Guidelines for Teaching

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10. Do not romanticize history to engage students’ interest

Guideline:

People who risked their lives to rescue victims of Nazi oppression provide useful, important, and compelling role models for students. However, given that only a small fraction of non-Jews under Nazi occupation helped to rescue Jews, an overemphasis on heroic tales in a unit on the Holocaust can result in an inaccurate and unbalanced account of the history. Similarly, in exposing students to the worst aspects of human nature as revealed in the history of the Holocaust, you run the risk of fostering cynicism in your students. Accuracy of fact along with a balanced perspective on the history must be priorities for any teacher.

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• Welcome and Introduction
• Before you start teaching
• 1. Define the term ‘Holocaust’
• 2. Contextualize the history you are teaching
• 3. Translate statistics into people
• 4. Strive for precision of language
• 5. Avoid simple answers to complex history
• 6. Just because it happened does not mean it was inevitable
• 7. Try to avoid stereotypical descriptions
• 8. Strive for balance in establishing whose perspective informs your study of the Holocaust
• 9. Make careful distinctions about sources of information
• 10. Do not romanticize history to engage students’ interest
• 11. Be sensitive to appropriate written and audiovisual content
• 12. Select appropriate learning activities
• 13. Reinforce the objectives of your lesson plan
• 14. Avoid comparisons of pain
• Topics to Teach
• Sample Lessons
• Conclusion

• Guest Lecture: Dr. William Meinecke Jr. discusses the topic "Nazi Ideology and Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution."

• Personal Testimony: Nesse Godin, a survivor of the Siauliai ghetto in Lithuania, the Stuffhof concentration camp, four labor camps, and a death march, shares her memories.