How Could "They" Let This Happen?

The world is a dangerous place to live. Not because of the people who are evil; but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.  ~Albert Einstein

If you're reading a Dystopian or a Holocaust novel with your students, you're apt to see the wisdom and warning in Albert Einstein's words. If so, then keep reading.

When studying the Holocaust, my students always ask, "How could people let this happen?" They little realize how insidiously this tragedy was allowed to occur, and how quietly and malevolently similar atrocities continue to proliferate across the globe.

To help students better understand, I assign a writing piece called Citizenship Credits. It consists of a prompt for an argumentative essay, and its success relies upon students' struggle with seeing both sides of the topic presented. Most important, however, is the discussion which ensues, as it helps students begin to understand how such tragedies can occur, through not only the action of those who seek to control others, but the inaction of those who stand aside silently and allow it to happen. This small understanding is a jumping off point to exploring further causes; it is also, however, a cautionary tale for avoiding the consequences of inaction in their own lives.

Please know that this is NOT a simulation activity. I recently attended a session of the Master Teachers Institute in Holocaust Education at Rutgers University, where I heard teacher educator Ilana Abramovitch discuss the ineffectiveness of simulations. We cannot conduct one short exercise which causes discomfort and deprivation, and then declare to students, "And now you know how it must have felt."

This prompt instead allows students to see that "how this was allowed to happen" could happen just as easily in their own country, their own state, their own school. If you're studying a Dystopian novel, this prompt could also serve as an excellent prereading discussion piece, with exactly that same message

The Prompt

The prompt I share with students is embedded below. I kept it as simple and jargon-free as possible, and it's always amazing to see the number of provisions and conditions and rules which students attach to it as they begin to write, regardless of the perspective they've chosen to argue.

The class reads the prompt together and discusses it briefly. I then ask students to turn to the assignment's blank backside, fold the page in half, and write at least three bulleted statements arguing why such a policy is good, and three bulleted statements for why such a policy is bad. We share these aloud, and I encourage students to record points made by classmates which they might have missed. Students are encouraged to record arguments for both sides, even if they've already decided which point of view they take.

Students are then directed to choose one side of the topic or the other. My students organize their thoughts on a Google Draw doc which I've created for this purpose, which later allows them to copy and paste sentences easily to a blog or wiki. Another possibility for organizing ideas is with an interactive mapping tool such as Read Write Think's Persuasion Map, which can be edited online or printed up as a blank map for off-line use.

If you prefer that students use a more traditional outline format, check out Quicklyst. This frills-free outlining site is incredible quick to learn and leaves off distracting bells and whistles which students simply don't need.

As students begin writing their essays, encourage them to discuss not only the facts, examples, and anecdotes which support their own side of the issue, but also the opposing views of their opponents. Only if they acknowledge these opposing views and counter them will their writing be argumentative, versus simply persuasive. For more on argumentation vs. persuasion, and also the power of the opposing viewpoints, see my previous Fightin' Words post. 

How you choose to close this activity depends largely upon the approach you'll take with your novel. Every year it's my students who draw parallels between the dangers of the Citizenship Credits policy, and what began to happen with citizens reporting on their neighbors in the early years of Nazi Germany.  You may also wish to share The Hangman by Maurice Ogden, an allegorical poem with a powerful message. See "The Hangman" related activities.  

Responding to Holocaust Readings

If you're interested in additional ways that students can respond to Holocaust readings, be sure to check out this post which provides four writing prompts to use before, during, and after a Holocaust unit.

Recommended Reads

While I've used this activity successfully with both Number the Stars and The Devil's Arithmetic, it could also used as a prereading activity with other Holocaust titles such as Markus Zusak's The Book Thief and Susan Campbell Bartoletti's The Boy Who Dared. 

The theme of a police state of paranoia would also ring true with Dystopian titles such as Animal Farm, 1984, The Hunger Games, Brave New World, and Divergent.

If you're looking to read more on the topic of argumentative writing, check out They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. This book explains in concise language, dozens of templates, and numerous real-world examples, the powerful concepts which guide argumentative writing.

Here you'll find templates for openings, closings, discussion, disagreement, etc. You'll also have at your fingertips many professionally written articles, essays, and speeches which show these same templates at work (see the explanation of argumentative writing in "Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail" shown in the book preview on Amazon). 

This work, aimed at both instructors and high school- and college-aged students, is must reading.

Responding and Reflecting; Colaborating and Collecting

If you've ever used Wallwisher, you know how powerful such a tool can be in creating collaboration and on-line dialogue between students.

Lino It is a similar online bulletin board, allowing anonymous and instant posting, permitting only the posters (and the administrator) to move or peel off the stickies that have been added. It's super easy with few frills to distract students. It's easily embeddable to most web sites and wikis, retaining full functionality.

Check out the example of students responding to Paul Laurence Dunbar's "The Sparrow" which was read in juxtaposition to Poe's "The Raven." You can see that this group of four students generated a bunch of questions they wanted to discuss, and even posted a picture, the poem, and a related video to the wall. 

Interestingly, some groups assigned stickies by color to each member, while others decided that "blue is vocabulary, and pink is questions," and so on.

One neat feature of Lino It is History, which highlights the ten most recent additions, allowing users to quickly see what was added since their last visit (when you view the example, click on Highlight New, and then keep clicking the arrow beside it to view the ten latest additions).

Applications for the Reading/Language Arts Classroom:

• Demand Exit Tickets: all students respond to an open ended question based on the day's lesson.
• Collect Ten Word Stories, ala Sparky Teaching's Ten Word Stories page. This ten word story might be a reflection on a day's lit piece.
• Ask students to list running questions or observations about a challenging text piece.
• Encourage students to collect colorful figurative language and "cool sentences" from their reading that they would like to discuss during later close reading sessions. Some of these sentences can later be submitted to Notable Sentences... for Imitation and Creation (see my write-up here).
• Add a "What's New and Notable" bulletin board to your teacher's page. Include assignment updates, links to current events, etc. See mine at the bottom of my main site.
• Share files and videos related to classroom discussion topics.
• Get instant student responses to poems, song lyrics, facts, and quotations, perhaps as a warm-up to each day's lesson.
• Allow students to record thoughts and questions as they watch a video or read a chapter.
• Check out more ideas at this blog.

Notes and Caveats:

• Limit the number of users on a single board to five or less. Otherwise, you'll have too much traffic and many redundant responses.
• If you care to know who posted which items, instruct students to include their initials on posts. As mentioned above, some students chose to assign a different color to each member to differentiate responses.

Five Great Sites for Making Poetry Happen

What's the connection between 18th century Japanese poetry, S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, and rock band Linkin Park?

I recently blogged about Teachers' Domain at my Teaching that Sticks site. In observation of Poetry Month, teachers in grades 6 through 12 can take advantage of some excellent resources and teaching ideas utilizing the 37 online video excerpts from public television's Poetry Everywhere series.

In the following video segment, for example, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass shares a translation of haiku by the 18th century Japanese poet, Kubayashi Issa. These "vivid, specific, and often funny perceptions of everyday experiences" provide students with concrete examples of how poetry can be both simple and entertaining. The Teachers' Domain site includes a background essay and content-aligned lesson plans. 

If you're seeking additional poetry resources for middle grades and above, here are a few I'd recommend:

Favorite Poem Project This site, subtitled "Americans Reading Poems They Love," is built upon the pretty cool idea of allowing average Americans to share their favorite poems. You'll need to visit the site to see how it came about, but I like the idea a lot since it can be implemented so easily in the classroom using the lesson plans and suggestions provided at the site.

One of my personal favorite poems is shared by this guy:

Poetry 180 Subtitled "A Poem a Day for American High Schools," this site shares 180 full-length poems and sharing suggestions, but it seems that you'll need to do the legwork to make them work in your classroom.

Elements of Literature This collection of free teaching materials provided by Holt, Rinehart and Winston includes a number of writing response ideas in printable pdf format. While the poems themselves do not appear on the resources, they're mostly in the public domain and freely available on the Internet or in printed collections. I would never suggest you break any laws.

Poet's Paradise In this "Collection of Helpful Resources" you'll find web sites of poets, poetry forms, poetry collections, poetic terms glossaries, and more.

Fooling with Words with Bill Moyers If you're counting, yes, this makes it six sites, not five. But I snuck this one in after posting since I like it so much. Lesson plans focus on understanding modern poets and how they "fool with words,"  in order to encourage students to do the same.

But Keith, what does have poetry have to do with teaching a novel?

A whole lot, but most importantly: poetry can introduce, reinforce, and extend a novel's theme.

When introducing The Outsiders recently, I wanted to engage my students in a discussion of affiliation, one of the many themes at the heart of that novel.

After discussing some overt ways that one might show affiliation with a particular group, we read aloud and discussed a poem together. Some of the lines from that poem included:

I was confused
And I let it all out to find
That I'm not the only person with these things in mind...

I wanna heal, I wanna feel
Like I'm close to something real
I wanna find something I've wanted all along
Somewhere I belong.

What did the poet discover when he finally let his thoughts out? (He wasn't the only one who was confused, or hollow, or alone). Was it really a somewhere, a place, that the poet sought? (No, he was looking for a group of people who would accept him).

By now one or two students realized that the "poem" was in fact a Linkin Park song titled Somewhere I Belong (lyrics here, and a million other places as well). We decided that if these guys were truly wrestling with their feelings of loneliness and confusion, they probably weren't working it out with a school guidance counselor. They were more likely jamming in their garage after school, finding affiliation with a bunch of other guys who also felt misunderstood and alone.

The cool thing is, the back cover of the novel used many of the same words as the song itself, and these same ideas were voiced by the novel's narrator, Ponyboy, in the very first chapter.

The official video appears below, and is safe for school, as are the song's lyrics.