The winter that will not die...

I have been trying to write this blog every two weeks but I got lost in the snow somewhere at the end of January. The last month and a half have seemed to drag by while still managing to be an avalanche of lesson planning and grading (and snow, I might add).   Exam week(s) just never seemed to end and then the new marking period was starting before midterm essays were even in the grade book.  I thought we were finally in a good pattern--my classes had been uninterrupted for several days--and now more chaos next week with a HSPA schedule that shuts down learning for 3 days, and more possible snow.

That said, I have been very excited about what is happening in my classroom. My students are wonderful this year and most days, we get into the routine of learning right off the bat.  In my ELL class, we have been studying the Holocaust and working our way thru parts of Schindler's List. It is a long movie so we cannot watch all of it but I always make some time for it in my ELL and Academic classes because I think it is so important.  We can talk about the Holocaust and even read accounts, but seeing tears in the eyes of some of my students as they watch parts of the movie brings the learning to another level for them. It also makes them really contemplate why countries like the US did not do more to help the Jewish people or stop the Holocaust.  Will the world allow it to happen again? Have we already?  As you can imagine, it leads to wonderful writing and discussions.

In Academic and AP history, we have finished up World War II.  World War II is a topic that I could spend months on because there are just so many interesting stories and events, particularly to show how much that war changed the US and the world forever. Hopefully, after a month of studying it, the students have a sense of the sacrifice that Americans made and the horrors that many around the globe lived through. Next up is my favorite unit of the year--the Cold War! I love the intrigue and espionage of the "chess match", especially now since so many new documents have been released so that historiography of the period is still changing.

I am looking forward to getting some full weeks in a row to get back to our routines in the classroom. At this point, I am also looking forward to days over 40 degrees!