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Showing posts from June, 2020

I Know Why We Learn History!

I was tutoring a high schooler a while back, when we could still see each other in person, and he was reading Night by Elie Wiesel. If you aren't familiar with this book, it's a memoir of Wiesel's time at Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. It's obviously horrific and very hard to read.

The student had some learning differences and struggled a bit with many academic tasks, and Night was a challenge. The copy he had was printed with a small, old-fashioned font, and much of the writing is old-fashioned, so he was struggling. In addition, it's one of the hardest subjects possible to read about, and Wiesel does not hold back but tells the stark truth.

As we were slogging through this, my student was really doing his best, but needed help on most sentences, as well as a lot of the context of what was going on in the world in 1944. He kept asking me if this was really true, and I hated answering yes.

At one point, he was quiet for a long time, after a particula…