"We are the champions, my friends." ~queen

CONGRATS TO THE INDIANAPOLIS COLTS! I was so happy to see them win; they deserved it. It was a good Super Bowl this year. The halftime show was amazing. Seriously, Prince was on fire. Great performance, great production. It was by far the best halftime show since U2. The commercials weren't great overall, but the football and the halftime show more than made up for that. Budweiser had the best commercials. I thought the "Rock, paper, scissors" one that aired at the very beginning was hilarious.

Today, instead of teaching, I got to go to an all-day workshop at the Virginia Holocaust Museum with my cooperating teacher. It was an incredibly worthwhile and eye-opening experience. We received copies of the book Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust and talked about how to teach it to students. There were so many teenagers like Anne Frank who kept diaries, and this author compiled a collection of them so that more voices could be heard. We met with Holocaust survivors. I got to sit next to a man who survived five different concentration camps and listen to him talk about his experience. He told me that it isn't easy to think about and talk about what happened to him and his family, but he knows that he has to talk about it so that people will know what will happen if we stand aside and don't do anything to fight genocide. It is still happening today. We went beyond the Holocaust and discussed more recent genocides. Someone from the Sudan spoke to us about Darfur.
We watched a 60 Minutes special in which a reporter discovered that North Korea is using The Diary of Anne Frank in schools to compare America to the Nazis and George W. Bush to Hitler. It was really, really scary. The kids were completely brainwashed into thinking that all Americans are Nazis. The message they got from The Diary of Anne Frank is that America needs to be completely destroyed. I'm totally serious. One student's response was, "”After reading this book, I had a hatred for the American imperialists." Another said, "As long as the warmonger Bush and the Nazi Americans live, who are worse than Hitler's fascists, world peace will be impossible to achieve.” The rest of the students expressed similar viewpoints. They saw Anne Frank as weak for hiding. Here's an article on it. I could not believe it.
The whole program was an eye-opening experience. I was very glad to have the opportunity to go, and I hope I can use some of the material in my future classes.