I begin each year of my teaching with one hope: to inspire my students with history. I want to help our students become the keepers of history in our community. I want them to not only learn the history, but to live it and work in it. Educators – and schools, communities, and parents –do many things to help our students become active learners of history. Among the things I’m trying this year is building a mini-museum inside my Grade 11 Genocide classroom at Waterdown District High School in Hamilton, Ontario.
Rob Flosman
Rob Flosman has been a teacher in the Hamilton Wentworth board for 17 years. He is married with three sons. He began teaching in the Czech Republic in 1993. Here he began “facing his own history” in the place where his family endured two murderous regimes. During the first, his grandparents were taken into Gestapo headquarters as they resisted their Nazi occupiers. Although they emerged heroes in 1945, they were again targeted in 1948. This time, they were forced to escape the communists after hiding Hubert Ripka, the Czech minister of foreign affairs, in their mill. After a year in a DP camp and a long voyage, they settled in Canada. Rob has embraced Facing History because of his family and tries to help young people get in touch with their own history.
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