Teachable Moments

As a parent, I have a different experience as a college student than some.  This past weekend, we were sitting down to our gourmet dinner of pizza (some college stereotypes still apply!) when my oldest daughter started talking about the book they are reading in school, "The Diary of Anne Frank".  My daughter is very tender hearted, so naturally, this book has really made an impact on her.  She was talking about how awful it was for them, and how scary it was.  My younger two children had no clue what she was talking about, so she gave them a brief run down.  I filled in a couple of gaps by saying that Hitler was the leader of Germany and had decided that he was going to restore Germany to power by eliminating all of the people that he felt got in the way of that.  We had a lengthy discussion about what that meant: the death camps and the concentration camps, the soldiers invasions of countries to separate families and destroy people.  I told them that Hitler was responsible for over six million deaths, which brought me to the movie Paperclips that we had watched in class. 
After talking about how awful it would have been to live there during that time, I said again that Hitler talked an entire country into believing his way was correct.  I told my kids that he didn't just wake up one day and say, "I think I am going to kill some Jews today", and I asked them how they thought this happened.  My kids always amaze me.  My son (who is 7) said, "I think he had like the bad person on one shoulder and the good on the other, and he listened to the bad person", my daughter, age 10, said that he wanted to be popular and loved so he made a plan.  My 13 year old said, "Maybe he was bullied as a kid".  Those are some great answers.  I pointed out that one seed of bitterness or hatred in his heart bloomed and grew into a hatred that changed the whole world.  The entire world was brought into a war because of one seed of hate.  We talked about how important it is to guard your heart, to make sure that any bitterness, anger, hatred, or rage is dealt with in a good way, so that we don't allow it to grow.  My 13 year old is learning a lot about WWII, and she is connecting some things my grandpa told her when he was alive. Yes, she is making text to text connections, text to self, and text to world, but, she is learning a lot more than that.  As a parent, I always look for those teachable moments with my kids.  As a teacher, we need to, too.