My 5th thru 8th grade classes are beginning our Holocaust units, and today I did something completely different with my intro than I've ever done before. I scared them - hopefully no scarring occurred. Please don't misunderstand, the kids knew they were in a safe environment and I asked them to suspend our normal reality and enter into one I wanted them to experience. They all willingly followed me into a new, and ultimately scary experience.
We will never, hopefully, truly be able to experience what the victims of the Holocaust went through; however, today's kids need some sort of connection to the fear, danger, and emotions involved in order to truly empathize with the stories of those who lived and died. I began this experience today with a statement to my kids very similar to that one, and they seemed a little lost. Kids today typically think that if they do not get to play a video game everyday then their lives are miserable, and luckily, they do not have to face such obvious and forced persecution. Most kids (at least the ones I've worked with) don't know true fear, loss, misery, hungry, or injustice. All people today have experienced some level of those, please do not think me ignorant, and there are certainly kids today who live those things daily, but I needed my kids to have a more empathetic frame of mind before delving into our texts.
They came into the classroom and I had taped off two boxes, neither of them very large at all. When we began I showed them the "rules" they had to follow in order to succeed. Now, I've played tricks similar to this before with the kids (when I introduced Nightjohn I took their pencils away and wrote their writing prompt in gibberish yet still expected them to write), so they knew something was up.
Here are the rules I gave them to build a card house:
- You may not move out of the provided space, that includes any part of you
- If a card goes outside of the space, you lose
- You may only speak in whispers
- All of your cards must face the same way (only the face of the card may show)
- If you do not succeed, the leader of your group will fail
- You must build your card house so it has at least three stories, or you lose
- You must use all your cards, if you do not, you lose
- You must complete your house by the time the clock stops, or you lose
I did not actually give anyone a zero, I also did not let anyone succeed. I made them uncomfortable by walking around in my "stern" mode, I said things loudly, I kicked down their houses when they were just starting to figure it out, and I changed the amount of time they had to complete the task several times. Neither group was successful, they were all nervous throughout the task however. When it was done, I asked them to sit down, return to our reality, and pull out a piece of paper and reflect on their experiences. I asked them not to talk about it at first.
Here are some of the things they said:
"We were actually getting close to one story, but your friggin' foot just pushed it over! Don't try and tell me it 'brushed up against it'...NO!"
"My heart started beating fast when Mrs. Ranzau walked to us."
"Towards the end I wanted to cry..."
"I seriously considered tripping Mrs. Ranzau, just because I felt like she only walked by us to ruin our work."
"My hands were trembling, and I began to feel quite angry with myself."
"I couldn't stop giggling. I don't know that there was really a reason, but we didn't seem to stop."
My kids were nervous and I could feel the tension rising as the experiment went on. I noticed some kids pull into themselves when I walked past them after knocking something down or pushing their knees back into the box. They were immediately going into survival mode but didn't feel like they had any power to do anything about it.
This got them all thinking about the reality they are about to read about in The Diary of Anne Frank and The Hidden Girl. I don't ever want my kids to feel as if they are in danger, anywhere, but I do want to encourage empathy. Without empathy and some level of understanding, we cannot truly learn from the words so many others have fought to share and protect.
