By Corey Harbaugh
It’s after 11 p.m., and in a little more than twelve hours I board a plane to head from my quiet rural Michigan town to New York City for the start of the 2009 Summer Seminar on Holocaust Education. The seminar starts Monday, July 6, but the New York City experience starts a few days early with my wife, a seventh grade E/LA teacher, who has never been to the Big Apple. We’re going to do the tourist thing for a couple of days, and get that out of my system. She’ll fly back home Sunday to our home and family, and I’ll hunker down for the beginning of the seminar the next day.
I am tired, but I have miles to go tonight before I sleep. I am bouyed from sinking down into bed by my general excitement for this experience, and the feeling that I have to prepare myself for the kind of mental, emotional, and spiritual presence the two weeks of the seminar are going to require from me. Preparation has already been a challenge, but also invigorating. The challenge has been the work conference organizers have asked us to over the past few weeks. I have read several books and shared my thoughts about and responses to the reading with the other participants in the seminar using an internet social network (Ning.com) created for us. And the rich discussion with the twenty-five or so other teachers taking this journey has been the invigorating part. We have already formed a nice community of professional learners, and aside from Phip I haven’t seen any of them in more than two dimensions yet. It has all been digital; still, a great community is forming.
The reading has been gut-wrenching, even after teaching and reading books on the Holocaust myself for years, watching films, and going to places as beautiful and evocative as the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. (twice). Every new encounter with the material rips through the callouses in my mind where I store thoughts about the Holocaust, and about genocide in general. The book The World Must Know is an amazing retelling of the history of the Holocaust, though written with bias, and without apology for that bias. The author tells readers in the introduction that the book grieves the loss of millions of innocent lives and tells the brutal facts without watering them down with the comfort of historical or academic distance: this still matters, the book pounds home on every page.
This seminar is why I went into teaching so many years ago; this is why I still think teaching is a noble profession, even fifteen years in to it; this is why I still think of my daily work as a ”calling”, in the true sense of the word. I wanted to live the teacher’s life when I was called into it because I thought teachers were the ones doing the work that might just change the world. The Summer Seminar on Holocaust Education is one of the experiences that comes along, maybe once or twice in a career, that will challenge me and equip me and empower me to do the work I was called to do. This seminar will impact my teaching in ways I can only predict at this point in time; somehow I know on the other side of this experience, I will return to work in the fall with a clearer sense of my responsibility to witness the Holocaust (and genocide) with my students, and stand guard against the smaller and larger brutalities that happen under my watch in my classroom, locally, and everywhere. Being open to the experience, preparing myself, packing up my mind, is my first duty in that chain of events that starts now in just a little less than twelve hours.
