High Stakes Testing Under Nazi Occupation and Today
It's pretty much the same
A place to explore: Poland
I haven’t been to Poland, so I have no pictures of Warsaw and Kraków for you lovely readers.
Yet.
I’m headed there this summer as part of the Auschwitz Legacy Fellowship. Every year the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation brings about 40 teachers from all over the US to Poland and Auschwitz. While the trip is the center of the Fellowship, we teachers have been doing lots of learning about Holocaust education to prepare for the trip. We’ll continue our work afterward, building and sharing lesson plans and resources.
So in a few months, this here newsletter will be filled with lots of Poland pictures and Holocaust teaching content.
Even though I don’t have travel stories and pictures to share yet, I want to mention the fellowship here in case any of you teacher-readers want to apply for the 2026 cohort.
If you are interested, learn about and apply for the fellowship here by May 31, 2025. If you have any questions about the application or interview process, feel free to contact me by replying to this email.
A book to read: STORY OF A SECRET STATE by Jan Karski
Naturally, I’ve been reading tons of books about WWII, Poland, and the Holocaust lately. My favorite and most informative has been Jan Karski’s STORY OF A SECRET STATE. Jan Karski was a member of the Polish Underground during WWII. He was often tasked with traversing war-torn and Nazi-occupied Europe to deliver messages from Poland to the Polish government-in-exile in France and then Britain. He visited the Warsaw ghetto and spent one terrible, terrible day dressed as a guard at a Jewish death camp near Bełżec to provide an eyewitness account of the horrors of the Holocaust. In 1943 made his way to the USA and met with President Roosevelt to beg for Allied assistance.
The things I want to say about this book will comprise several forthcoming newsletters. I initially borrowed the book from the library, but I’ll have to order my own copy because this is a book I’ll likely reference for the rest of my life.
It’s a little too big to manage, this book.
Therefore, I’ll only write about tiny little snippets of the book. One of the chapters is about secret Polish schools, organized and taught by members of the Underground. There were training classes specifically designed to prepare teens for Underground activities (classes: weapons, sabotage, explosives, psychology of terror, etc.), but the The Education Department of the Underground also organized a more standard curriculum for Polish kids as well. Students met in groups for 3-6 to learn from people whom Karski referred to as “overworked educators,” to learn math, science, Polish literature and the like.
Naturally, this is fascinating to me.
If the United States is one day torn apart by war, would I sign up to secretly teach my students without pay, demanding that they still learn history despite the bombs falling around them? I hope so.1
In Warsaw, eighty-five thousand children received an education from The Education Department of the Underground and seventeen hundred graduated from high school.
Guess what?!? Polish Underground students had to take high-stakes tests too, just like high school students in the USA today. Karski writes about witnessing his young cousin’s final exam:
Zosia and two boys sat at a large rectangular table, each place being at a considerable distance from the next to prevent cheating. The [professor] sat in the fourth seat. He handed out paper and instructed the pupils to mark on each sheet their number and symbol which in these Underground classes always took the place of their names. Then he rose and addressed the three pupils, who were trembling with anxiety:
“Try to do your best, don’t be nervous, try to concentrate. For the next three hours, there is no war, no occupation. All you have to think about is your examination…”
Once the students were all busily writing, Karski asked the old professor if he wanted to grab a coffee while the students were working. Karski clearly hasn’t attended a district-required staff meeting about testing security.
The professor glared at me sternly and wagged his finger in rebuke.
“Young man,” he said stiffly, “do not tempt me into evil ways. I have the greatest confidence in Polish youth, but not on the score of all students’ greatest weakness - cheating. From time immemorial youth has cheated, and will continue to cheat, in examinations. I shall have to remain here.”
He returned to the head of the table to keep a sharp eye on his students as he had done for more than twenty years…The prospect of remaining in this room for three hours bored me so I scribbled a note to Zosia informing her that I was going to her home.
I love it when historical text are so intimately relateable! The jaded professor, the bored observer, and the anxious students can all be found alive and well in classrooms today. Across continents and cultures and war zones, high stakes testing environments remain the same.
Advice for Teachers: How to Keep Yourself Entertained
As Karski learned, standardized testing is that it is very boring. Not for students, but for teachers.
Students are entertained with reading questions, document-based essays, or math problems. Teachers have no such entertainment.
Some principals and school districts allow teachers to camp out in front of their computers, grading papers, planning lessons, and mapping out their upcoming summer road trips. Those teachers are very lucky and don’t need to read the tips below.
But most schools require their teachers to be actively ambling around the classroom, ensuring that students are on task. These teachers are not allowed to sit, work, read, stare at computer screens, or do anything that looks productive or entertaining.
Karski and the Polish professor are long gone (Karski died in 2000) and no longer able to benefit from my top tips for staying secretly entertained and/or productive while proctoring tests, but hopefully this will help some of you:
Plant an open book in one corner of your classroom. Every few minutes you can walk over to the book and casually read a few paragraphs, and then go back to pacing. This is a good time to tackle one of those lyrical or hard-to-understand books (perhaps this one?), as you’ll have plenty of time to ponder what you just read.
Walk around with an index card and a pen. Write an article, to-do list, or an entire book as you pace between rows of students. Just don’t trip on any of their computer cords.
Kegels2
Ever wanted to memorize a long poem? Now is the time. Have the poem printed out and hidden in your room somewhere, and practice lines in your head.
If you have hard copies of work to grade, you can also plant those in little stacks around the classroom. Walk over to pile #1, grade a paper. Move across the room to pile #2, grade a paper. Repeat.
Wall sits. Just do this behind the students so they don’t see you.
Embrace the boredom. It’s probably good for your brain.
Happy teaching, traveling, reading, and evading testing boredom! See y’all next Sunday.
Affiliate book links in this newsletter are through Bookshop, a book-buying platform that gives independent bookstores tools to compete online and maintain their presence in local communities. If you purchase books via the links in this newsletter, you’ll are financially supporting me AND your local independent book store, so thank you!
Note to self: delete this post if such a situation comes to frutition.
I think this only works for women? Do men have a version of kegels?
I've been to Poland but not Warsaw or Krakow, but I hope you have the best time! May my other people be very kind to you and that you eat a lot of pierogi.
Another great book with a similar theme is Teaching Lolita in Tehran. During the time of the Iranian Revolution, the author, who is an English professor, no longer allowed to teach at the university invites her students to her home to continue their English literature classes secretly. I look forward to your future posts on your important summer studies and trip.