My wife called me Sunday evening on her way into town to let me know that she had a blowout on her tire and could I please come and fix it?
So I did, in the wind, and rain, on a slope, in the dirt, and yes, a few curse words did fly.
Like how in the heck do you get the spare un-freed from the cable that drops the tire when it is all rusted and corroded? Grrrr.
Not her fault. It was all done in short order and everyone was safe and sound, aside from some new back spasms on my part.. I even let her take Big Red- my sacrosanct Chevy plow truck- to drive to work while the car was in the shop.
So when she dropped me off at school this morning, and then called me 15 minutes later at 7:30 from her school (she’s a teacher too), I immediately assumed she had somehow crashed or otherwise hurt Big Red! I cringed when I picked up the phone….
A soft voice, calm. “Hello, honey, how are you?”
Yep, the same line I got when she called to inform me that my Sunday night was about to get dirty. Nooooooooooooooooooooo……..
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Well, she was calling to say that my mug was on the front page of the local newspaper, very prominently featured, in an article about what my year-long WWII/Holocaust course has come to be. She was proud of me, and she wanted me to know it. But frankly, none of it could have happened with out her support.
Ever, in a million years. So, thank you honey for not wrecking Big Red, and thank you for being there every step of this incredible journey.
And it couldn’t have happened without supportive administrators, teachers and just everyone in the school community , but especially these kids and their parents who supported me by believing in the power of teaching, and learning. We open new doors fearlessly, even though that new room we enter together has a dozen new doors to open. And that is what is exciting- the taking of the risks together- the kids who were terrified, some of them, at the outset, to make contact with a member of the WW2 generation, but who forged bonds, built bridges, and created relationships to link themselves to their own history as Americans in the most meaningful way possible.
To share their time, to sit and talk, and to then to process and weave a new story into the fabric of our national history. Listening, studying, writing, and presenting.These kids created history! And what is the highest form of learning?Creating new knowledge. {School reviewers, please take note!}
So I am proud of them more than of this new recognition, this milestone of sorts. I do thank the Glens Falls Post-Star {article below} and the reporter Michael Goot for his interest. And I hope that it somehow serves to inspire new teachers and old, as we wonder about that element that sometimes seems to be missing from our harried workdays, of the real meaning of teaching.
A former administrator hit it on the head for me, in a passing comment from my younger days that has always stayed with me:
In the end, it’s about creating human beings.
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NBC crew documents Holocaust teachings in Hudson Falls
Glens Falls Post Star, May 6, 2014.
HUDSON FALLS –The Hudson Falls High School students in Matt Rozell’s Living History class got to hear a firsthand perspective on the liberation of a concentration camp — nearly 69 years to the day when that event happened.
The class watched a clip of an interview with 88-year-old Rich Marowitz of Albany, a member of the U.S. Army’s Rainbow Division who helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp in on April 29, 1945.
Marowitz recounts going to Adolf Hitler’s apartment in Munich the following day and taking the dictator’s top hat.
Senior Mackenna Wood, 17, said it was amazing to hear Marowitz’s story.
“It gives us a whole other dimension. When you read it in a book, it’s all facts and impersonal,” she said. “When you hear from someone that was actually there, it makes it so much more real. It makes so much easier to relate. I think it’s important to learn from our past.”
Rozell has been interested in World War II and the Holocaust for many years.
Over the years, he has had concentration camp survivors and their liberators meet through giving talks to his class on World War II and the Holocaust.
This year, his teachings on the Holocaust caught the attention of NBC Learn, which is a subscription service of NBC News that provides educational multimedia content for schools.
A crew came to the school on April 28 to film Rozell doing a lesson about the Holocaust.
Rozell’s Holocaust history project began in 2007, when he invited four men who on April 13, 1945 were part of a tank battalion investigating an abandoned train near Magedburg, Germany. They found about 2,500 Jews crammed in boxcars en route to a concentration camp. [clarification: one liberator, Red Walsh, and 3 survivors]
Students taped their testimonials and put them on the website www.teachinghistorymatters.com. More videos get added every year.
“For the past seven or eight years, it’s kind of taken on a life of its own almost,” he said. “We’ve heard from about 250 people who were on the train all across the world,” he said.
NBC Learn segment producer Norman Cohen explained that he is producing a 3- to 4-minute-long video in partnership with Pearson Education about the liberation of concentration camps. The video is part of NBC Learn’s video “field trips,” where cameras follow students as they meet someone who has witnessed history.
While doing an Internet search, Cohen found an oral history that Rozell had done with Marowitz, and Cohen thought it would be nice to have his students interview Marowitz.
However, since Marowitz couldn’t make the trip to Hudson Falls for health reasons, Cohen interviewed him at the New York Military Museum in Saratoga Springs.
Rozell showed excerpts of the interview in his class and lectured on the subject.
The NBC Learn crew filmed the students’ reaction to the interview. The piece will be edited and uploaded next month, according to Cohen.
The class watched the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where bodies were being dragged around.
Tim Havens Jr., 17, said watching footage from that area is powerful.
“It was graphic. We all had to decompress after the lesson,” he said. [Teacher’s note: PBS Frontline’s “Memories of the Camps”. My students are seniors in high school in studying the events in full context. As I have always promoted, if graphic materials are to be used, it must be with judiciousness and sensitivity. If you are an educator, DO NOT use these materials casually.]
It is important to bring those stories to light, according to Havens.
“There are people that deny the Holocaust,” he said.
Student Matt Connolly’s grandfather, Carrol Walsh, was one of people who helped free the prisoners on the train.
“My grandfather didn’t think of (himself) as a liberator. He never wanted to be talked about as a liberator,” he said.
The class covers the build-up to World War II in the first semester and the Holocaust during the second half of the year. Students are required to record their own interview of a person connected to World War II for the mid-term.
Cheyenne Bishop, 17, interviewed a veteran who was a member of the Signal Corps, which was a noncombat team in charged with maintaining communications between Allied forces. This gave her a new perspective on the war.
“You don’t learn about the behind-the-scenes people,” she said.
Bishop, who is planning to study history in college, said it is important to record these stories because World War II veterans are dying off and, soon, this will be the only way to access their stories.
The stories is what she likes about studying history.
“It’s almost like a huge mystery and that’s what this is, the greatest crime in the history of the world,” she asked.
“Why did it occur and what can we do to stop it in the future?” she added.
Rozell said he enjoyed having the cameras in the classroom.
“It was a good experience for my kids to kind of demonstrate what they learned and why study of this particular segment of history is something that shouldn’t be forgotten,” he said.
Teaching History Matters 