In Response to: Night

Ellie Wiesel's Night is a moving memoir from first-hand experience in World War II concentration camps. I first crossed paths with this text in winter of 2011. It was the middle of my freshman year of high school with the English teacher who inspired me to be an English teacher. This wasn't my favorite text we read that year.. I don't think I had come to appreciate memoir as a genre yet, and historical texts were still a little boring to me, but I found this text profound nonetheless. Wiesel writes in a way that makes you ponder life- even as a barely fifteen-year-old. The biggest takeaway I had from this unit was the lesson that paired with the chapter that begins by describing traveling in the cattle car. My teacher had used painters tape to tape a rectangle on the floor of his classroom, and all of the desks were pushed to the perimeter of the room. As we read the chapter, the whole class was to squeeze within that taped rectangle to simulate the crammed conditions on the train. This really hit home for me. We felt a glimpse into the discomfort that Wiesel describes. However, I'm not sure if I'd use this idea in my own classroom because in another class period taught by that teacher, a girl passed out from that simulation, so I guess, proceed with caution.

This time around, I felt I was able to better appreciate the gravity of the text as well as the beauty with which Wiesel writes. Within the context of our class, I continued to think about the concept of teaching and discussing empathy in the classroom, and this book allows for such a great opportunity to do that. It's important to recognize different instances where empathy is necessary, and Night offers a great historical context of its power.