I swear I have a giant update that chronicles my first two weeks at Thurgood Marshall coming soon. It has been an interesting time so far, but the work is really starting to pile on as I handle more and more in the classroom. Things are picking up with APO too, as we have our new spring pledge class and all the extra (but exciting) things that come with that. One thing that doesn't come with these extra commitments is extra sleep, and I'm eagerly looking forward to spending lots of time in my bed this weekend.

The past few days were a test. The DC History classes are going well, mostly because I'm only teaching the first 30 minutes of those right now and Kathryn handles the rest, or at least she is the one in the drivers seat for the rest of those periods. I open each of those classes with an article from the Washington Post Metro section, accompanied by four or five questions I've written for the class to answer and discuss. We use the questions to scaffold into a short, opinion-driven discussion on the subject matter of the article. Unfortunately, the local section of the Post has been pretty dray as of late. Most of the stories have been about DC's failing schools, neighborhood crime, or District politics. I've had to use the latter for most of the articles (because crime and failing schools are a day-to-day affair for these kids), but that is frustrating because many of the students couldn't even explain a two-party system. I do a lot of explaining, but we've been getting the work done.

The three US history classes are an entirely different story. One of the US classes is just so far ahead of the other two in ability and this really impacts the way we do things. We've had the opportunity to do some awesome group activities in this class that have genuinely contributed to the students' understanding of the content. The other two classes...we get by.

The past several classes for US history focused on the end of World War II and the Holocaust. The Holocaust basically needs to be taught in 90 minutes, as did the end of the war in Europe. In my high school, periods were 41 minutes, and I don't remember how many we spent on the Holocaust, but after four years of college history , I feel as if it is an injustice to discuss anything in under 90 minutes (though I realize this is my flaw/problem, not that of the curriculum).

Last week, we watched "the beach" scene of Saving Private Ryan with the US classes. I saw it a total of 3 times in 24 hours, so I felt awesome about life. First period took it well, remained composed during the showing, and had insightful questions after we watched. We had the opportunity to discuss the logistics of the Normandy landings, their impact on the course of the war, and the actual hardships faced by these soldiers/how terribly accurate the film actually is in this scene. On top of that, at my direction, we talked a little bit about how prisoners of war are to be treated under the Geneva convention and that it is a war crime to kill prisoners or surrendering enemy soldiers; something that Saving Private Ryan was one of the first movies to show American soldiers doing. Touching on this helped the class understand a bit more about how terrible war is and that war crimes are something that will inevitably happen on both sides. I wish we could have had the time to pick the movie apart more (especially some of the other parts that seem to fly under the radar for most people, i.e. gratuitous shooting of dead German soldiers) but this is an 11th grade US history class, not Cinema 101.

Periods three and five were different. I think the intense amount of violence made them uncomfortable, which led to lots of laughing during the scene, but I do know some of them were genuinely entertained. When we tried to discuss the killing of surrendered troops, the Geneva Convention, and the other battlefield conditions at Normandy, they were generally unresponsive or displayed enthusiasm and support when it came to killing the "bad guys," regardless of ethics. I'm probably letting this frustrate me more than it should.

Today we watched a moving documentary on the Holocaust from 1995. It was excellent. Period one agreed and we had a productive discussion around it, but period three had a few students fall asleep. They just weren't connecting to the material, at all. When we moved into the discussion, one student (who is quite bright but holds some radical viewpoints about race relations) asked how many people were killed in the Holocaust. I told him it was six million Jews and about six million other people considered to be sub-human by the Nazis in the course of about five years. His response was, "That's all?"

"That's All?" He proceeded to try to defend this question by comparing it to the "African Holocaust" which he said he saw a movie on and had a book in his backpack about. Kathryn and I asked him to explain this. He couldn't, but continued to defend himself. I told him if he loaned me the book, I would read it before his next class on Wednesday, because I was genuinely interested in whatever he was talking about, but skeptical of whatever numbers might be involved in this. I assume he was referring to the hundreds of years of slavery endured by Africans, but that doesn't excuse "That's All?" By this point in his argument with us, the rest of the class become critical of him and realized he had nothing to back himself up with (and take note that Thurgood Marshall is 100% African-American). Later in the period, when Kathryn and I were explaining to the class that they needed to actually DO SOMETHING on their research paper assignment (which is going HORRIBLY for periods 3 and 5) to get results, he got argumentative again and tried to use his socioeconomic status as an excuse for failing the class.

I'm at Eboard right now, and I actually need to get back to paying attention. My bad. Wednesday I'm giving a presentation on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which I have yet to finish. Friday and most of next week, I'll be teaching to my own lesson plans. Woooo!

Also, I promise that my actual update about my first two weeks (pictures and all) will come soon.