DIANE MAKAR MURPHY Holocaust education earns teacher a spirit award

Jesse McClain is barely 50 years old -- far too young to be a Holocaust survivor. Nor is the Boardman Center Middle School teacher Jewish. Yet McClain will be given the Triumphant Spirit Award Monday evening by the Jewish Community Relations Council.
Previous recipients have been Holocaust survivors, and McClain is embarrassed as well as honored to receive it. "I really don't deserve to be sharing a stage with them. They've been through so much and shown such courage," he said.
Ideals of award
Despite McClain's reservations, the council has found he has advanced the ideals of the award, given for "inspirational and significant contributions to Holocaust awareness and education ..."
As a language arts instructor, McClain leads his pupils through a Holocaust unit, with the goal of teaching not only history, but the relevance of history's lessons, and has done so for the past 20 years.
Tall and lanky with a neatly trimmed goatee, and wearing a red- and blue-striped tie bordered by a pair of suspenders this particular day, McClain is nearly as enthusiastic as his eighth-grade pupils.
One young man, David Lawson, summed up the general feeling well: "I have to say, that through all my years of schooling, I've never had a teacher before who was fun where I learned something."
Fun, yes, but McClain is anything but easy and anything but cursory in his investigation of the Holocaust. Kids characterize the class as "hard" and "lots of work."
Requirements of pupils
For the study of the Holocaust, each pupil was required to do research and write a report. I asked for the subjects and pupils replied:
"The Warsaw Ghetto"
"Hitler Youth"
"Mengele's Experiments"
"Himmler"
"Dauchau"
"Pope Pius XII"
On and on it went.
"We can't let it happen again," one pupil interjected.
"I'd like to learn more. ... It's history. It's important," another said.
McClain has an agenda beyond teaching history and how to keep it from repeating. He believes the lessons learned so tragically by the attempted genocide of the Jews to be relevant to his pupils' everyday lives.
In fact, McClain said, he began teaching the Holocaust because he was alarmed by the tendency of middle-school pupils to tease one another. "Working with this age of student, you see them picking on each other because of things," McClain said.
"Differences become paramount at this age. The first year I taught about the Holocaust, children were kinder because of it."
"You notice [bullying] more," said Alyssa Paidas, a pupil in the class. "If people say mean things, I tell them not to now."
McClain's first year showed such a significant change in pupil behavior he decided to teach the Holocaust again. "Then I got caught up in the greater issue of it," McClain said.
Since then, he has pursued in-depth Holocaust scholarship as a Beifer Scholar in 1994 and a Mandel Fellow in 1995 during studies in Washington, D.C.
The following year he participated in the Jewish Labor Committee's Poland/Israel Summer Teacher Institute and Facing History and Ourselves Institute. Just last summer, he traveled to Japan to study Japanese involvement with the Holocaust.
Sharing the knowledge
As to sharing that knowledge with his pupils, in addition to writing reports, pupils saw the movies "The Diary of Anne Frank" and "Schindler's List" and created PowerPoint multimedia computer shows based on their reports.
In one lesson, they were told they had 30 minutes before they had to leave their homes behind -- "gather what you can."
"It's lots of hard work," Paidas said, "but there are good projects with lots of steps and in the end, you've learned a lot."
The Jewish Community Relations Council is commending McClain for just that.
murphy@vindy.com