After a mini-unit on Walt Whitman and American ideals, my honors US literature students were given a project to recreate one of Whitman’s poems capturing the cultural diversity of their own school. As I read their rough drafts, tears welled up in my eyes. One of my Korean students had used wondrous imagery of an eagle soaring on the winds of the East and West—the eagle is our mascot and the directional words represent the varied cultures present in our student body. Another compared the diversity present within the confines of the school to a symphony of instruments warming up and finding their tune together. Yet another used Whitman’s “singing” example to talk about how his voice is heard amongst the “chorus” of students—individually beautiful, but more resonant when put with the other voices. Their masterful work clearly clouded my common sense, for when I read the title “Olleh” on one of the poems, I questioned my Korean student as to what it meant. His response: “It’s ‘hello’ spelled backwards.” Ah, yes.
My grade 10 students are currently reading Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place. In order to prepare them for the Holocaust unit, we spent a great deal of time learning about Elie Wiesel and his account of his experience in the concentration camps. In honor of the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, my students created posters for the day of remembrance. Their creativity and ability to visually represent the gravity of the situation highly impressed me. Here are two examples of their work:
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