Happy 2016 and welcome back! I hope everyone had a fun and relaxing winter break!
Friday was a powerful day for the 8th grade students as 86 year old Holocaust survivor Miriam Greenstein mesmerized the students with her life story. Mrs. Greenstein survived the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen. At the end of the war, she found herself alone in a hospital in Sweden with only one surviving relative, an uncle living in Portland, OR. She was 15 years old and weighed 55lbs.
Mrs. Greenstein was lucky to be on the first ship out of Europe and she has led a full and complete life in Portland ever since. She graduated from Grant High School at the age of 18, married, and had four daughters. She shares her experiences as a way to combat the hatred and racism in the world. Her decision to speak out about the Holocaust came later in her life following the murder of Mulugeta Seraw, a young Ethiopian man killed in Portland by Neo-Nazis in 1988. She told the students that she was so outraged she was wondering where to turn and who to call. Then she realized that she needed to take action against hatred herself, rather than look to others. Since then, she has been part of the speakers bureau at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education.
I hope your student shared this experience with you this weekend. If not, please ask about it. You could have heard a pin drop while she was speaking, and after two hours, they were hardly fidgeting. All the teachers were proud of their attention and behavior. I hope they carry her story and its lessons with them into adulthood.
As a thank you to Mrs. Greenstein, I thought it would be nice if we collected $1 to $2 from each student to donate in her honor to the Oregon Holocaust Memorial Endowment Fund for the upkeep of the Memorial in Washington Park. Mrs. Greenstein was instrumental in the creation of the memorial, and she was one of the survivors who traveled back to Poland to collect ashes and soil from six different concentration camps.
On a different note, this week we are working on "Six-Word Memoirs (http://www.sixwordmemoirs.com/schools/). Legend has it that when Ernest Hemingway was challenged to write a six-word story, he came up with, "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn." It is amazing how much potential meaning six words can convey. Students came up with a wide variety of possible backstories for these six words.
Crafting Six-Word Memoirs forces us to focus on purposeful and precise writing. They also allow us to examine the power of particular words and the importance of punctuation. One comma, moved to a different part of the sentence, can change the entire meaning. And, most importantly, it lets students share a story from their own life in a creative and meaningful way.
Next week, we will start To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. It is one of my all-time favorite novels to teach, and I am excited to share it with my classes. We will examine life in the Jim Crow-era South, prejudice and racism, judgment and justice, and many other important themes. Students will have short, nightly reading assignments most nights of the week during this unit.
As always, feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns,
Leah Hermes
lhermes@pps.net
