Today marked the completion of our unit on the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel. If I am being honest, I always struggle a bit with this work. It is, of course, one of the most important writings of the 20th Century. And beyond that it is a beautfully written piece of literature with its symbolism, use of juxtaposition, and poetic prose.But - and I realize how absolutely horrible this sounds - I just don't want to teach it sometimes.
Reading passages three times in a day about the murder of babies and the torture of an entire people becomes depressing. Even typing that makes me feel like a complete jerk. People had to live this horror, and I can't even bring myself to read it?
Because I recognize the deep value of this work, I knew I had to shake things up a bit. I began by creating reading groups that would work through the memoir together. Instead of a traditional reading guide, I gave them activities to do while reading that asked them to deeply consider what Wiesel was trying to accomplish when he wrote his memoir. They had to complete the work together, and come to consensus about what he was trying to say, and how he hoped his readers to responde. I purposely created groups that forced students who were very different from one another to work together. This led to some lengthy debates within the reading groups which is exactly what I had hoped.
Most importantly I started the unit with the question: who do you want to be when you grow up? Right away students started shouting out career choices. No, I told them, that is not what I asked. I asked WHO you wanted to be. This stumped them. It occured to me that we don't ever ask students this question. We focus so much on a career path, that we forget the much more important path to becoming a person character, depth, and impact. Does it matter if you become a doctor, but you cannot show compassion? Or an architect who designs beautiful buildings, but cannot assess the impact of the designs on the community?
As we moved through the story, I kept asking the students to consider who they wanted to be. There were many difficult discussions. The easy route is to dismiss the Nazi's as "others" - monsters who are somehow very far from who we are as humans. The truth is they were people with families and dreams who somehow (and I am sure I will never understand this) became capable of one the greatest atrocities our world has ever known. One student said that there was no way he would ever do such a thing, and that he would have resisted and spoken up. I pointedly asked him how much he had spoken up when he saw other kids getting bullied. Many students seemed fazed by this point, but then aren't we all guilty of turning a blind eye now and then?The truth is we are very good at saying we would have done better and been better, but we often fall short when injustice on a small scale is staring us in the face. I looked at my students' expressions today as we watched Wiesel's interview with Oprah at Auschwitz. I was proud of their discomfort, and proud that they were allowing themselves to feel.
If we read a book like Night and simply respond with shock and disgust, then we have turned it into nothing more than a cheap reality television show. A book like this begs you to struggle with your own humanity, and with the choices you make daily. To not allow the book to change you, is to miss its point entirely.
At the end of class today I had a student approach me. He looked me straight in the eye and said, "I wasn't excited to read this book. I felt like we already read too many books about the Holocaust. But this one was different. I could feel what he felt. It was like I struggled with him. And I am afraid that I am not the person I thought I was."
What a beautiful and honest assessment of how we all feel at times. "No," I told him. "We are often not all that we hoped we would be. But the point is that we keep trying to be."
That kid's gonna be all right in this world.
