable to listen to the interviews of the different women and men, who were adamant in their refusal to answer questions about turning their neighbors in, or were refusing to take responsibility for the actions of the Nazi party. These people knew what was going on. They knew that when they reported their neighbor for suspicious behavior that nothing good would happen to that neighbor. And yet they still did it. Listening to these people was very upsetting. But it was also upsetting because you then had to wonder “would I do the same thing, if I was in that situation?” These people were trying to continue living; would I have put my life above the lives of my neighbor? It was saddening to watch as all of these individuals chose the easier route. In contrast to the cowardice that these people showed, there was also bravery and selflessness that arose from the Holocaust. In the film The Warsaw Uprising, the determination of the Jewish people living in the Ghetto was inspirational. In such hard, depressing conditions, those people found it within themselves to make a stand for what they believed in. They did not believe that they could win. But they had enough hope to think that they could stall the Nazis, and maybe help others escape their fate. The inner strength of the men in The Grey Zone was also hopeful to me. Even in that destitute place, these men were still hoping. They were still able to think that they could change, or at least disrupt the Nazis and the extermination camp. Their courage reminded me that we can always do something. In the worst imaginable conditions, we can still reach inside of ourselves and do the right thing. These men were not fighting for their lives. They were ending their lives, in the hopes of changing the endings of others’ lives.
Introduction
Facing History and ourselves is a course that I was lucky to take. I was originally was planning to take the course next year as a senior but after finding out I was moving next year I knew I had to take the class while I had the chance so I dropped the art elective I was signed up for and picked up facing history and ourselves instead. Going into the class I wasn't completely sure what to except all I knew is it was a class about the holocaust and students from passed years only had said good things about it. Throughout this course I discovered Facing History and Ourselves is a course based off of the Holocaust. While one of its goals is to educate students on the Holocaust, it also aims to teach students how to be civil agents. The course begins by showing films about prejudice towards the Jewish people, as well as giving information on past genocides. We were asked to put ourselves in the shoes of many different people; the Nazis, the Germans, the Jewish people, the Poles, as well as many other ethnic groups. The course continues to delve deeper into the Holocaust. It shows how Hitler was able to use the different social and economic situations at the time to come into complete power. We watch film showing human beings torturing and killing others. The course ends by showing real footage from the liberation of the death camps. The class is not just a tour of World War II and the Holocaust. You live through the history, as best as you can.
One of the most unique things about the course Facing History and Ourselves, is that you cannot take it as just an educational class. It changed the way I act, as well as the way I look at the world around me. The films we watched in this class showed me the strengths as well as the cowardice and weaknesses of humans. Being able to learn about the concept of being a bystander at the beginning of the course, I think made a difference during the class. Before taking this class probably wouldn’t stand up to someone; I would think about saying something but wouldn’t actually. But after watching and learning about what happened to the Jews I realized I don’t want to be a bystander anymore but someone who can stand up for others and myself. I would rather stand up for what I think is right then let someone think they can do whatever they want. I would say watching the Death Camps and seeing the pictures made what happened so many years ago feel real to me and had the biggest impacted on me. They disturbed me and made me sad that no one stood up to the Nazis. I also was able to really see all the death and horror a group of people went through for no reason other than they were Jewish. I hope that if people today saw the pictures and the death camp videos they would feel that this was truly something horrible and should never be repeated.
What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to Me
One of the first things we read in the class what The Bear That Wasn’t. The Bear That Wasn't is a children's book that has a very deep message to it. Throughout the story the bear talks to more and more people, all of which tell him that he isn't a bear, he is a man. The bear begins to lose himself and lose his identity. Eventually he stops trying to convince these people that he is indeed a bear and just goes along with what everyone is telling him. Society in the story and in everyday life forces people to conform and to just go along with what’s "normal". Even if it is hard to state your opinion or share how you really feel, it’s always a good idea to take a step back and think about what matters to you; don't go along with what everyone is telling you to do if you know it isn't what you believe in. This story was a great start to the class because it teaches you how powerful.
there were some brave souls out there that actually fought back. There were people that came together in efforts to revolt. I found their bravery and their optimism to be tremendous. I admired them for being so courageous at a time when everything was against them, because if I was put in their shoes, I can't say confidently that I would've been able to do that. The most horrifying movie that we watched was the live footage on The Death Camps. I couldn't believe what I was watching was actually real. This footage made everything about the Holocaust that more real. Seeing the bodies that were so skinny and looked like only bones broke my heart. This movie left the most impact on me because I was able to see the actual footage of the time and it was heartbreaking with my own eyes and didn’t just read it somewhere. Watching this film was devastating but I'm glad I had the chance to watch it because I'm more appreciative of everything because of it. I was also to find that the Nazis that had brought all that pain and suffering to the Jews got what they deserved in the end at the trials. Though in my opinion some people's punishment should have been harsher, they all got what they what was coming to them and they did have to pay for that.
The concept of bystander perpetrator and victim will always stick with me thanks to this class. In most cases it's always the perpetrator and victim mentioned however now I know that the bystander plays just as much of a role in the situation as the victim and the perpetrator. They may not be doing anything but just by standing there and watching something they know is wrong happen, they’re at fault as well. All it takes is one person to stand up for what is right and not blend in with everyone else. Facing History and Ourselves was a truly unique class and it influenced me as a person in so many ways through the exposure the many sources presented. To me, the main messages of the class and what I got out of taking this course, was to stand up for what you believe in and to question authority, stand up for who you are as a person and not be so easily influenced by others, and lastly, to stress the importance of not being a bystander in situations. Along with these facts, I loved learning all about the Holocaust studies as well because it connected to everything we talked about in class and seeing live footage made the experience all the better. With the new information I've learned about the Holocaust I can go back to The Holocaust Museum with a whole new perspective than before when I didn't know much about what had really happened in Germany. The ideas that I learned from taking this class concerning social topics will stay with me for the rest of my life. Learning about the Holocaust has made me more than ever appreciative of the kind of life I have, I appreciate others and have respect for others. I have learned that I should appreciate everything living happily and shouldn't take life for granted, because no one knows what tomorrow holds. This course has helped me learn a lot about myself. Facing History and Ourselves is really the course that helped me open up my perspective to my surroundings. Taking this class helps you become less ignorant and more educated about what is around you. I would just like to say thank you Mr. Gallagher for bringing this course to Westborough High school. You truly inspire each one of your students in one way or another and this is why your course is always in high demand. I consider myself to be very lucky to have been a part of this remarkable life-changing course and I am extremely thankful that you were the one to instruct the course. Because of your passion and dedication, I don’t think anyone could have done a better job in teaching this course than you. This class has taught me lessons I don’t know if I would have learned elsewhere had I not taken the class. I am a different person than I was because of taking this class.
joined the Hitler Youth, however Thomas became consumed in everything the Hitler Youth did and forgot that he was once opposed to what they were doing to the Jews, and once thought that it was wrong of them to do that. The desire for Thomas to fit in with the crowd made him lose the people that he cared about. In the movie, The Boy In The Striped Pajamas, the Dad who got a promotion to a higher position in the Nazi Party was so desperate to keep that position, he no longer cared about his family and instead chose Hitler which resulted in him being responsible for his son death in the end. This movie how powerful Hitler was, that he caused people to turn on loved ones but be evil and hurt other families. Another example of this was the Milgram Experiment. I found it to be really interesting how the teachers were so obedient to cause pain to others. It was disturbing to watch them instill pain to others without even questioning why they were doing it. I couldn't believe people would do such a thing when they could clearly hear the person on the other side was in pain. Watching this experiment made me realize who I am, and that I wouldn't allow myself to be influenced by others.
This course also taught me the power of ignorance and the outcome of prejudice. In this class, we watched many movies that involved prejudice and discrimination. One of the movies that we viewed was Freedom Writers. I had seen the movie previously and admired Mrs. Gruwell. I thought that she was an amazing teacher who genuinely cared about her students. Mrs. Gruwell didn't judge her students when she had been told to watch out for them, because they might steal her pearl necklace. Instead, she was optimistic and didn't label her students as thieves but as people. She also showed her students and the people watching that the discrimination inside her classroom and outside the classroom is the same as it was like in Holocaust. Mrs. Gruwell's point was to prove that, that same attitude is all that it takes for a genocide to occur. If people are ignorant and judge others, some will start to think that they're better than others. I now know the dangers of judging other off of rumors and stereotypes and how horribly things can go for those being judged and for everyone else as well. If we could all be like Mrs.Gruwell, the world would be a better place. This class made me look deeper within segregation and discrimination. I had never looked at these topics the way I did when I was in Facing History & Ourselves. Another movie that we watched in this class that also represented bias against one group of people was Hotel Rwanda. Like Freedom Writers, I had also seen this movie many times before. I remember the first time I watched the movie I couldn’t help but cry. It was sad to see the Hutus and Tutsi fight one another and how many innocent lives were lost due to ignorance and the power one group of people dominating over the other. I think that, that film did an excellent job in bringing to light the Rwanda Genocide. Before watching the movie, I didn’t know that something like that had happened; but I am glad I was able to watch it again with a new perspective.
One of my favorite movies we watched in this course was The Grey Zone. I found this movie to be really intense but I loved it for that reason. This movie showed us that not all Jews sat back and let Nazis take over without a fight. I looked forward to watching this movie and seeing the Jews plan and organize to rebel against the Nazis. It was relieving to know that
Introduction
My name is Tracey Mugi and I am a junior at Westborough High School. Ever since my freshman year at Westborough High School, I had always heard of what a great class Facing History & Ourselves was. I had heard nothing but positive feedback of the class I was disappointed to learn that only upperclassmen were able to take the course though. I had Mr.Gallagher as my teacher sophomore year and he had mentioned the class, which made my decisions to want to take the class even more. When it was finally time to pick my classes for my junior year, I knew that it was the perfect time to sign up to take Facing History & Ourselves. I was sure to let my guidance counselor know that Facing History & Ourselves was a top priority. I was pleased to learn that this course had made it in my schedule and that I would be taking in it the spring semester. I became interested in the Holocaust when my 8th grade class went on the Washington D.C field trip and visited the Holocaust Museum. Going inside the museum really showed me what Jews went through during the time of the Holocaust. The museum had pictures of dead bodies in dumpsters, shoes, pictures of the beds that the Jews slept on and the uniforms they had to wear on the concentration camps. Seeing this made me want to learn more about what actually happened. I can honestly say that taking this course was the best decision I made. I remember Mr. Gallagher saying that this class is like no other and he was correct. This course truly opened my eyes and changed the way I see things around me. Through the movies, documentaries and articles we read in class, I had a whole new perspective of the Holocaust, discrimination and segregation. After taking this class, I saw why it was only available for upperclassmen. There is a maturity level that is required due to all of the raw material that is discussed. Taking this course definitely made me grow as not only a student but person in society as well. I think that every school should offer this class and that every student take this class because it changes your outlook on life.
What Facing History & Ourselves Meant to Me
Through reading articles and watching documentaries I've learned the importance of finding out the truth. In this class, knowing the truth was emphasized daily. A good example of this was the Nazi propaganda that was everywhere during the time of the Holocaust. From seeing this, I am now able to question sources and not believe everything that I read or see. This class has really emphasized the significance of finding out the truth as something we should all do for the rest of our lives. This class has also affected the way I view myself in society. The story of The Bear That Wasn't was a great way to introduce this concept, and how important it is in this class. The bear was constantly told by a higher power that he was human and that he should shave. The bear listened to that higher power so much that he started to believe it. This conveyed the idea of determining your own identity and not letting someone else make that decision for you. It also shows the idea of not always going with the main group but going against the majority higher authority. This idea of being true to oneself was also seen in how Nazis became powerful through the Hitler Youth. The boys joined without hesitation. This was also evident in the movie The Swing Kids. The main characters Peter and Thomas
What Facing History Has Meant to Me
My name is Nicolas Ross and I am a 17 year old senior attending Westborough High School. I am an active member of many extracurricular activities with the school such as Anatomy Club, Community Cooking Club, National Honors Society, Rec Basketball, and Varsity Golf. After four years of being on the Varsity team I was elected to be a captain for my senior year. Golf has been a passion of mine since I was 4 years old and my dad brought me out on the course with him in Orlando Florida and taught me how to putt. Ever since that moment, I was obsessed with perfecting the game and it has been a major component of my life. I played tournament golf around the country throughout high school and play with my family a lot too. Whenever we travel together we always try to find a way to squeeze a round of golf in because everyone in my family plays. Outside of the school activities I also go on church retreats every summer to help out people in need in places that are less fortunate than mine. This passion of helping others drives me to volunteer every weekend at the Kindred Rehab hospital where I work with patients who need help with physical and mental recovery. This experience ultimately made my decision to study biology and go pre-med when I attend college next year. I decided to go to Texas Christian University next fall for the class of 2018 and I plan on studying kinesiology and going to graduate school to become some kind of medical doctor.
“Facing History and Ourselves provides ideas, methods, and tools that support the practical needs, and the spirits, of educators worldwide who share the goal of creating a better, more informed, and more thoughtful society”. I decided to take this elective because many of my friends have taken the course and highly recommended it to me. I thought that I would give it a try despite the fact that I am not the biggest history buff. Prior to taking this course I wanted to find out who I truly was as a person deep down, my morals, and what I stood for. Now that I have completed my journey through the curriculum I have gained a better understanding of all of those things, civil agency, and what it means to be a bystander/perpetrator/victim. The knowledge that I have gained from this class will stay with me for the rest of my life and I will use many of the lessons I have learned in my future endeavors. No matter what scenario I am faced with I know that it’s perfectly ok to question authority, stand up for what you believe in, and never lose sight of your morals.
The name Facing History means that we as a society and world need to face our past, learn from it, and make for a better tomorrow. We as a human race have done some pretty incredible things in our time on this earth but we have also done some unforgettably terrible things as well. Throughout the duration of this class I was exposed to detailed events in The Holacaust, The Rwandan Genocide, and many more. I personally saw films of American and European involvement in these horrific events. By viewing these terrors with my own eyes I was able to get a better appreciation for what actually went on at these places. I was able to emotionally connect to people involved in each film and it really put all of the things that happened in to perspective. I tried to look at these films from a completely educational standpoint and put myself in that time period. We watched many films over the course of this semester but the ones that stood out to me the most were “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”, “Hotel Rwanda”, “The Pianist”, The Milgram Experiment, “Freedom Writers”, and “Mrs. Elliot”. Another really important piece of this class that will always stick with me is when we had a class discussion about Sophie’s Choice.
“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” follows a Nazi family that moved from Berlin to a home right outside of a concentration camp. The family consists of a Nazi soldier as a father, a German mother, a daughter, and a son. The son’s name is Bruno, an 8 year old innocent and adventurous boy, and the movie mainly follows his life and experiences at this new home. Ultimately Bruno is homeschooled and exposed to many Nazi party beliefs. He constantly sees soldiers coming in and out of his house, his tutor pours Nazi garbage in to his head, and his dead is a highly ranked soldier always on the job. His urge to explore drives Bruno to check out the concentration camp a few miles down the road. When his parents are away he quickly escapes to go check it out. When he arrives at the fence he meets another 8 year old boy named Shmole who is in “pajamas” that he befriends. He then visits him more and more and then one day Shmole comes in to Bruno’s house and works as a slave. He gets caught by the Nazi prison guard for “stealing” their bread because Bruno throws him under the bus. Shmole gets punished and beat up and then one day his dad goes missing. Bruno agrees to dig under the fence to help find him but then they get cornered in to a gas chamber with a bunch of the other prisoners and are gassed to death. Bruno’s parents go searching for him but it is of no use. Their son has been killed. Although this movie is extremely emotional, upsetting, and hard to watch it portrays a really important lesson of looking at things from different perspectives. Bruno’s family who was 100% pro-Nazi has now felt the pain and suffering of losing a loved one in the camps. The brutality is off the charts horrific but it is a very well made film that taught me a lot about putting yourself in other people’s shoes.
“Hotel Rwanda” is a film about a mass genocide between two African tribes named the Tuzi and the Hutu. The hatred that both sides have for each other is so deep and intense that they tried to completely wipe out each other’s populations. This was a very difficult movie to watch for me. Before viewing it in class, I had very little background knowledge on the genocide that occurred in Rwanda 20 years ago. I had heard about it but I never knew what happened or why it did. This movie allowed me to understand the events that played out during this time. It's so hard for me to understand how someone can have such an intense hatred for someone else to the point where they brutally murder them with a machete. I can't ever imagine having such a burning hatred for someone else. I think the main character Paul is such an inspirational man. He is very heroic and brave to stand up for what he believed was right. I admire the fact that he wasn't only concerned with the safety of his family and himself, but he also cared for the safety of others around him who were in danger.
“The Pianist” is a movie that follows a large Jewish family throughout their experiences in the Warsaw ghetto. The killings, starvation, deaths, and inhumane things that these people witnessed is unreal. Before viewing this film I knew that the Jews were brutally exterminated but "The Pianist" really put it all in to perspective. The amorality that lies inside the Jewish ghetto is incredibly baffling. When the old man was dropped out of his wheelchair over the ledge to his death, my heart sank through the floor. I couldn't even watch the horrors going on in front of my eyes. It made me sick. The Nazi's completely abused their power and proceeded with Jewish slaughtering just because they could.
The Milgram Experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. The psychologists measured and experimented with whether people would obey authority over their personal morals. Random people were brought in to a room and were instructed to give an electric shock to a man that had to answer questions correctly. Every time the man got an answer incorrect they had to increase the voltage on their shock. Many people were hesitant but they continued to obey. The fear of taking responsibility for your actions is the driving force of obedience. People will do what they are told because it is part of human nature. Despite their conscience telling the people to stop the experiment many of them remained involved. Personally I don't believe that these people were morally strong enough to stand up to authority and know when things aren't right. Even when there is a lot of pressure it's important to remain true to yourself and what you believe in.
Another movie that had a meaningful effect on me is “Freedom Writers” In this movie a young female teacher begins working at an extremely racially diverse public school. At first many of the kids hated each other and would fight in gangs on the street outside of school. As the movie progressed she enforced an interactive and fun way of education that brought many of the different types of people together. I was extremely inspired by the teachers persistence with her students and it made me feel that if I really want something bad and go for it hard enough that I can achieve it. The movie had an important message that everyone should practice; Doing the right thing for yourself, and others no matter what the popular decision is. Mrs. Gruwell did that by buying things for her kids with her own money even if it meant getting more jobs. Mrs. Gruwell didn't worry about stereotypes and did what she did even though it wasn't a popular decision.
Mrs. Elliot is a first grade teacher who conducted an experiment to show kids how it felt to be segregated and discriminated first hand. I thought that it was very incredible and creative. The idea of experimenting with children is very controversial indeed, however she conducted it in a safe manner where no kids got hurt. Kids who were singled out and segregated would only be singled out and segregated for a day anyways so no true harm could be done. It was amazing to view how easily the kids would change their way of thinking simply because an authoritative figure told them to. I believe that a lot of people in this time period and some people in the present who could use this kind of a lesson. Mrs. Elliot proved that you cannot fully understand someone's struggle until you step into their shoes. I feel like this video should be viewed by all people with racist ideology and prejudice with the hopes that their views may change for the better. What made this way better is that Mrs. Elliot would not give in to the immense amount of negative reactions she was getting from her entire community and never gave up on her values.
The last and probably most meaningful thing that occurred over the course of this semester is when we had a class discussion about Sophie’s choice. Sophie was stuck in a situation at the concentration camp where she had to spare one of her kids and let the other one be killed. When we paused the movie and really thought about what we would do in her situation it put this tragedy in perspective. How could she possibly choose one of her own kids over the other? I wanted to just run away from the problem but she had to face it and make a quick decision on the spot right then and there. I can only imagine the pain, suffering, and heartbreak that Sophie was going through.
History and Ourselves has taught me not to be the perpetrator or let the victim be harassed. It’s absolutely crucial to help others in need and look at things through their eyes. If I’ve learned anything from taking this course it’s to always question authority, stand up for what you believe in, and always keep your morals.
*(continuation of Paragraph)*When I saw the documentary on the Nazi concentration camp, (the one shown at the Nuremberg trial) I was appalled as I was the first time I watched it a couple of years ago. The entire time I didn’t need to try and understand the emotion behind the camp, the raw, revolting, demented look of bodies upon bodies almost all in decomposing form took hold of me and I was honestly more disturbed in a more freak-of-nature way than I was emotionally. After I watched it however I realized that every one of those bodies and every person who was sick and starving and so close to death were people with their own stories. People with their own emotions and I think that was the hardest thing to contemplate when watching the documentary. How everyone there had a soul, a different intelligence, personality, and life prior to their time in the camp. I can’t really begin to think about that utter destruction of this vast array of human wealth and character. Part of me wants to learn more about the individual stories of people in the Holocaust; so then maybe I can get a better understanding of what the term ‘six million dead Jews’ mean, but I doubt I’ll ever understand.
Reading other people’s entries about their experience, others have said that the course changed who they were and they felt like changed people, and Mr. Gallagher himself said it would change who I am. I can agree and relate to that partially, the course definitely changed who I am and I think I’ve been influenced positively by understanding more about anti-Semitism. There is no doubt in my mind whether I’ll remember it in the future or not that my actions and thoughts are different now that I’ve learned more about civic agency, about being a bystander, about what pressures there are, and how easily the human mind can seem to be controlled because of them. I can’t say the course was entirely eye-opening, I’ve seen a lot of the material before, but there was still a lot I learned from the course. I’ve definitely grown intellectually and a small amount emotionally watching the videos. If there are some things I think I’ve taken away and am most happy I have is the new knowledge I have about the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, and the understanding of Nazi attitude, the cruelty showed to Jews, what happened in the concentration camps, and especially the personnel encounters of the Nazi’s who carried out the murders or their victims. The components I enjoy the most to have received are the idea to never stop asking questions. I think I’ve learned a great deal in Mr. Gallagher’s class about authority, and resist it, but always question it, and if you see something going on that is not right, you should follow the urge to intervene and stop it for yourself, and not be the bystander, since the power to stop it is usually in those who stand by. I think the best thing I took out of this class was that while I was looking at the massive amounts of death in the films we watched wondering how the conscious mind could function and handle doing such things it got me to look more deeply and more introspectively at myself and my life. I’ve always tried to do this but this brought my thoughts to an interesting point. I don’t think I’m quite satisfied with what I learned in this course. I don’t think I really came out of the course as much of a changed person as I wanted to be. What would be awesome is if the course challenged us in some way, but then again maybe this is the stepping stone to doing so ourselves. So actually I think I’ll change what I said earlier; the best thing I took away from the class was the challenge it gave me to think to differently and change my actions in the future to prevent the injustices of life and even the great atrocities history has proven can happen. Thank you Mr. Gallagher for the wisdom you’ve shared with me and the class, believe me, I’ve not taken it for granted. I’m glad I took this course.
*(continuation of Paragraph)*I was surprised by the stupidity of this move and felt a little reassured knowing that the weakness and part of Germany’s downfall was its part of its idea for a pure race, and therefore its will to wage war against the majority of humanity, that partially led to its downfall. I think the factual data revolving around how systematic the massacre was was a necessary part about the course. Learning about how the Nazi’s formulated the gas and why they did so in the first place (to make it more ‘humane’ for the executioners) was also intriguing. Another thing I learned about humans while watching this was just how desensitized a person can get to anything (even personally murdering others) given the right circumstances. Although there were many Nazis who couldn’t emotionally handle killing innocent people, they were many who could, and it seemed they went from their lives as killers to normal feeling individuals in an ominously swift way. At least that’s what I learned about that in the documentary Albums of Auschwitz, where they talked about the lives of S.S. Officers in the death camps. I’m interested in that part, and especially why woman were looked at as even more cruel then the men, and what kind of psychological impact the repeated murdering of other human beings had on that people that were S.S. officers.
The pianist and the Grey Zone are two Movies I want to talk about together because there is one theme they both shared that intrigued me. The theme is hopelessness. I can’t believe how awfully trapped the people in Nazi control and the majority of Jews in Europe were. I felt awful watching both of the movies, seeing how the people were like animals trapped in a corner. The opposition against them was too much to repel, and with nowhere to go, I can’t begin to imagine how much of terrible situation it was and how bad you would feel each day living with that knowledge; it must have been hell. The grey zone was the worst, for at least in the Ghettos the Nazis originally quarantined the Jews in you could fight back, but in the camps, you could do nothing. I remember one of the worst things I ever saw in the course was the scene in the Grey Zone where a Jewish guard beats the man for his watch while in a changing room awaiting the gas chambers while his wife screamed. Then when the camera pans out on him later listening to them suffering and being murdered by gas was disturbing verging on what I want to call demented. The gas chambers is easily one of the most intriguing parts about the course, and how people were herded like cattle into them executed in huge numbers was appalling. These movies showed me a terrible, personnel reality of exterminating other humans, and also allowed me to understand the hopeless feeling everyone in the camps felt.
I also want to talk about the Boy in Striped Pajamas and the film we watched after which was the actual documentary of the Nazi concentration camp, and the thousands of body’s laid in waste there. The movie The Boy in Striped Pajamas offered me a new perspective on the Nazi attitude towards Jews. I felt great sympathy for the Jewish worker named Pavel that the main character first meets after injuring himself on the swing. It was sickening seeming the old man be so afraid of the Nazi who was really a just out of boyhood, and watching him regard Pavel with so much hate and Semitism to the point that was surprising even when I knew this was the attitude back then. Seeing how the relationships in the German family Bruno was in also gave me insight into how much the extermination of so many people couldn’t simply be ignored, even though that was obviously attempted. It seemed that even though they lived in a nice house and everything was done for them the fact that there were so many souls being destroyed was an overwhelming fact that spilled over in their lives, and probably everyone’s lives to some degree in Nazi Germany.
*(Continuation of Paragraph)*65% of people in the experiment carried out the maximum voltage, even when the learner in the next room went ominously quiet. The surprising thing is that people nervously laughed in the beginning of the experiment and showed other signs of nervousness, which changed into obvious signs of distress, because of the sympathy they felt for the person they were shocking. This showed me how apt we are to obey authority, even when our conscious is telling us that what we are doing is wrong, and when we don’t feel like we were the ones responsible.
Another facet I found especially interesting in the course was the Rwandan genocide. In class we learned about how in 1994, the death of President Burundi caused several weeks of massacre for the Tutsi people, committed by the Hutus. Approximately 1 million people were killed, mostly by machete cuts, and 150,000 – 250,000 women were raped. I forgot how recently this happened, and how readily possible genocide can take place. Watching the movie hotel Rwanda which was about the genocide opened my eyes as to how possible it is to have an attempted genocide with the right conditions, and it makes me wonder how we can prevent them in the future. One thing I noticed about the genocide was that the male ‘Hutus’ that committed the atrocity left clues that they were going to attempt to exterminate the race. Some of the clues were how they compared the Tutsi people as ‘cockroaches’, or people less than human. This demonizing and dehumanization of the people was close to how the Nazis described the Jews. After watching this, I started I couldn’t look at the Holocaust and think that it happened simply because that was then and this is now, and the world is a much more civil and better place now. It also made me aware that this could happen again under the right circumstances, and it truly is up to me as a bystander to recognize the clues that might mean a future genocide and stop it.
I enjoyed the Swing Kids movie as well. It was entertaining, and it gave me a since of perspective about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust that made better sense. I think a lot of times what people do when they look at the Holocaust is they see truth but register it as almost a fantasy or dream, something that’s inconceivable since it happened long ago, and times were so much more different. I think part of this is because there is a belief that people and the world were so much more different back then they are now. Although part of this is true, and I understand that there were many external influences that changed how people thought, people are still people, and lack of knowledge of different influences are present, but personality, intelligence and civic agency remain the same. Watching the movie Swing Kids explains that the people back then were just as average as we are besides the radical ways in which they thought compared to our present society. That also made the Holocaust more real and scarier, because I realized just how human the act was, and that Hitler and his party weren’t really monsters, they were human.
I found this out more as I began to see the history of Hitler’s rising into power, and I want to talk about the different documentaries we watched in class revolving around the actual history of Germany during the war. For example, I found that the documentary entitled ‘The Road to Treblinka Segment’ was very interesting. I can’t say the documentaries emotionally changed me too much, (there wasn’t very much emotional material in them) but they did give me a better understanding of how Germany operated, especially in the higher ranking segment of Germany, as well as how each decision led to another. In the documentary, I found out that Germany razed everything while invading Russia, relentlessly killing the innocent people that lived there and turning the rural peasants that lived there from potential allies to sworn enemies.
My name is Chris Eames, and I’m a junior at the Westborough High school. To be honest, at first I didn’t put much thought into wanting to take the course. A lot of my peers were taking the class, and I heard good things about it from other people as well as my history teacher who first informed my class so I decided I would as well. However that wasn’t the only reason I joined, since one thing that also intrigued me to join the class was the name History and ‘Ourselves’. I’ve always been interested in humans, how we work, and psychology in general. I love to learn more about myself, and so when I heard that I would learn things about myself I was certain this was a class I wanted to take. A large part of the course revolves around human behavior, including anti-Semitism, civic agency, how people respond and act to external pressures, and more. The other chunk of the course is about the actual history of the Holocaust, and how it was possible for the mass extermination of the Jews to take place. The videos we watched in class are intriguing and often make you look critically at others and yourself. Some of the content is intense and actually hard to look at, which shows you just how impactful they are. Overall the class teaches you to understand human beings more, especially by the close observation of what took place, and through other semi-related experiments and events. The class will change you in that you will see things that you never saw in society before. It will teach you to detect small forms of dangerous thoughts/ideas that are anti-Semitist, racism, or discriminating. Above all it will change your perspective on human identity, the Holocaust, and other genocides and acts of discrimination and racism. The course benefited me as person by expanding my knowledge of the Holocaust and the people in it as well as explaining the dangerous thinking that led to it and like I said before other acts of genocide and acts of discrimination and racism.
One of the most interesting videos I watched was the documentary called the Milgram experiment, where they tested a person’s will to obey. In this test, people of all ethnicities, occupations, and genders were asked to join in an experiment run by a prestigious college. The test involved two people, one who was called the ‘learner’, the other called the ‘tester’. The test required the actual person being observed to be the tester, and an actor as the learner. The tester is unaware of this, and is asked to sit down by a desk while the ‘learner’ is in the next room over. The tester is then told that the test is trying to find answers for whether or not learning can be enhanced with the use of shock therapy. The tester is the one that must ask the learner questions and if they get them wrong they deliver a shock that ranges from a low to a lethal voltage. The learner was asked to deliver these shocks starting with the smallest voltage first going all the way up to the lethal voltage, and then down again. The subject in the teacher position was delivering the shocks to the person supposedly in the next room, they could hear them shout and yowl (it was really a recorded playback), and as they got to higher voltages, the yowling became pleads to stop the experiment and let them out.
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