Introduction

Facing History and Ourselves is awesome at Westborough High School. The course is a semester long (I wish it was the entire year) and available to juniors and seniors. The main focus about this course is finding out, who are you? Do you start the trouble? Do you stand by and watch as things evolve? or do you do something about it, voice your opinion? In class we usually watch movies on situations likes this and about the Nazis and Holocaust, one of the greatest inhumanities of all time. On occasion we tend to just have class discussion, for example on the Penn State scandal or other current events. What makes the course even better is we are free to say what we want when we want to, which is a huge freedom in class and you won’t be judged on what you say. The course is well designed and as the semester comes to a close I feel like my outlook on things has changed, in a good way.
I chose to take this course initially because I heard it was fun, Mr. Gallagher was a great teacher, and there were lots of movies. I’m not going to lie, I thought it was a blow off class, but it became something else. I noticed I used to be a shy guy with little to say and stood on the sideline but now I am not afraid to voice my opinion. The class is a life changer and by all means I recommend everyone to take it.

Making a Difference Essay

Facing History and Ourselves may have been the greatest class I have ever taken in my entire life. It definitely affected me as a person and to my surprise, as a student as well. The class opened a whole new way of looking at life and how to approach a situation. The most I took out of that class was that I would no longer be a bystander or a problem starter both as a student and as a person. I’m going to say what I’m going to say and not being afraid to say it. As a student I’ve paid more attention to the conversations around school. I hadn’t really noticed it before till I took this class but other students including my friends were speaking of such profanity and negative comments and gestures toward others. I was appalled, and especially how I would actually catch myself in the act. After the course I no longer tolerate these undesirable actions and I will say something to the person. There is no reason to project anti-semetic, racial, or hateful comments in general. I slowly had started changing my ways because I too used to be a person of bad language and this course has taught me through experiments and various historical accounts that it’s not necessary and you become the perpetrator not the rescuer.

                As a human being, my attitude toward life and the way I speak has changed the way I speak and act. I no longer, as the course has taught me, require to make an argument or my point across by saying anything hurtful because it makes no sense to hurt the other person in the process and I no longer will tolerate anyone getting harassed anywhere, anytime to such comments. I would not want to be in the position of taking the anger or giving it for that matter. It reminds me a lot of the third grade class that participated in the blue eyes, brown eyes exercise. For a week a teacher assigned kids a social status to the color of eyes that they had and by the end of the week the lower social kids were getting picked on and harassed and looked down upon. After the exercise concluded the children hated the experience on both ends. This goes to show, no matter what end of the aggression you are it is terribly agonizing and hurtful to your personality and well-being. Facing History is that power day in and day and that is what makes it so good because we should all have the same status no one above or below the other.    

Another very important aspect to the course that I learned was that the Nazis were awful people and what they did to the Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, etc. was horrid. Adolf Hitler was a mad man who was insane with power and decided to blame World War I’s loss on the Jewish people. We watched many movies about the Nazis and they were very disturbing and bone chillingly accurate as to how the concentration camps operated. It opened my eyes to the horrors of World War II, the Nazis were ruthless and the Jews didn’t deserve it. My favorite representation to the Nazi unit was the movie Uprising which portrays Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, fighting back against the German army and actually a few escaping. It was the perfect movie because it shows the Germans were weak, they couldn’t even beat a ragtag group of Jewish people in a contained area. There will, spirit, and determination was astounding and brought to me a realization to present day. No matter who you are Black, White, Latino, Asian, or European you could fight back whoever you wanted to because if you had the essence to stand up to your perpetrator you could. Not to stoop to their level but prevent further damage and save yourself, no one deserves punishment for being who they are.   

In the course we were shown an album of pictures from SS officers from the Auschwitz-Birkneau concentration camp. There was one picture that was really disturbing to me and that was a picture of SS soldiers and ladies, laughing and smiling. It brought true rage into me and made me feel sick. I couldn’t believe someone could be happy with themselves knowing that millions of people were getting burned, and chemically killed by their hands. It upset me because these Nazis were blind at what they were doing; it just made me sick that you could be happy at a place like that. I wanted to rip up that picture in class but it truly was a good photograph of the ties and showed the actual thought of these perpetrators.

Another one of my more favorite discussions in class was the Milgram experiment/movie. The movie showed us of an experiment of “scientists” would give a test to a subject to memorize and then the teacher would give him the test. However if the subject got something wrong the teacher would administer a shock of increasing value for each wrong answer. In fact, it was the teacher who was the subject because the experiment was to test the will of a person to give lethal shocks to a person. It was amazing what people would do was unbelievable; because under the guidance of “scientists” they would keep on going even while the “subject” was actually a recording, which made noises of pain. The experiment was interesting because people would keep on doing it and threaten to stop but then not. After this course it taught me that you need to stop because shocking someone is wrong even if you get money for doing it.

Facing History and Ourselves was an amazing class; I would take it again if I could. Through Mr. Gallagher I have changed as a student and a person and learned a lot from the movies of the Jewish people against the Nazis and the various experiments/exercises. I am truly grateful for the class because it has made me a more conscious and nice person.

Work Cited

Milgram Experiment. Google Images.Image. 1/13/12
Uprising Movie. Google IMages. Image. 1/13/12
Auschwitz Album. Google Images. Image. 1/13/12
Jane Elliot's Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes. Google Images. Image. 1/13/12
Auschwitz Entrance. Google Images. Image. 1/13/12