Students flying to D.C. Friday to visit HolocaustOctober 13, 2010
Mayfield High School social studies teacher and seasoned traveler Jennifer Wasserstrom wants her students to know how fortunate Americans are to have the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum right in Washington, D.C. That’s why she’s leading a day-trip to the museum with 18 of her students – and three adults – on Friday.
The students in her class are currently studying the Holocaust, which Miss Wasserstrom has been teaching for four years. She’s studied the Holocaust for even longer and has taken trips to several concentration camps.
“There are videos and displays in our Holocaust Museum that are not at (the concentration camps) Dachau and Auschwitz,” she said. “There is a liberation video of Dachau that is not even at Dachau.”
Miss Wasserstrom encourages her students to watch certain videos at the museum including the ones on medical experiments at Dachau and survivor testimonies. “That is something I can’t give them in the classroom,” she said. “There is a complete replication of the crematorium that they can go up and see.”
A teacher in the district for six years, Miss Wasserstrom also plans on showing her students The National Mall, White House and the U.S. Capitol. For some of her students, it marks the first time they’ve been on an airplane. The trip ran each student $200, which they had to come up with on their own. The one-day trip starts with a flight out of Albany at 8:15 a.m. Friday. They fly out of Washington, D.C. at 9:30 p.m.
This is Miss Wasserstrom’s third time leading a day trip and she’s looking forward to sharing her excitement and love for Washington, D.C. with her students.
“D.C. is my favorite city in the world,” she said. “It’s our nation’s capital and a showplace, so they should see how beautiful it is.”
Wasserstrom has travelled extensively in the past to feed her interests in history, and in the summer of 2009, attended a seminar in Poland as a Fulbright-Hayes Scholar.