A Lesson On The Wall

And then I thought about the students in my high school history classes, and I realized that the powerful scenes I was watching on television gave me an incredible opportunity to make my subject come alive. The dancing on the wall marked the end of an era and the beginning of a revolutionary new one, with a free Eastern Europe and the possibility for a lasting peace. I felt certain that I could rouse the interest of even my most apathetic students. Surely, they too would be gripped by the human drama unfolding around them. As witnesses to one of the most significant geopolitical shifts of the postwar world, they could not help but be curious about the events that led up to it.

Yet, because my students, like most teenagers, have never had to grapple with the world at large, I also knew I had to try to find ways to bring some of that outside world into their own.

I started my lesson by putting a picture of an obviously sad girl on the overhead projector and asking the students what they thought might be wrong with her. She had a fight with her boyfriend or parents, guessed one. Another thought the girl had flunked a test. Next, I showed a picture of a young man looking sad and somewhat perplexed. Again, I asked the students to guess his problem. I got similar responses. By this time, they were quite curious about what I was doing. I put...