John Poole
Interviewee: John Poole
Interviewer: Johanna Bringhurst
Description: John Poole from BYU-Idaho joins Johanna this week to talk about how he became an advocate of social justice in the classroom and how teaching about the Holocaust has inspired him. John Poole is a professor of English education at BYU-Idaho. Prior to that, he was a teacher and a principal at an alternative high school. He started his career as a high school English teacher. He has been interested in social justice issues since he encountered a white supremacist student in his high school English class. He is a lifetime resident of Idaho.
Date: 2024-02-07
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Johanna Bringhurst: Hello everyone, and welcome to context. This program is brought to you by the Idaho Humanities Council with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The views expressed here today do not necessarily represent those of the agency or the NEH. My name is Johanna Bringhurst and joining us today is John Poole. John is a professor of English education at Brigham Young University, Idaho.
Prior to that, he was a teacher and and a principal at an alternative high school. He started his career as a high school English teacher. He has been interested in social justice issues since he encountered a white supremacist student in his high school English class. He is a lifetime resident of Idaho and, I just learned, from Preston, Idaho, home of Napoleon Dynamite, which you might not like me saying, but I have to throw it out there.
We love you, Napoleon. Okay. Doctor Poole, thank you for joining me today. To talk about your experiences as an educator.
John Poole: Great to be here. And I welcome the opportunity to talk about it, because I feel really passionate about the topic of social justice, particularly the Holocaust. So it's great to be here. Thank you.
Johanna Bringhurst: Great. Do you mind telling us, about how you became interested in social justice? You began your career as a high school teacher teaching English. What got you hooked?
John Poole: So, I taught, or I started teaching at Hillcrest High School in Idaho Falls, Idaho. You know, I don't know how I came by it until one student asked me, and I don't know what it was about this one student, asked me, what is it that you I mean, why do you want to be a teacher and why do you do this?
And I gave him the pat answer. I love kids, I love English. And then on the way to teach at BYU Idaho, I was an adjunct faculty at the time. This memory came back from when I was in third grade, and I don't know why it was that time, but, I had bullied a third grade, another third grader, and he had moved away during the, Christmas of that year, and I've never seen him again.
But I remembered all these details. I got glasses and, in third grade, and I remember being made fun of for these glasses and instead of, really trying to process those emotions, I projected them on to this other kid. And so I joined with the other bullies and, and bullying this kid for probably 3 or 4 months.
And so I went back the next day and told my this kid who had asked me, okay, I gave you the answer that I thought you wanted to hear, but here's the real answer. And I told him the story. And so I think social justice is my attempt to to make up for what I've done in that third grade classroom.
But even more importantly than that, I don't want anyone else to feel, judged or, you know, just not accepted in a classroom environment. So I think that experience and third grade, even though I didn't recognize it at the time, was really the catalyst to really address social justice issues in my own classroom.
Johanna Bringhurst: It's amazing that you had that memory.
John Poole: Yeah. Yeah. It just came back and and honestly, I think sometimes those memories circle back to us in times that we need them. And this kid really wanted to know why I was a teacher and he wasn't, I mean, he was put off by the fact that I just gave him that pat answer. And so he was looking for something more.
And so I, I'm grateful that I was able to given that. The next day after I thought about that experience.
Johanna Bringhurst: You had an experience in your own room encountering anti-Semitism, also. What happened?
John Poole: So, if you know anything about Idaho Falls, it's predominantly white. And, we were reading Huckleberry Finn, and, I mean, if you if you think about Huckleberry Finn, half a book is about an African-American. And I don't I didn't think like, I could speak to that experience. I didn't want to speak to that experience. So,
Fortunately, the Idaho National Laboratory has a diversity coordinator, and there's a lot of diversity at the site. So I contacted her and asked her if she would, ask someone if they'd be willing to come in who was African American, come in and speak to the experience of being African American. And she readily agreed. He came in and spoke to what it's like to be African American in the United States.
And I remember probably three things that he said. Number one was, I never met a white person until I joined the military, and he'd grown up in rural Mississippi. So he goes being in this white world is different for me as much as it is for you white people to see a black person in your world. It's it's kind of the same feeling.
And he goes, you probably won't understand this as youth. But when my kids are old enough, I tell them that when they go out, if they're ever pulled over by the police, you always keep your hand on the steering wheel. You never make any sudden movements. You say, yes, sir, no, sir. And he goes, that's the way of life it is for African Americans.
And then the third thing that he said was, we have to appreciate different cultures. We have to appreciate what it is about that culture that we like, and what we don't like. We have to accept that, that we have biases. And it was a phenomenal, I think, opportunity for my kids to learn from somebody who was different than them.
And so, I thought it was a really great experience. But I go out to my car that night and there's white supremacist fliers all over the car. And so I'm gathering them up thinking, gosh, which one of my students did this? And I spent because we were on an AB schedule from Thursday to the following Monday, looking at my class list and trying to determine which one my students had done that.
So the next Monday, I take these fliers into the resource officer and say, I think we've got a problem with white supremacy here. And he goes, oh yeah, I know we do. There's a cell that operates at Hillcrest High School. We've been trying to, to, find out who who's responsible for it? So they had been responsible prior to the fliers on my car for some violence against African Americans, against Hispanics in the Ammon area.
And, the long or the short, the long, the or the short of this really long story is that there was a ninth grade student in my class, who was involved in it, and he'd been writing these journal entries, these horrible journal entries about other races. So I'd ask him to respond to, The Giver. And he started out with a response to that, but pretty quickly was anti-Semitic, anti, African-American, anti-Hispanic.
And so as I became aware of that and the resource officer was also aware that we started copying his journal, and a month after that, he was arrested in my class as a member of this white supremacist group. And I think the thing that really stuck with me about that whole experience wasn't the horrific way that he talked about it, about different races, but the way he would not explore any perspective other than his own, no matter how long we talked, no matter what we talked about, it always came back to these racist ideas.
And I always wonder what ever happened to him. I've lost track, obviously, but, I think that stuck with me and made me recognize that I need to address those kinds of issues in my own classroom.
Johanna Bringhurst: Wow, thank you for sharing that's, shocking. But the student was in ninth grade. So young.
John Poole: Right, and his older brother actually was the, instigator of the entire cell. And they'd been responsible for most of the violence. But I mean, it it really bled into everything he said in that classroom and everything he wrote, which is unfortunate because I think at a very young age, very impressionable, he's not going to have that opportunity to see different perspectives like he should.
Johanna Bringhurst: Absolutely. So how did you begin teaching the Holocaust? Were you reading literature as an English teacher then you switched over. How did that happen?
John Poole: I, I actually didn't start teaching about the Holocaust until I got here to BYU. I always touched social justice and multicultural and try to incorporate as many, as many texts as I could into that, into my classroom in high school. But it wasn't until I came to BYU Idaho that I really had the opportunity to, explore the Holocaust.
And, so I, I don't I'm in the English department, so I actually teach a course, it's an, introductory English course. So a freshman level course composition, but it's themed on the Holocaust. So everything we read about and everything that we discuss centers on the Holocaust. So, I, I'll have to say it came from the Olga Lengyel Institute.
TOLI. That I went to New York in 2017. I started teaching in 2016 here. But it just felt like that's something I needed to do. And so it started just as an idea. And then I attended the institute. Then I went to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC three different times to explore different aspects of the Holocaust.
And so I feel like it's slowly changed. I mean, originally I talked about the Holocaust, but now it's become a study of the Holocaust. And I think, as all good teachers do, your teaching evolves over the course of time and with the students you have. So I, I think it's started out as something different, and then it evolves into the study of the Holocaust, which I think is really powerful.
Johanna Bringhurst: Why do you think your students really need to learn about this history and the literature about it?
John Poole: Well, that's a great question. You know, if I think back to 2016, the political situation in this country, a lot of that resembles what happened in Nazi Germany, meaning there's a lot of misinformation. There's a lot of, inability to trust people of authority or be skeptical of people in authority or blind obedience, on the other hand.
And so, in 2016, it just felt like the right environment to start talking about the Holocaust. And it doesn't matter when I teach this class, people can always my students seem to go back to that 2016 environment and say, ooh, that feels like Covid, or that feels like when President Trump came to power or, you know, whatever it is, they can make, connections in their own life, which I think then makes that study of the Holocaust that much more important that we, really focus on that as a backdrop to what's going on in our country right now.
Johanna Bringhurst: As an instructor, of students and your students or young adults, exploring their options. What are you in based on your experience and what research tells us? What do you think are the best practices for teaching about the Holocaust and discussing it with students?
John Poole: Starting out, I thought, okay, I'll read a couple of books about it, go to some conferences and and feel qualified to teach it. I recognize very quickly that the more you know about the Holocaust, the deeper it is. I mean, there are so many aspects to it. And so I recognize that I can't be the expert here. I can't speak for other people.
So I think the most important thing for me was finding people who could speak to the experience. For instance, of being Jewish. And so, I require my students to attend Shabbat. And then, the rabbi there, she doesn't like to drive in winter weather. So we, like we go down to her synagogue and she talks to us about what it's like to be Jewish.
In the spring and the summer semester, she'll come to us and and do a quick presentation about Jewish life and what it's like. So I think having those resources and utilizing those resources of the actual voices is important. And then when it comes to the Holocaust itself, there are so many books and so many opinions about it. I think it's important that we stick to survivor testimonies and, and realistic, depictions of what went on during the Holocaust.
I think we the closer we get to the actual sources, the more important it is. And in my class we use document based inquiry. So, for instance, if we're going to talk about Jewish life in Europe, we're going to access actual people who lived there and the the Holocaust Memorial Museum. And Echoes. Reflections has a lot of testimonials from survivors of the Holocaust that I think is so important to utilize.
But we can't ever set ourselves up as experts. We're just the conduit to allow them to learn about the Holocaust and point them in the right directions to people who actually experience that. And so I think that's the power of, of the Holocaust is getting back to those resources that are available to us. I'd like to say it would be great to have a Holocaust survivor come in and speak, but they're not there's not many left.
And so we have to rely on those testimonials, on video, which are also powerful.
Johanna Bringhurst: Why do you think it's so important to connect students with those primary sources about the Holocaust?
John Poole: Also, we can get to people that were actually there. I think the less we have of the, I don't know, the interpretation or the biases that exist in people. I mean, even myself, I wouldn't I wouldn't want to speak for the Jewish experience. I mean, just reading books and studying it doesn't make me an expert. People who lived it are the experts.
And so we have to rely on their testimonials of what happened to, to really help us as, human beings try to grapple with what happened during the Holocaust. And I think that even includes, we talked about Holocaust survivors, but I think rescuers are also important, as well as perpetrators, or bystanders. It's important to have that perspective and their original, voices and what they say about the Holocaust.
So, I mean, we we never want to interpret history. We want to give students the ability to interpret history through those primary sources for their own personal situation.
Johanna Bringhurst: Have you ever had a student who had been taught that there was no Holocaust, that that is fictional, or anyone who questions the validity of the sources that you're sharing?
John Poole: I've never had anyone question, the validity of the sources that I used, but I did have a white supremacist that had just gotten out, was in my class two semesters ago. And that was an interesting conversation because he and I, we had this conversation outside of class because he didn't feel like he could share what he had learned in the white supremacist movement.
So we spent a lot of time in my office talking about what he had learned versus what the actual sources were, and it was phenomenal to see that perspective. I'd never sat down with someone who was an ardent white supremacist and had had him explain the process of indoctrination the way he did. And so, like when we looked at the the survivor testimonies, he would say, like in the white supremacist movement, we would say, oh, that's just doctored.
That's just they found somebody who told them what to say, did it in their basement. There's no there's no validity, no reality to that. It was just all made up. And then we would talk about, well, you know, think about all the things that they share in common, like the idea of Auschwitz, how many survivors mention afterwards, how many survivors mention the gas chambers or specific events that happened to them?
And so it was really interesting to have that conversation. He's coming out of it trying to see the Holocaust for what it really was, instead of what he'd been taught about it, so that those were fascinating conversations. But I've never had anyone really question the validity of the sources that I use. Kids, I don't know that they're drawn to those testimonies.
Like we mentioned earlier, YouTube, young adults are drawn to that, and they think everything on YouTube is true. So I've never really had anyone say, wow, you know, that's not true.
Johanna Bringhurst: What are some of the toughest questions that students ask you?
John Poole: There's been some and I've written some down here, that have really taken me back and made me wonder about the Holocaust and one and almost a narrative, inevitably, every semester. This is the question what did the average German do during the Holocaust? Were they they support the Nazis? Were they standing up against it? So they always want to know what the average German did.
And, you know, it just depends. Right. We don't know a lot about those people that were bystanders. We just don't have a lot of information about them. And so that to them is the most fascinating. But here's some other questions that they've wondered about. Why did the Nazis game and, majority of the country, when they were in the farm minority, I mean, 38 million Germans, two of the 2 million of them are Nazis.
How did they swing that, to really, develop a majority and power in Nazi Germany. And they want to know that the end of it. Were the Nazis ever, like, rounded up? Were they ever punished? Which when they find out that the US government really de-Nazified a lot of these people, makes them a little angry that they weren't punished more for the crimes that they committed.
They always want to know why the Jews didn't fight back or leave. And I think through it, analyzing anti-Semitism and how pervasive it was in Europe, that gives us some real things to talk about, particularly, at this university where it's, affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, they begin to see some similarities between religious persecution, racial persecution of what happened to the Jews.
So it starts to develop some of those questions that they have about leaving. Right, or fighting back. Inevitably someone will ask, what does the Holocaust have to do with me? Or why do we study this? And it's more at the start of the semester, you know, why are we studying the Holocaust? This is like 20, 23, 24.
What we what are we studying the Holocaust for? That happened a lot of years ago. And I say just, you know, wait and see. And over the course of our study, particular, I think that the one that really answers that question is we study, Jewish teenage life, before the Holocaust from the 1930s to to 1939 and what it was like for them.
And it always comes out that 1 or 2 students say her life is just like mine, and they do the same things that I do. Yeah, they're concerned about dances and friends and, you know, popularity and wearing clothes and things like that. And I don't think it really occurs to them until they actually read those testimonies and what it makes.
I think what makes it even more powerful is the ability that they have to to read the story prior to the Holocaust and then echoes reflections, has the aftermath, what happened to them, and probably, three. Well, three out of the six eventually end up in Auschwitz and are killed. And so when they read about it, then it comes, becomes real, like, wow, they're no longer here.
They no longer had the opportunity to live their lives. So I think when young adults encounter the idea of death, that really shocks them. And so that teenage testimony is really powerful to address that. Some of the other questions they ask is why didn't America intervene earlier when we knew about it? Or, how did people recover from the Holocaust?
I mean, if you're a survivor, what do you tell your kids? And if you know anything about the Holocaust, a lot of those, Holocaust survivors didn't really talk about it, to their kids. And so there's this missing information about the Holocaust, and then why do we forget? I mean, we've had so many genocides since. How do we forget those lessons of the Holocaust?
And so those are some of the questions that students have asked me that I think come up again and again, and they're hard to answer. And they leave students grappling with some really tough life questions, which I think is good. Coming out of a class.
Johanna Bringhurst: Do you try to answer the questions or you're trying to get them to find the answers for them?
John Poole: So they hope that they can find the answers themselves. And you know, I have my opinions about some of these questions, but I really try to help them focus their question and find the answers in those primary sources that we talked about earlier.
Johanna Bringhurst: I really admire, so humble you are as a teacher. You sound like you're learning along with your students rather than trying to be the source of all wisdom for them.
John Poole: It's easy to do, I think, to fall in that power dynamic and say, I know everything about the Holocaust, but that is a lie. In my doctoral program. I mean, the more I study, the more aspects there are. Like, for instance, I had a class on the geography of the Holocaust, and I didn't realize this, but, there's not a lot written about the Sinti and Roma.
There's a lot written about Jews and about homosexuals and about the infirm, the disabled that were killed. But there's not a lot of history from the Sinti, Roma. And I never really had examined that until this class. And I realized, wow, that's a whole different aspect of the Holocaust that I've never even really thought about. And so I think you have to have that humble opportunity to come into a classroom and say, let's learn together.
Let's learn, from these sources.
Johanna Bringhurst: These are really weighty and heavy issues that you're grappling with. How do you help students feel comfortable coming to you to ask questions and talk about these issues?
John Poole: That's a great question. And I think, honestly, adopting that idea that I'm here to learn with you and I often talk about what I'm learning in my doctoral classes. Like I learned this, like, this week I learned that Norway in Norway or not, not in Norway, in Finland, the Jewish soldiers actually fought with the Nazis against the Russians because they hated the Russians so bad.
So the Nazis allowed all, Finnish soldiers who were Jewish to survive. They never sent them to concentration camps because they fought with them. They have their own brigade, fought with the SS against the the Russians. So just these things that you're finding out, it's important, I think, to bring those to the class, share them with your students.
But I think honestly, I went on my sabbatical, winter of 2022 to Auschwitz, to the Łódź ghetto, to Berlin, and to Prague and to Terezín. And one thing that came up again and again, particularly in Auschwitz, was, the idea of names and how important they are. And I think in my classroom, I try to help my students understand that their name is important.
It it establishes their identity, but it's also important that they get to know other people's names and their stories. So every day in my class, we do some sort of get to know you, to allow them to get to know themselves as well as other students. And then, I always try to, remember their names by the third day of class, which is huge.
The older I get, the less memory I have. So, but.
Johanna Bringhurst: That's very hard.
John Poole: It is. And it's and it, you know, every 14 weeks we have new names. So I think it's important to address them by their names. So I think that's important. And then I have to be vulnerable as a teacher. I have to share with them that my life isn't rosy and peaches all the time. So I do an introduction at the start of my class, where we talk about things that get us outside of our box.
For unique things. And so I share with them the fact that I spent two years on an LDS mission in Japan. I went from Preston, Idaho, which has 3500 people, to Nagoya Japan, which is 3.5 million. I eat beef, potatoes and vegetables. And here I am eating rice and fish. And it's just, and I can't read anything,
I don't understand the language. I'm taller than most people. I stick out like a sore thumb, and that got me out of my box and helped me to understand that, you know, people are people. Wherever you're at. Doesn't matter if they look different than you, if they believe differently. It's important that we recognize that they're different. So that's the first thing.
Then I worked at an alternative high school. And that really got me outside the box because I originally came from a high school where every you assume everyone has a great life, and they come to school fed, and then you go to the alternative high school, and some kids don't. They don't have parents that are operating in their lives.
They don't have enough food. This is the least of their concerns, right? They're they're addicted to substances. They're pregnant. I mean, so you start to see a different side of life. The third thing I share is, the fact that I have four children with mental illness, and I've had two sons attempt suicide. And so, that conversation about the idea that mental illness is something that we have in our society really hide in the closet.
We don't talk about it a lot. It's becoming better. But, when my eldest daughter, when we found out that she was depressed, we took her to our doctor. And the first question he asked her was, are you, have you thought about suicide this week? And she said, every single day. And as parents, that's a shocking statement to hear from your daughter, because you don't you don't want to talk about that, right.
That's that's too over the top. But I since realized that we have to have those difficult conversations around mental illness. And then the fourth thing probably that got me outside of my box is, the idea that everyone has a story and we don't know about people's stories. My mother, was depressed, most of my growing up life, and I didn't know it at the time.
I can look back and say, okay, I can attribute that to her mental illness, but there's a lot of things that I didn't know about her because she didn't spend a lot of time with us kids. And so I know she has a story and I want to honor that story, but she's gone now. And now I don't have that opportunity to hear that story.
So I think it's important for me to be vulnerable and say these things in front of my class. So when we have those difficult conversations, they can say, yeah, yeah, it reminds me of this experience. And and they're much more open that way. When you are vulnerable with them.
Johanna Bringhurst: I'm just trying to think of if I had any teachers that I knew that kind of personal information about that is really brave to put yourself out there and to share with your students.
John Poole: I think if you tell your story in all of its core detail, and obviously I don't tell everything about suicide attempts or what I went through the last me about that. Will you share and I'll, I'll, I'll share with them what I think they need to hear, but I don't shy away from it, because I think in telling our stories, we honor our humanity and we honor our names,
really, And so the more human I can be with my own experience, the more human they can be with their experience, and they can really learn compassion for themselves and for the people that have wronged them in their lives. And I think that's important moving forward.
Johanna Bringhurst: What do you hope that your students take away from your class? What's that most important thing you want them to take?
John Poole: That humanity exists. And just because I don't look the same as someone else, even though I don't, agree with or don't, worship the same way they do, or don't believe politically the same way that they do, it doesn't diminish that person in any way, just makes them different. They have a different story, a different experience. And so I want them to to treat everybody that they come in contact with, with the dignity and respect that they extend to themselves.
So that's what I hope they get out of it.
Johanna Bringhurst: Well I'm sure they do. When I was preparing for a conversation today, I was kind of looking at your website on BYU, at BYU Idaho, and I came across you on ratemyprofessor.com, which I don't know how popular that is with professors, but you had the highest ratings I have ever seen for, a professor. It sounds like you, are really helping students make that connection, learn about their humanity.
And you know, that beauty that we are all different and we all have different perspectives and point of view. And that's such a wonderful part of being human. If you were going to advise, a young teacher, a young educator just starting on this journey, what would you tell them is, you know what? What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out that you've learned as a seasoned teacher?
John Poole: A great question. It feels like today, when we're talking about teaching, it comes down to standards and test scores and all those kinds of things, and somehow we've forgotten the humanity of teaching. The teaching is really all about, helping students to understand who they are and understand the world around them and really be a better human big.
And so I would give the advice of, I have to teach to my heart. I have to teach things that are important to me. And if I have that passion, if I carry that passion into my classroom, my students are going to learn something just by the passion that I bring into the class. And so this is going to sound horrible in our world, but disregard the standards and teach to what you think your students need, and you'll always be able to incorporate standards into what you're doing.
But start with your heart and not with the standard. Because I think we go south of our goals when we really focus on, for instance, critical thinking or whatever we really should be focusing on. How do these young people learn to navigate their world and become better humans as a result of being in any classroom? Literate.
Johanna Bringhurst: Thank you so much for that advice, and thank you for being with me today. It's such a treat to talk to and learn.
Learn about teachers who are doing just what you said, helping students to know how to navigate the world and to be a better human.
John Poole: I appreciate the opportunity. I know the Idaho Humanities Council has been fabulous, in doing that, and I always appreciate the opportunity to talk about our humanity, our shared humanity. I think it's lost in our world today and we need more of these conversations.
Johanna Bringhurst: I agree, thank you so much.