By, Steve Glazer
At Crossroads Academy, the English 8 program follows in the footsteps of the History 8 program. After the students study the rise of Nazi Germany and World War II in History 8, they read Elie Wiesel’s Night in English 8. To come to a deeper understanding of Wiesel’s memoir, they read excerpts from three other texts: Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Hannah Arendt’s “Banality of Evil,” and Prof. Gregory Stanton’s “Ten Stages of Genocide.” Maus allows the students to grasp the scale of Auschwitz/Birkenau through drawings rather than photographs; Arendt’s philosophical work invites them to reflect on human behavior; Prof. Stanton’s framework challenges them to see within the specifics of Elie’s experience the broader steps of genocide. Taken together, four genres (memoir, graphic text, philosophical essay, and academic paper) allow us to nest history in literature and align our traditions of Core Knowledge and Core Virtues.
Because of the darkness of the material, we read Wiesel’s words during the light of day. Because his text is concise, we slow down the reading process to remember the details. As the unit concludes, students collaborate to create a “Graphic Response to Elie Wiesel’s Night.” This response merges Wiesel’s words with Spiegelman’s from. This year, the eighth-grade students were mentored by the award-winning New Hampshire comics educator Marek Bennett. In early February, our “Graphic Response to Elie Wiesel’s Night” was featured in The Voice, the digital magazine of the Young Writers Project.
