Essential Questions

How, exactly, did I manage to show my sophomores Hotel Rwanda in my English class today? Good question . . . my head is still reeling from three hours of pausing and explaining. Explanations that don't seem to roll off my tongue in a confident cadence. Each day we are required to have an essential question on the white board in our rooms. The question must address a component in the standard course of study and should be answered by the end of class. I left it blank today. I was also observed today. What can I define as essential? When it comes to one million slaughtered lives what constitutes an essential question? My questions, as a white female living in the free world, could never parallel the same vein in which this atrocity occurred. The only freedom I felt today was my ability to teach; an ability that often gets overlooked by the lobbyist scandals and bipartisanism, which seems to trickle down to the coffee we drink and the cars that we drive. Essential factors in our daily routine that could signify the difference between one choice finger or all five. (Vermont has 3 Starbucks in the entire state . . . ) I guess I should bring you all to the dawning of this project before I lose you.
One of the required texts for 10th grade North Carolinians is Elie Wiesel's memoir of the Holocaust, Night. Having come down from a particularly dry unit of Greek drama, I decided to jump start my students with the chilling memoir while I still had them in my good graces. I was excited for this unit, particularly becuase I was going to take a chance and expand the Holocaust to the present day massacres in Darfur. My sister just spent her summer working at a refugee camp in Kenya and told the most haunting stories of people who have escaped with little more than their souls, many of them from Rwanda and Somalia. My hope was to have her come to my classes and tell her story; I wanted my students to comprehend genocide as it is happening presently, not simply through a memoir that is six decades before their time. Since George Clooney is not available to come to Siler City, and law school is a total BITCH, I had to settle for my mediocre knowledge and Google skills. Darfur was not on their radar. Neither was Rwanda or Somalia . . . unless you mention Black Hawk Down. Thus, we enter my unit on genocide. My essential question on the first day of study was, How can literature combat violence in the world? Idealistic? Definitely. Do we have time to be realistic? Absolutely not. If bumper stickers and coffee cups are our only tools for identification, who's really the idealist? I sent the permission slips home to their parents and each one was signed. I gave them an overhead preojected timeline from Belgian colonialism through April 6, 1994 and the rest is history, so cliche. These are some of the questions posed to me today: "Is my skin too light to be a Hutu?" "Is my nose narrow enough?" "What does the UN do if they don't make peace?" "Why didn't the Tutsis fight back?" "What were your children if you were a Hutu and your wife was a Tutsi?" "Was that President Clinton on the news?" "Can that happen to us?" "Is there genocide really taking place in Darfur?" "How did this happen after they pleaded for help?" "Is it better to be a nigger or an African?"
Write down your answers to these questions and feel free to share them with the people you work with, carpool with, buy coffee from and your loved ones. My essential question tomorrow will be: What is your personal responsibility to help stop these daily atrocities? Will you be realistic or idealistic?