Elie Wiesel's "Night" -- Blog 13

Elie Wiesel’s Night is a nonfiction memoir that follows Eliezer as he and his father try to survive the Holocaust. The story starts in Sighet, Transylvania and ends in the concentration camp of Buchenwald in Germany. On their way to Auschwitz, Eliezer is separated from his mother and sisters and never sees them again. His father survives almost until the Americans free the prisoners at Buchenwald, but sadly, is taken to the crematorium, having been sick with dysentery and unable to move. Night also tells the story of a young man losing his faith in God as he views and experiences the atrocity of man under God’s watchful eye. While watching a young boy be hanged, another man asks where God is, Eliezer hears the answer within him, “"Where He is? This is where--hanging here from this gallows..."

As a life-long doubter and, nearly as long, an atheist, I struggled with the question of how God could allow atrocities and, among of the things, killed what little faith I had over the years. I will never be able to understand how a man, woman, or child could rectify their faith in God after God sat by and did nothing while man killed, raped, pillaged, and burned man. If God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, evil cannot exist. Since evil does exist, one of these three properties is incorrect, either God does not see evil, cannot stop evil, or does not care for the sufferings of man. This philosophical counterargument for theism is known as “The Problem of Evil.”


As far as teaching this in the classroom, because of its ethical dilemma--the problem of evil--and its ties to World War II, a topic that is very prevalent in high school, this book would make an excellent addition to the curriculum. It could be taught in tandem to The Diary of Anne Frank or similar texts.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Casque of Amontillado, The Raven, and Lenore -- Blog 14

Edgar Allen Poe is one of the most favored poets in my household—William Ernest Henley takes the top place for me because of “Invictus”, but I digress—because, mostly, of my fiancée’s obsession with ravens, crows, and goth culture. My first experience will Poe was in Challenge Reading (think Honor’s English) in the sixth grade. We read Tell-Tale Heart and it terrified my little sixth-grade mind, but I loved every second of it. The dark, gritty nature of most of Poe’s writings inspired the tone of a number of my own short stories, especially those dealing with modern mythologies or superstitious ideas, e.g. angels, demons, ghost, magic, etc. For today’s reading, I revisited The Casque of Amontillado , as well as “The Raven” and “Lenore.” In The Casque of Amontillado , the narrator takes his friend, Fortunato, into the crypt to look for a cask of Amontillado wine. As they traverse the long crypt, the narrator beseeches Fortunato to return to the party, for a number of reasons, but ...
Read more

The Common Core Standards -- Blog 3

Prior to returning to school to studying teaching, I had only heard about Common Core Standards second- and third-hand for, at times, some very unreliable sources. As far as many of these sources—most of whom had not, did not, and would not work in education—were concerned, Common Core was the scourge of the earth coming to poison our water supply, burn our crops, and deliver a plague our houses. Much like Bubble-buddy from Spongebob never actually did any of those things, neither has or will Common Core Standards. While Common Core certain has its flaws, it is important to remember that nothing is perfect, and this applies especially to mandated by the government. One of the actual limitations of Common Core Standards is the rigidity of some of the standards themselves. For instance, CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.WHST.11-12.2.C states that: [Students must] [u]se varied transitions and sentence structures to link the major sections of the text, create cohesion, and clarify the relationships ...
Read more

CSU Reading and Writing Course Template -- Blog 4

Reading and writing are two of the fundamental aspects of studying English. In one way or another, they are connected to everything that we do as teachers and everything that our students do as, well, students. Beyond the scope of school, writing is a skill that will last them a lifetime, perhaps even longer depending on their will to use it. Now, it is quite unlikely that any of us will teach the next Shakespeare, but it is nevertheless important that our students understand how to read and write constructively. Luckily, California State University has some pointers to improve our teaching abilities. This CSU template discusses both reading and writing, how to both do and teach them more effectively, and discusses some ways of assessment. The template emphasizes an idea that it calls “reading rhetorically” which essentially means to the purpose of the text, the intentions of the author, and the effect of the audience. In order to achieve this, reading is broken into three parts: ...
Read more