Introduction

My name is Jenna Kelley and I am currently a senior at Westborough High School. I am 17 years old and I spend most of my time playing sports. I play soccer and basketball for the high school teams and I also play soccer year round on a club team. I plan to go to college to study nursing and I hope to someday work in a prominent hospital as a pediatric nurse.

As a senior in high school, the first two words that came to mind when choosing what classes to take were easy and interesting. I wanted to take classes that wouldn’t require me to do a tremendous amount of work, but yet would still be interesting to me. Choosing my history electives might have been the hardest ones to choose because history has never been one of my favorite subjects and I didn’t want to pick an elective that I would hate going to everyday. I had heard of Facing History & Ourselves from seniors who had taken it the year before. They told me it was a class that everyone needs to take before graduating from Westborough High School. They said it would change who I am and that it would ultimately be the best class I had ever taken. I trusted them and signed up to take the class, but I sort of shrugged off the idea that a class could actually change who I am.

Facing History & Ourselves did in fact change the person I am today. This class has changed the way I perceive myself and other people, and it has also changed the way I make choices that affect my life. Throughout the course, we watched movies and documentaries about the Holocaust. We were able to see what truly happened to the Jewish people during that time period. The films we watched showed realistic scenes from the concentration camps and the conditions that the Jewish people were forced to live in. Facing History & Ourselves showed us details about the Holocaust that we had never seen before. During the class, we also talked about current events that were relevant to how the choices people make in their lives affect them in either positive or negative ways. Every documentary, film, and movie that we watched, made us think about the choices we make in our everyday lives and how they are not only affecting ourselves, but also the people around us.