Introduction

The Facing History and Ourselves course is a very unique and special class. I can honestly say that I have never taken another course remotely similar to this one. The main focus of the course is to examine racism, bias, and prejudice in a historical context.  Students study intolerance, genocide, and the Holocaust in order to make correlations between history and the difficult moral and ethical choices they are faced with everyday.  In the course students watch films, discuss activities and topics in groups, and engage in class discussions regarding the topic matter. At first, the main reason as to why I chose to take this course was because of my huge interest in the Holocaust and World War II. I thought this was a standard history course that focused mainly on that time period in history.  I soon realized that the course was about much more than that. The course described why these events happened and what triggered the events that occurred. This course was able to go in depth about all of the contributing factors to the events that occurred.  It gave you the real truth about everything and didn’t leave out even the tiniest details. Before starting the course, I thought I knew a pretty good amount about the Holocaust and World War II. However, I now realize that didn’t know that much information about it at all. This course made me realize that it would take years to learn “a lot” about the topic and that it is impossible to know everything about it.