Celebrating Failure in Rm 613

I have a new tradition for the summer: travel abroad with students. It started last year when I took a group of students to Western Europe (Spain, France, and England) and this was where I formalized Minarets Abroad  for my school site. You can read about our adventures here . The group pictured in the city center of Kraków, Poland. This year, I decided to shift the focus away from Western Europe and give students the opportunity to explore Eastern Europe, including Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, and Austria. Unlike the previous trip, our trip was specifically focused on exploring the historical sites of the Holocaust in Europe, which made it a true one-in-a-lifetime trip. By the end of our fifteen day adventure in Berlin, Warsaw, Kraków, Prague, Nuremberg, Munich, and Salzburg, my students and I came to the conclusion that visiting historical sites is far more influential than learning about it in the classroom or from a book. Each and every location left me with new ...

In June, I spent twelve days traveling across western Europe with a group of students. We started in Barcelona, Spain and slowly made our way north, ending in London, United Kingdom and it was a whirlwind of exhaustion, excitement, stress, blisters. Like any great travel adventure, I gained a new perspective on the world and a better understanding of new culture, but most of all I understood the benefit of traveling with your students. During those twelve days, I got to witness a whole new side to my students. I was used to seeing them in my classroom or in the hallways at school surrounded by their peers, but on the trip I got to see them away from their friends in a new environment, experiencing a foreign culture. Within the first 24 hours, one student had a meltdown because the Coke in Spain did not taste the same as the Coke in the United States; it was mostly the jet lag talking, but it became a running joke and we made him try Coke in every country, just to be sure. There w...