Published: June 23, 2008 05:06 pm      

WMS teacher to study

By Lisa Magers

cisd community services



A Wheat Middle School teacher’s passion in sharing “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and educating her students about the Holocaust, through which the young Jewish girl lived and died, has resulted in her selection for a five-week tour of central Europe.

Eighth-grade English teacher Sandra Runyon is one of 30 middle school and high school teachers selected for a National Endowment for the Humanities institute, which will focus on the “Multiple Perspectives on the Holocaust.”

Runyon will travel to the Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, to meet her fellow educators. Their journey will include several of central Europe’s capitals and two of the Holocaust’s most infamous concentration camps. They will spend the first two days at the U.S. Museum of the Holocaust. Their final stop will be at Auschwitz, the largest of Nazi Germany’s death camps.

“I thought I had no chance,” said Runyon, who was encouraged by her family and Wheat colleagues to apply for the summer institute. “When I was called with the news I had been accepted, I was overwhelmed — and was even more so when they told me they had received an enormous amount of applications.

“I know I will have so many more stories to share with my students through this experience. Plus, being with 29 other teachers with the same interest will also add to this learning opportunity. We’ve been e-mailing each other for the past couple of weeks. We’re all so excited.”

Runyon’s interest in the Holocaust began with her desire to know more about the subject, which is included in the eighth-grade curriculum.

She signed up for a workshop through the Museum of the Holocaust held at the University of Dallas

“Growing up in rural, central Texas, I knew little to nothing about the Holocaust and what I did remember was from a few paragraphs in my high school world history textbook,” she said.

During the workshop, Runyon met a Holocaust survivor, which she said “put a face to all she had learned.”

The time she spent at the workshop as a student changed her efforts as a teacher in presenting the history and the literature of the time.

“Through my newly discovered passion for more information, I made decisions to completely change my lessons plans, and the unit, in introducing the story of Anne Frank,” Runyon said.

Each spring, during the Holocaust unit, Runyon’s students create a hallway mural filled with their interpretations of the period and the life of Anne Frank. She has since added “Night,” author Elie Wiesel’s memoirs of his captivity at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, to the books her students read during their study of the Holocaust.

Eighth grader Marcos Cardenas said he was deeply affected by “Night,” recalling the Jewish author’s story of being moved from one death camp to the other.

“I learned that some people then didn’t have the right thoughts,” Cardenas said. “In ‘Night,’ he had to run more than 1,000 miles and was also put in cattle cars.”

“Mrs. Runyon was very creative in teaching us about the Holocaust. She is an awesome teacher. She’s very outgoing, just about the coolest person on earth. I think it’s amazing she is going on this trip. I would like to go and do something like that.”

Runyon expands her students’ literary explorations of the Holocaust by including the historical aspects of the period.

“Surprisingly, many of today’s students are largely unaware of the circumstances or events of the Holocaust,” Runyon said. “A recent survey showed 56 percent of teenagers didn’t know that six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust and 94 percent didn’t know that another five million noncombatants, non-Jews were murdered by Nazis.”

“Mrs. Runyon goes into a lot of detail about the Holocaust,” said eighth grader Michaela Starks. “She reads us stories about the survivors. It was a sad time, but it’s something we need to know about. We need to know about the past so we don’t repeat those things from the past.”

Starks’ comments reflect Runyon’s bottom line in teaching her students about the Holocaust. Her desire is to educate them about the past and make them aware of what is going on right now.

“I would not take away from the horrific events of World War II, but I do want to bring to my students’ attention the events of today, and more importantly, that genocide is still happening,” Runyon said.

She also hopes that through their reading and studying of the “true life” accounts of the survivors of the Holocaust, her students can relate to the importance of staying strong, and believing that better days are ahead.

“Many days students come in with problems burdening them to the point that getting an education that day is irrelevant, compared to what is going on in their lives,” Runyon said. “Some are even experiencing their own living hell. But if I can relate to these children the survival of one’s spirit through atrocities, then just maybe these children can embrace it also.

“With each passing year introducing the students to the Holocaust and the life of Anne Frank, I see excitement, a thirst for more information, questions after questions, and their ability to relate to the spirit that Anne showed through her words. Having this opportunity to experience first hand the stories told by experts, speakers and survivors, the latest literature, the museums, it will fulfill my dream to ‘show’ what the human spirit looks like after the Holocaust.

“It will be a privilege to understand and bring back these experiences and to share them with students.”