Introduction

Introduction

My name is Chris Arsenis, and I am a senior at Westborough High School. I participate in several activities in and out of school such as Boy Scouts, working in the Easy Tech department at Staples, and being an active member in the Facing History and Ourselves club. I took this course due to the positive reviews from older friends and siblings who all advocated for taking the class in order to help figure out what kind of person you are. I also heard that the teacher of the course, Mr. Gallagher, was very understanding and passionate about the class, which made it seem even more interesting and enlightening to take as a class.  I believe that the Facing History Course’s main goal is to help each individual student find their own unique identity and to take action in what they believe in. At the beginning of the course, we started off by reading short children’s stories such as “Little Boxes” and “The Bear that Wasn’t”. These simple children stories helped get the basic morals of the class across to the students. For example, in “The Bear that Wasn’t”, the bear was easily manipulated by the environment around him and eventually lost his self-identity. After reading these stories, we would always end each class in a discussion regarding how the characters in the story could have made different decisions, and how the story relates to our society today. The course than transitioned to a more historic approach by quickly going through some American history about the Civil Rights movement and the discrimination of African Americans in the United States. All of these sub unites were all building up to the Holocaust, which was the main focus of the course. Facing History was able to bring the Holocaust to life by showing many documentaries, scrapbooks, and films which showed this horrific era in our history in many different perspectives.