Today in class we continued reading in Elie Wiesel's Night to page 17. There was debate about hope, and whether the Jews in the ghetto were naive to hope that they would make it through the Holocaust, or whether hope was the only thing that kept them going.
This sparked a good discussion. Everyone was great at finding words that represented main themes in the book and figuring out what words meant based on their roots and other similar words. Everyone wrote down their top six words on a sticky note, and then we shared them with the class, keeping a tally of how many people had each word.
Once we had all the words and the number of votes up on the board we narrowed them down by voting for how important we thought each word was. After that we erased all the words that didn't get votes. Then you all wrote down your top six choices from the words on the board, and we voted one more time for the top 5 words that were most important.
There was another debate about whether the word "abandon" should be included over the word "ghetto." After a thoughtful explanation that abandonment is a theme that runs through the whole book and it's an important emotion where as ghetto is just a place that gets left behind, you voted almost unanimously to add abandon to the list, making a top 6.
The final list included "hysteria", "abandon", "deportation", "oppressors", "hostile", and "premonition".
