Ed Cafe
In class Tuesday my History class performed an EdCafe. I had prepared a little blurb about the relationship between Japan and the United States during WWII with a partner. We ended up talking with a group of students for about 15 minutes on our subject. It was a very interesting time to talk about what I had spent my time researching the past couple of days. I learned about battles between the United States and Japan during WWII that I hadn’t learned much about before like Pearl Harbor, the Death March, and the atomic bombings on Japan. I had known of these battles before, but never in depth researched them. I was also interested in how racism affected the magnitude of violence between Japan and the United States. One of our essential questions was “Would detonating an atomic bomb fly today like it did during WWII on Japan?”. This essential question was interesting to me because there could be many different opinions. The different opinions were shared during our discussion. I realize that my class mates have very different outlooks on civilization today.
After my partner and I presented our topic, we had time to choose different groups that we wanted to go to and discuss their topics. I chose to go to groups about children in the Holocaust, modern day Nazis, and finally a group about pseudo-scientific experiments on people held by the Nazis. All of the topics were interesting. I was able to tell a story that I heard first hand from a Communist General in China about an attack on China from Japan. The communist general had told me that he witnessed a stabbing of a pregnant Chinese woman and then saw the attacker stab her uterus to make sure that the baby was dead. Although gruesome, it was interesting to be able to share a story I had heard almost seven years ago.
All in all this experience of the EdCafe was much better than I had expected. All of the topics were interesting and there was not a lot of pressure put on the person leading the discussion. I enjoyed that we were privileged enough to be able to have the EdCafe outside on a beautiful day. The weather made everyone’s mood much more enjoyable. I would definitely be open to having more EdCafes because I learned so much from the discussions and it was relatively fun. Thanks for the opportunity