Wednesday

These are the things that make an English teacher’s day --

A student pointing to a book, “Fahrenheit 451,” and saying, “That is a greeeaaat book.”

A student dropping in between classes with all of his comma questions on his upcoming paper underlined. (all of the commas were correctly used)

Another student handing me his senior picture before adding, “Put me in a good spot!” (he was referring to how I tape senior pictures all over my desk as students give them to me).

These aren’t much in the grand scheme of standardized tests and district standards, but they sustain me. Sometimes for weeks at a time.

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To preface “Fahrenheit 451” I had my juniors write an essay reflecting on a time they felt that they were genuinely happy. Then today I introduced them to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (just don’t ask me how to pronounce it) theory on the psychology of flow. Mihaly found in a massive study across cultures and economic levels that what caused people to feel happy was experiences where they encountered flow. Ask an athlete and they’ll tell you all about flow - it’s that state where you are so tuned in to what you are doing that the worlds seems to fade away and time stops. An hour will pass in what feels like a matter of minutes.

Mihaly found that it was not limited, however, to just athletics. Any time a person works to accomplish something they experience a level of flow. Engaging in this work which leads to flow is what really causes us to feel happy. Imagine that - happiness linked to work.

Then the class and I looked at our culture. After some prodding we looked at what our culture seems to define as “happiness” through advertising. In fact, we put it into three categories - buy stuff, east stuff, and sit on your ass. Sometimes one product can include all three things. We had a good time talking about that.

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Today in my senior English class we began “Night.” To prep them, I visited eyewitnesstohistory.com and found an article on a Nazi death camp. It is the account of a British journalist’s first glimpse inside one of the first death camps to be liberated. His account of the gas chamber there (and the peep hole in the door - maybe the most frightening aspect of all) were far too horrible for the BBC to publish right away. Yesterday I had them read this and discuss it.

Today we plunged full steam into “Night.” For lack of a better word, I have several red necks in class - one who has often drawn swastikas on his tablet - so I really laid it on thick about the horrors of Hitler’s genocide from accounts I’ve read and seen.

I recounted what Kristie told me about “Sophie’s Choice” and the horrible choice that Jewish mother faced. The Nazi guards gave her a choice: choose your son or infant daughter to live. She chose her son, thinking since he was older he would survive. She could never forget her daughter, as the guards hauled her away, crying “Mommy! Mommy!” Could you imagine the horror of that. You should have seen the shock on several students’ faces.

I think this situation was repeated a few years ago when terrorists in Russia took a school hostage. A mother was held with her children. She was given the option to release one. While the other had to remain hostage with her - for possible death. Could you imagine?

Over all the students were observant and respectful. On the other side of the classroom I have several choir students who has spent years studying the holocaust. They too were shocked, but their contributions were invaluable.

Back in 1994 Dr. Drake took several members of her class (including me) to the UND writers conference. Then after lunch we attending “Schindler’s List.” On the way home Dr. Drake asked us if it could ever happen again. I was unsure. But one older student was absolutely resolute that it could never happen again.

Now I know better. Just look at Darfur. Granted that is not on the grand scale of genocide that the Nazis practiced, but it is genocide nonetheless.

Many of my students brought this up today. They were shocked that we aren’t doing anything about it. The best I could offer was, “It’s always easier to not do anything when the bad stuff is happening to someone else.” I think that was part of what happened in Europe (and America) during the Holocaust. There were clues that bad things happening (maybe they didn’t reveal just how bad they were though), but it was happening to someone else.

To help them consider this I asked how many people saw “Charlie Wilson’s War.” And having just seen a very good History Channel documentary on him, I felt confident in discussing it. But the class seemed relatively unimpressed with a Texas congressmen sitting in a hot tub chugging whiskey and snorting (supposedly anyway) coke with a bunch of strippers when he saw a broadcast on the terrible things that the Russian military was doing to the Afghanistan people while invading the country and that motivated him to try and boost CIA funding to the Afghan rebels. I thought that would hook them into a good discussion, but it went nowhere.

Then I noted to students how a podcast I was recently listening to (Dan Carlin’s episode on the Assyrian city of Nineveh) and he recounted just how terrible the Assyrians were - and they were in power several thousand years ago. One Assyrian king actually had a river diverted so it would flow over the city of a king who disobeyed him! Another Assyrian king wrote about skinning his enemies, building a tower of the dead, having their ruler wear a severed head around his neck and beating him to death, of walling the ruler’s family up in a wall. And this was in ancient history! The point was that people have always had the potential for evil and genocide in them.

Then I asked them if what Hitler did was that different from what the founding fathers did to the Native Americans here. They didn’t use cyanide, machine guns, ghettos, or death camps. Instead they used small pox, whiskey, reservations, and the mass slaughter of bison to practice their genocide instead.

Then we listened to the first chapter. Some wanted to read on their own, so they headed to the hallway or library.

I just hope students come away with a little darker world view. I hope the always wonder what we are truly capable of. Will it ever happen again? These students may be the ones to decide that.