(WGHP) — Melanie Handy, John Haynes and Lisa Mortenson all teach high school students with Guilford County Schools, but now they’re bonded by something else.
“It’s such a not a religious experience but very close to that,” said Handy, an English teacher at James B. Dudley High School in Greensboro. “You are so vulnerable at those sites, and it’s definitely a bonding experience.”
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Over the summer, the three joined dozens of other public school teachers from across North Carolina in Poland to learn the history of the Holocaust in Poland. For eight days, they stepped into their kids’ shoes and became the students.
“It was a week of just intense everything,” said Mortenson, who teaches AP European History and World History at Grimsley High School. “Intense emotion. Intense experiences. Intense study of this one subject.”
Over the course of eight days in mid-June, Mortenson, Haynes and Handy joined 33 other North Carolina public school educators in Poland to learn the history of the Holocaust. They’d all studied the subject previously but never quite like this.