In Wednesday’s Dialogues Across Differences workshops, students and teachers reflected on the ideas of sympathy and empathy. Students role played various conversations with teachers and friends and considered how to respond to issues showcasing empathy. The ongoing Wednesday discussion series has allowed students in small groups to meet with a trusted adult and several peers to share ideas about identity, diversity, stereotyping, friendship, and acceptance. This middle school-wide program was developed over the last two years to build deeper, more honest conversations and allow students to develop a sense of community and shared humanity and help learn productive ways to respond to discrimination. 

In Mr. Bhuva’s sophomore history class, students will be starting a unit on WWI with a Harkness discussion to figure out who is to blame for WWI, based on all of these contradictory primary source texts. Students will use two primary sources to evaluate in their discussion. One will be the “Blank Cheque,” a telegram from 1914 front he Imperial Chancellor, Von Bethemann-Hollweg, to the German Ambassador at Vienna. They will also read a letter entitled “Austria Hungary’s Ultimatum to Serbia” from the following month to evaluate the twin perspectives on the rising tensions in the run-up to the war. Students will also view a timeline of events leading up to the declaration of war in August 1914. By evaluating a wide variety of primary sources, history teachers allow students to view historical events through different lenses, rather than simply reading a summary in a textbook. 

Eighth graders are busy starting the second semester with a unit on memoir and biographies in English. Students will be reading a memoir they have chosen by George Takei, Jackie Robinson, Megan Rapinoe, or Sonia Sotomayor. Meanwhile, in class students will be studying the poetry and life of Langston Hughes for a research essay about how his life affected his writing. The winter unit will include comparisons between the way that authors may craft an identity for themselves and how they see themselves in private. 

On January 16, seventh graders Evan Kendall and J.D. Miller, participated in a Model United Nations conference hosted by Williamsburg Middle School in Arlington, Virginia. Seventh grade history teacher Mr. Wills is the school’s Model UN coach and advisor. The conference  was the second of  this school year, and was attended, via Zoom, by more than 50 students from DC, Maryland, and Virginia. Evan and J.D. chose to participate on a historical committee which debated the causes and effects of World War I.  For this activity,  each student was assigned a  historical person to study and portray throughout the debate.  J.D. played the role of Austrian General,  Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, while Evan portrayed the journalist and French statesman, George Clemenceau.