Throughout the semester I took part in a literature circle at Tibbetts Middle School with an 8th grade class.  The book of our choosing was about the Holocaust and the biography of Elie Wiesel titled "Night".  My classmates and I would meet them once a week on Mondays.

In the beginning of our literature circle I thought it was greatly important to depict the setting of the time, and the history of the setting.  When I asked what the students knew of WWII, there wasn't much to convey.  I thought it would be helpful for them to understand the history of the Jewish people that had lead to their arrival and persecution in Europe.  This book written by Elie Wiesel is stepped in Jewish culture using words such as Talmud, Kabbalah, and Zohar, in the first chapter.  I felt this can easily disengage a students’ reading because the book does not accommodate for a glossary that lists the definitions of the words.

I believed this book held a very important value in human history, and that before judgments could be made about the account, I had to deliver as much accuracy as I could before the students would make their decisions about human character.  However, since this is the first time reading a book like Night and learning about the Holocaust in general, I couldn't expect them to know as much as I wanted them to know.

Over the course of time many of the students were in different areas of the book, the standard pace of where they should be was directed by our visits on Mondays.  We would spend most of our time reading the text together, but we would still find time to address scenes of the book and ask for student responses to what they thought about.

For anything that came out of the literature circle, they were exposed to the history and a real depiction of the Holocaust.  I wasn't there at the end of the literature circle to see what the students had overall judged about the time, the characters, and the book itself.  I know that every student who came to the literature circle did take something away from that book and made it real in their understanding, I have no actual proof, but I don't need any.  Even if their focus wasn’t with the literature circle at times, those instances where they listened to the recurring account of moral ambiguity and ethics from Elie Wiesel, I know they took something with them.

I did design a worksheet around Elie Wiesel, his witnessing, and the book Night, but it never reached the students.  The worksheet was to work hand in hand with online videos from YouTube of an interview with Elie Wiesel.  The questions were intended to give personal answers that would tie some of Elie Wiesel's experiences with their own.

Either though introducing this book was not smooth and easy, in the end the students were able to familiarize themselves with a piece of very important human history.  Later they can go back to their first experience with Night or the Holocaust, and go deeper into the understanding of the time and the people to broaden their insight into human character.