Pause. In the last sentence, I wrote 'in sync', and I mostly thought of 'N Sync' as I wrote it. Are we a generation of people who really did grow up thinking it truly was spelled the way the boy band claimed it? I remember the moment I knew otherwise, and unfortunately I think it was when I was in college.
Unshun. Shun. Unshun. Ha ha. That's a Dwight Shrute thing. As I'm writing, clearly in a stream of consciousness form this morning, I am seeing that the rested brain truly is still a random one. I hope I can convey information to the kids today in a semi-normal manner.
What I was going to write about in the first place is the fact that this week I'm going to be talking to 8th grade students about WWII. Guess what? It seems like every boy I teach has this deep love for WWII history. And it seems like they've been waiting for it for a LONG time in my class. I did research this weekend, and I spent a few hours making a power point that gave some clear information about all of the crazy things that were happening all over the world with a few fun details mixed in as well. I did research on the leaders, how they died, how landmines are detonated, why certain things happened at certain times in the war, how people write about Americans and their involvement with the war, the civilian life of Russia, all of the meanings behind all of the symbols all of those fascist governments were using. Things about the Blitz and people rescued from the Blitz, scary SS guards at Bergen-Belzen (yikes!), the German reaction to the Holocaust, the ways spies stayed alive in enemy-occupied territory. I found a VERY informative children's book, as you can see.
The most striking things for me as I learned about the war again....
- How ignorant Americans really can be about the post-war collaboration because of the fact that we are separated by an ocean and our cities weren't bombed
- How little I knew about civilian deaths before reading this book. I always tell the kids that the 20th Century brought new ideas about total war, but I didn't see that in WWII until this weekend. A LOT of people in Poland and the Soviet Union were killed.
- Just how much England was doing on its own when France fell to the Germans in 1941. It made me admire their pluck.
- How happy I was in seeing a rescue picture of a boy being pulled from the rubble by a dog. And the dog is smiling as dogs sometimes do. I loved that picture.
- Just how much I love the book The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. That's a book plug...can you tell? You should read it.
- How awesome people were at sending propaganda into enemy-occupied territory. They would fling leaflets out of airplanes and hope they landing in vulnerable soldiers' hands because they were explaining on those pages how futile it was to continue to serve their commander in a losing war effort. Pretty brilliant.
- How much I learned about the German army
- How bothered I was by images of survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I had prepared myself for the images of the Holocaust and I've been wrestling with them this week with my students. I did NOT prepare myself for the atomic bomb pictures, and decided I couldn't put them in front of the kids. They were too horrific for me. I wondered if it was a cop out to show the Enola Gay plane and the cloud view from the sky, but I think for class, for 8th grade (REMEMBER this, Jessica) it is very ok. Those sort of small decisions remind me again of the importance of seeing where kids are in development.
Ok, so that's a lot about the war, but this post-lesson planning reflection is very valuable. Teachers don't do this enough, and we forget the sensitivity we must have as humans who study human history. I talk about remembering humanity in history all of the time, and it looks like I finally remembered to take my own lessons to heart. What a relief. My brain is still on straight, even at the end of the year. I was getting concerned about that last week.
I want to close this out by adding a few pictures that really struck me as I studied this war.
Literally taking down a country's border....
Everyone in Britain got a gas mask!
This made me think of all of my friends who have babies now. What a scary thing...make sure the gas mask fits all the way around your baby. It made me realize I have no idea what this time would have been like.
Air wardens looking for German fighter planes in London in 1940
The rescue I was talking about! I love that dog in this picture. This became a really famous picture.
No one hears very much about the conflicts in Northern Africa, but here are some people fighting in the Sahara. I learned that this part of the war officially closed down in May of 1943. There are still land mines out in the desert from WWII today.
Americans clearly found their way to Europe. New word I learned = denazification. No more Nazis!
This was a strong impression on me because the kids are very concerned about what Germans did or didn't know. In their minds, they still can't imagine that people would turn a blind eye to horrible things. In this way it's overwhelming to know how to teach them, and it's very humbling too.
Last picture....this one actually comforts me. Book lovers lived during WWII and were devastated by many things, and in small ways it also included the London library.
Time to teach this. Cheers to a new week in the classroom!
Once again, how much I would love to just sit in your classroom and just absorb everything. I guess this blog will have to do the trick!
ReplyDeleteI was thinking, you should share with your readers about how your room has become the "station" for disheveled teachers. Why is that? Is it the mood lighting? Or do you have some sort of relaxing, calming draw that brings us all in and makes us all feel safe and relaxed and at ease after all the chaos that is middle school?
I think it's a combo of the two, but more of the latter.
I was one of those students obsessed with studying WWII. Jamie K could tell you a story about that!
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