* “Beyond Tolerance: Teaching English in a Post-9/11 Classroom” by Raquel Cook

from V.96 N.2 of English Journal

       Raquel Cook left the World Trade Center right before it was hit on 9/11, and because of this experience, she decided that she needed to become a teacher so she could help students “learn to live in a world community,” communicate, and question. She developed a World Literature class curriculum based around the idea of a trip around the world, each quarter a stop in another region. During each quarter, the students read both primary source accounts and novels about the region; some of the readings covered horrific topics like The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II while others were more spiritual such as the Hindu Vedas. I love the fact that this teacher used real accounts to help students learn about these historical events and foreign lands; too often, the “world literature” books are written by Westerners, or someone who had no necessarily spent their life in the country (a child of an immigrant, or someone who moved to the U.S. when they were two). Therefore, the books oftentimes still have a Western feel to them. I would love to choose books like this to teach in either an English class, or have a book or two read in a history class. The books brought up important topics on race, politics, spirituality, religion, and war as well as the horrors of war that the U.S. is oftentimes so distant from since we are isolated from much of the world geographically. I will say I was a bit disappointed though with their list for the Middle East and India because they only focused on spirituality rather than personal accounts, possibly because it was so close to 9/11.

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* “The Other Side of Terrorism and the Children of Afghanistan” by Ruth R. Caillouet

from V.96 N.2 of English Journal

         Ruth R. Caillouet’s son did a tour in Afghanistan following 9/11, and it inspired her to create a unit on Afghanistan for her students to learn more about the culture and what it means to be at war. She used a wide variety of media forms to get different points across. For example, she collected a number of picture books about how students in the U.S. handled 9/11 as well as books about people dealing with war in different time periods (the Holocaust, the Iraq war, etc). She also played songs, read poetry, and short stories. While I like that the author of this article used picture books for a quick lesson, I would not stop there for my own lesson; children’s books, while they can capture the greater lessons of why war isn’t good, cannot fully show the horrors of it due to the age level they are written for. They also tend to be too happy in the end, and war rarely has happy endings. I might start out with picture books to open up discussion along with poems and short stories then give students the option of taking one of those mediums and creating a fictional account of someone going through the war of their choosing, or one I assigned. It would be a good creative writing piece, and the students would need to think critically as well as be concise. I would want to add in a book for adults or young adults to go along with it, however, to capture the true horrors of war since the point of the lesson was “what it means to be at war” such as The Bookseller of Kabul by Ingrid Christophersen or A Long Way Home: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah.

 

* “Israeli Encounters: Books and Teens about Israel” by Linda R. Silver

from English Journal V.99 N.6

Linda R. Silvers was actually writing a response to an article Allen Webb wrote on teaching modern Middle Eastern literature, and how she felt that he had neglected to include anything from the Israeli perspective. She stressed her belief that both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be covered. While I agree that it is important for students to learn both sides of the war so that they can create an informed decision, too often all we hear in the West is the Israeli perspective since the Holocaust is pushed so heavily in the curriculum from a young age; students - and the rest of society - are even taught to call it the Holocaust, as if it were the only holocaust or genocide. Some of the books she listed seemed a bit overly bias toward the Israeli perspective, and almost pushed an agenda, possibly because she considered herself a specialist in Jewish literature and could be Jewish herself. However, one book stood out to me that I may want to use in a classroom (after I read it to check it out). The Bat-Chen Diaries by Bat-Chen Shahak is the story of a girl who is killed in a suicide bombing on her 14th birthday. Much like The Diary of Anne Frank, the book is a collection of her poems, letters, photos, and journal entries leading up to her death. It is written at a level that middle schoolers could understand, and the story is said to be relatable to them. Putting a story and a face to victims of war and terrorism is important in an age where people are becoming desensitized by the amount of death they see in the news daily. If I used this book, I would also want to use a book written from the Palestinian perspective to show that the war destroys both sides.