Thursday, October 4, 2012

Night Final Blog Response

Write a 3-paragraph blog response in the format of “I said...     He said...    Now, I say...”

Paragraph 1, write a reflection that explains your feelings about the TodaysMeet incident from last Friday, September 28.  Quote your own journal entry (attached to these instructions) that support your description of your thoughts and feelings from last week.

Paragraph 2, write a reflection that explains the most relevant point(s) that Elie Wiesel makes in his book Night and Nobel Prize Speech.  Provide quotes that support your description of Wiesel’s theme and thesis.

Paragraph 3, write a reflection that synthesizes the ideas from  your journal-writing Monday and Wiesel’s ideas from Night and his Nobel Speech.  This synthesis should demonstrate how your own thoughts and feelings interact with your understanding of Wiesel’s writing to result in a new perspective.  

Your Monday journal might completely agree with Wiesel’s thoughts, or you might completely reject any connection between the TodaysMeet issue and Night.  Either of those responses - and any that fall within the continuum they form - is by definition a reaction to your reading of Night.  If you are more logically or mathematically oriented, think of the instructions this way:

            My ideas from Friday + Wiesel’s ideas = My ideas now

Paragraph 3 should describe this equation.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

“The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human” - Adolf Hitler ( epigraph in Maus)

This sickens me and makes me think of the lie of race in our world. The Jewish people simply had a different culture and ethnicity from the Germans. Hitler’s language dehumanized the Jews  to a point that mistreatment, torture and extermination were not questioned by the masses.  I know we are not living in the midst of the Holocaust, but racism, homophobia, and hateful speech like this  are alive and thriving at EHS; I heard some of those voices online last Friday. I am still horrified by the ugliness and bullying that went virtually unchecked.  I vow to make sure that when I witness hateful speech, I will speak out.