Facing History and Myself: January 2012

I took facing History and Ourselves because of my older brother. He had taken numerous classes with Mr. Gallagher and absolutely loved them. He would tell me stories of the classes he took, and how Mr. Gallagher was by far the best teacher he has ever had. I was looking over the class options I could take my senior year and Facing History was open. After reading the description, it becomes something I was very interested in. I have always been interested in what happened in the Holocaust and what the facts were about an event that I couldn’t internalize or make a reality. From other people, the course description, and talks with teachers, didn’t prepare me for ANYTHING close to what I was about to witness. This course is about who you are as a person. It’s about finding out who you really are based off of certain situations and events. After all, a calm sea doesn’t make a skilled sailor. By taking this course, you will feel and discover first hand emotions that weren’t even possible to feel before. The course results in passionate fury over people we never knew or even knew anything about. I didn’t think it would be possible to feel so much emotion for people I never meet and lived…Murdered…over roughly 70 years ago. I was always someone who would defend anyone no matter the circumstances. This course didn’t change who I am as a person but made me unbelievable more aware of the importance of every single person who is born.

The course Facing History and Ourselves was an unbelievable course. It forced us to watch and absorb some of the worst cruelty there has ever been in history. By taking this course, we had to learn and form a certain mind set of the time period. I witness through fictional and nonfictional movies and documentary’s of people being burned alive, gassed, tortured, slaughter, and disgraced for no reason other than their religion. This course made me open my mind to the reality of how some people think. This course was easily the hardest class I have ever taken. I saw fellow classmates crying because of the horror and realizing there was nothing I could do to ease their pain from just watching it. I believe that this course is the best course taught at Westborough High School because it forces other students who lived in a completely cushioned life, guarded completely by their parents or money to view what life was like for these innocent people and how THEY could have possibly been one of the slaves in the concentration camps. I always felt that personally, I was always a person who would stand up for what I believed in no matter what the consequences or how I would look to others. This course made me as a person realize how important that is to do, and how every little action that we don’t take will always have a chance of turning out for the worst.

As a student I learned a lot. I usually don’t like taking history classes because I absolutely suck at remembering dates. This was by far the best, most educational and enjoyable class I have ever taken (especially for a history course). The date of the Holocaust, 1939-1945, will always be burned into my memory. As stupid as it sounds, history makes a lot more sense to me in a sense of chronological order. I feel like I understand how events happened now in a clearer, more memorable way that they happened. This course as a student helped me realize that bullying isn’t just a subject teachers talk about non-stop to be annoying repetitive pests. The way Mr. Gallagher explained bullying didn’t focus on a person we didn’t know and would have a hard time connecting too, he had us think of ourselves and what WE as people allow to happen. He asked the class, straight up, if we were bullies. As I looked around the class I knew some kids who bullied others and not a single person did anything about it. It made me realize every day after that class when I saw someone teasing or just in general being a jerk, to make a move. One day in gym class this freshman shoved this other kid. And the kid fell backward and just stood up and didn’t do anything. After watching some of the horrific movies in Facing History I did something. I stood up and looked at the kid who got shoved and said push him back. When he looked at me with the most fearful expression I said if you don’t push him back I am going to push you. Me being a imposing person to a small freshman boy, he took my advice and pushed the kid back who originally pushed him. That kid hasn’t messed with him since. After I looked at that kid and I said don’t ever let anyone push you around. EVER. Its sometimes hard to deal with the subjects and movies we watched in Facing History. They were events we knew about, everyone knows about and an event that nobody wants to look into because of how horrific it was. Being forced to watch every single movie, being fiction or not, was life changing. It made me as a student wonder how much other horrible things happened in history that we weren’t taught because it was considered a sensitive subject. Mr. Gallagher said that if anyone around me or if I ever hear someone say that the Holocaust didn’t happen to walk right up to them and say something. That is something that I will definitely be doing because of the fact that I will no longer be a bystander to any situation. ANY.

As a person it made me look within myself. The movie the pianist made me extremely sad. I hated watching this Jewish man who was a very passionate person, be forced into lies of being able to escape or get help. A movie that made me so mad was Uprising! I literally wanted to get into that movie and help them. I hated the Germans for everything that they did. That movie was a true inspiration because it showed people who knew that they were going to die, fight to the death for something that every single living creature should have. Freedom and Respect. Just looking at the living conditions was enough to make me sick to my stomach in every movie. I didn’t even need to see the torture after affects, or the living skeletons. It made the Holocaust an event that just made me so angry. 6^th period I have Theater Arts with a student who is also in Facing History and happens to be Jewish. She was personally and emotional tore apart by what she saw. After her explaining to me how and why it was such a hard thing to watch I hugged her and looked her in the eyes and said, I will never. Never. Let that happen again. And I won’t. As long as I’m alive I will never let something like the Holocaust or something even to the smallest degree of that happen ever again. This course really opened my mind to subjects and situations that I have never thought or been challenged to think about before. I am extremely thankful to Mr. Gallagher to literally did everything he could to make sure that this course was available at the Westborough High Schools. It is my hope that every school, everywhere will have this course as an option because everyone needs to be reminded of this horrific event and needs to understand that this can never be forgotten.

Facing History and Myself

Friday, January 13, 2012

Introduction

What Facing History Meant To Me

Works Cited