Introduction

In the past three years of high school, I had never really enjoyed or liked my history classes. American History and World History were never interesting to me and wasn’t something I looked forward to everyday. So, as a junior when I was picking my classes for senior year, I was shocked that I ended up signing up for another history class for what should be the best year of our high school experience. I was completely persuaded by friends and others to sign up for the class because of its good reputation. I heard it was very good and worthwhile so I was hoping that I wouldn’t be let down. First semester of senior year I found myself getting more interested and excited to start taking Facing History and Ourselves because of the good things I had been hearing about it. Finally, when second semester came around I started the course. This class teaches you about history and makes you look deeper into the events of the Holocaust along with looking deeper into yourself. There are many things that I learned that I wasn’t aware of before taking this course. I also learned more about myself as I continued to attend and look forward to my period three class every day. There were all kinds of important lessons including discussions, readings, films, and lectures. During some classes, we were broken up into groups and shared our thoughts and feelings about certain films or readings that we went over as a class. Pretty much every time we were broken into groups, we were with new classmates which gave us new ideas and different perspectives. The course and overall lesson plans are set up very well and you can learn all of this stuff by taking Facing History and Ourselves for a semester.