Does How We Teach WWII and the Holocaust in Schools Need to Change? A Teacher’s Perspective
Last month, I was wiping dry-erase marker smudges off my 10th grade history classroom whiteboard when the final bell blared. Most kids grabbed their backpacks and bolted for lunch, but Mia, the quiet kid who always sits in the back with a cat-stickered canvas tote, hung back by my desk, twisting her strap between her fingers. I waited, and after a minute she said, “We learned all the dates of the invasions and how many people died. But my great-grandma was a kid hiding in the Polish forest, and I don’t know how to ask her about it. Did we miss the part that’s still mine?”
I’ve been teaching high school history for 12 years. For the first 8 of those, I taught WWII and the Holocaust exactly the way I learned it: chronological, fact-heavy, focused on leaders and battles, with a 20-minute grainy documentary on concentration camps slotted in the last two days before the unit test. I can’t count how many times I watched kids zone out during that documentary, scrolling TikTok under their desks, because they’d already checked all the boxes they needed for the exam. The whole unit felt like a box to tick, honestly – we taught it, we tested it, we moved on.
The first crack in that routine came seven years ago, when Javi, a sophomore, stayed after class for a similar conversation. His grandma had fled Germany as a 7-year-old refugee, and he told me the unit made what happened to her feel like just a footnote to a list of battles. “It’s not like it ended for her,” he said. “She still can’t stand to see people yelling at groups of strangers on the street. But the book doesn’t talk about that.”
That conversation stuck with me, so I started messing with the unit, slowly. I didn’t rewrite the whole curriculum overnight – that’s impossible, with all the other content we have to cram into a semester. I just swapped one opening lecture day for a different assignment: I asked every kid to bring one small object from their family that tied to a story of leaving something behind, losing something, or starting over.
The first year I did it, half the kids thought it was a stupid assignment at first. But by the time we shared, the room was quiet. One kid brought a chipped porcelain teacup his great-aunt had carried in a suitcase from Vienna. Another brought a folded yellow star his grandpa’s uncle had hidden in a wall for 20 years before he dug it up after the war. Mia, the girl who stayed back last month, brought the crayon drawing her great-grandma made of an apple tree – the one she hid under for two days when she was 8, separated from her parents.
After that, we built the rest of the unit around those stories, before we dug into the dates of D-Day or the Nazi seizure of power. I still teach all the required facts – I don’t skip the death toll, I don’t soften how antisemitism was baked into every level of German society, and kids still have to match leaders to countries for the unit test. But now, those facts get tied to people first.
I hear from other teachers and parents all the time that changing how we teach this topic means we’re sacrificing “real facts” for feelings. But my test scores tell a different story: the average score on the unit’s factual multiple choice section is 8% higher now than it was 10 years ago, when I taught it the old way. Kids remember facts better when they care about why those facts matter.
What does this look like for parents, if your kid’s school still teaches this unit the old way? You don’t have to schedule a meeting with the principal or buy a whole set of new books. Just start with one simple question when they come home talking about WWII: “Does anyone in our family have a story that connects to this?” If you don’t have a family connection, ask, “What part of this stuck with you that wasn’t on your study guide?” It’s a 30-second question, no extra planning required, and it opens the door to talk about how history isn’t just something that happened 80 years ago. If you want to go a step further, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has free 10-minute survivor testimonies on its website you can watch over dinner – no long field trip needed.
For teachers who don’t have time to redo their entire curriculum? Just swap one 3-page textbook summary of the Holocaust for a 3-page personal survivor account, most are available for free online. It’s a small change that doesn’t throw off your whole semester pacing.
Last week, Mia emailed me a photo. She’s standing next to her great-grandma in an apple orchard an hour outside of town, under a gnarled old tree that looks just like the one in the crayon drawing. She wrote that after she did the project for my class, her great-grandma started talking more about her experience than she ever had before, and now they go to the orchard every fall to pick apples.
I still don’t do this perfectly. Some lessons fall flat. Last month, a sophomore told me he’d rather just memorize the dates and move on, because all the personal stories are too sad to think about. That’s okay. I don’t push him. The point isn’t to make every kid emotional about it every time. It’s just to leave space for the kids for whom it’s not just history. There’s still a lot I’m adjusting, a lot I’m learning. But ever since that day Mia stayed after class, I know we can’t keep teaching this like it’s a closed chapter that has nothing to do with the kids sitting in front of us right now. Some stories don’t end when the war does. We owe it to kids to let them see that.
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