Blogging while observing class – here is another post in the series. The photo is a doorway in Stare Miasto, the old town in Warsaw. Not much remained from 1666 when this house was rebuilt in 1953.

The students are on break, one student mentions the long wait at the border over the weekend, coming back from Lviv to Warsaw. The war in the neighboring country feels suddenly very close.

I’ve grown accustomed to the physical space of the school. Oval tables with students bunched on the side furthest from the whiteboard, the teacher right next to the whiteboard with empty chairs to both his left and right. I know a number of these students now, I’ve interacted with more than half of them during my week-long visit here at their school. Many of them say hello when they see me, one tall boy waves at me through the glass wall. 

Like in other classes, there isn’t much time for rapport. Class gets underway directly and the students start taking notes on their tablets or computers as the teacher begins reviewing the lesson from the last class. I chuckle to myself a little. Not because the teacher is being funny, but because he’s explaining the incredible gray blur of history while dressed in a white shirt, black jeans, and white Adidas with black stripes on his feet. His coffee cup is white. There is a black screen behind him, a whiteboard next to that. Everything here is black-white. Everything in history is anything but. 

Apparently there was a Moroccan crisis in 1905. This is new territory for me, I admit to knowing little about Morocco. I need spellcheck to even write it correctly here. Three o’s, not a single a. I know Casablanca, the city, and Casablanca the movie, and the incredible destruction in the country by the recent earthquake there. I know that the Moroccans I’ve met speak Arabic and French.

We move to the subject of the day, Germany’s dependence on the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The teacher introduces (or perhaps reintroduces) me to the Schlieffen plan, named for Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen. The students are familiar with it, they have done the reading. The plan details the invasion of France, arriving in part through Belgium, the takeover swift, just a couple of weeks. The plan is preemptive, although one student feels differently. Now the discussion takes off, several students start debating at once.

These students are discussing military tactics. What-ifs. Manners in which to win a war, to take over a country.

One student has been trying to get the floor, but too subtly. Her hand is up, sort of, it’s next to her face, unmoving. I haven’t noticed students raising their hands in the other classes, they usually just join the conversation. I wonder if she is somehow feeling good by not being recognized by the teacher. When he does call on her, she declines to take the floor. Little things that might not mean a thing. Or might indicate something that should be addressed. Or I’m reading too much into it. She  leaves her hand next to her face, and a few minutes later the teacher calls on her. Now she states her opinion confidently. There really is no way teachers can know all that is going on with students, know what they need, know what they are struggling with. Something is going on there.

The discussion turns to a few influential figures who contributed to the notion that the expansion of the German Volk beyond Germany was justified. I learn of Max Weber, who preached liberal imperialism, justifying the German Weltpolitik, and Kurt Riezler, a journalist and an advisor in the foreign office, who also justified German colonization. Another German mentions needing more land in order to support growth, I missed the name. All of this smacks of Lebensraum, which I associate more with the Second World War. The notion was incubating, growing, setting the stage for atrocities of a scale we still cannot comprehend. 

I can’t help but think about the tours I took this weekend, here in Warsaw. The Jewish ghetto, the Polin Museum, the Umschlagplatz from which so many innocent people were removed from Warsaw and killed in Treblinka. We are learning of the past to prevent repeating our mistakes, yet CNN online, at this very moment (I switch from my document to a browser to check) leads with the story: 

Strikes cause ‘significant damage’ to Odesa port.

These students are studying history, yet they are also studying people, what they think and how they act right now. I don’t know if they realize yet that history is also today and tomorrow, despite the refugees from Ukraine who are their classmates, despite the daily news, despite a weekend spent waiting at a border of a country at war.