Who would have guessed!

Last week I attended an educator's conference sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and a local college. If nothing else I was at least hoping to "network" with other teachers. As the English department at my school, I find these types of occasions stimulating and refreshing. Despite the fact that much of the information was a repeat at this particular conference, overall it was even better than I expected. Who would have guessed that Nebraska has a Holocaust Educators Consortium? Not me. I met other teachers from the "more populated" areas of the state that are Fellows of the USHMM and have the same passion for teaching the Holocaust as I do. Also, a local college professor is planning to host a summer rural institute for the Nebraska Writing Project and she asked me to co-facilitate it. We are going to have a dual focus of place based education linked with Holocaust/humanitarian education. It's really exciting and I'm still floored that I didn't know about all of this before last week!

One of the greatest parts was meeting another Holocaust survivor...from Omaha. Her name is Bea Karp and her story, like all the others, was amazing and emotional. The Holocaust Educators Consortium and the Anti-Defamation League of Omaha are going to be in contact with me about having a local survivor and other experts on teaching Judaism visit our school. Even though this conference wasn't connected to our summer seminar, it definitely was the catalyst for these opportunities.

Holocaust Survivor, Bea Karp

This upcoming week will be exciting, too. Larry and I are going to begin the blog shared between our students. They'll be discussing Night and other issues such as identity. We (and our students) are really looking forward to this new adventure! We'll be sure to give you all the address so you can see the discussions.

I hope everyone is having a tremendous year! I can't wait to see many of you in San Antonio.

~Danielle