A Halifax teacher envisions classrooms across the country stringing paperclips together to commemorate each victim of the Holocaust.
By Jamie Lee <jamie.lee@dal.ca>
Posted: Nov. 9, 2007
Sacred Heart of Halifax student shows off her string of paperclips. Photo: Jamie Lee
Boxes of paperclips are everywhere in the auditorium of the Sacred Heart School of Halifax. The room fills with the noise of excitement as students hook paperclips together. Some hang the long chains around their necks while others stand on their chairs to show just how long theirs are.
The students are testing how simple it is to create a project like the one teacher Wayne MacIntyre completed with his students last year. MacIntyre hopes his idea will grow by getting these students excited.
He stands in the Sacred Heart’s auditorium in front of nearly 200 students from five different Halifax high schools to talk about the class project. His students untangled and hooked 100,000 paperclips together last year just to understand the sheer number of deaths in the Holocaust. The project was so successful that he was invited to talk about it for Holocaust Education Week on Tuesday.
The teacher from Herring Cove Junior High took the idea from a US school and called it the Paperclips Extension Project.
After coming back from a tour of the Holocaust concentration camps in Poland last year, MacIntyre wanted to undertake a project with his Herring Cove students that would help them understand the Second World War’s horrors.
He decided to use a similar concept used by Whitwell Middle School in Tennessee. In 1998, students there placed millions of paperclips on a German transport car – each paperclip representing an individual murdered in the Holocaust.
But MacIntyre wanted to make each paperclip visible. So he had his English students string them together and hang them from the ceiling in his classroom. There are 100,000 paperclips in the room.
He says each paperclip sparkles in the light. “The twinkling would be similar to the souls sparkling … and when you turn the lights off in my classroom and you just let the light come through the window, they twinkle … they really do twinkle,” he describes. The paperclip is the person and its twinkle is the person’s soul, he adds.
Like hooking the paperclips together, MacIntyre started hooking other ideas together. Students had suggestions of their own and they began to add these to their paperclip room. When the project was finished, the room was a miniature museum with displays, posters and photographs on the walls. The students planned to open the museum for a day but ended up keeping it open for a few weeks. Members of the community would visit and walk through.
Herring Cove Junior High teacher Wayne MacIntyre stands in front of the miniature museum he created with his students last year. Photo courtesy: Wayne MacIntyre
The retired teacher now wants other teachers and students to adopt the idea because it makes students realize how many people actually died in the Holocaust. We would need 60 rooms to show all six million deaths with these paperclips, he tells the students.
One of his students last year suggested that 60 classrooms across Canada each string 100,000 paperclips. All these mini-museums would open on the same day so the six million Holocaust victims are remembered at the same time.
He wants to follow through with this idea or other ideas like it. That’s why at the presentation, there was a box of paperclips on each student’s seat.
At the end of the day, MacIntyre gave them the opportunity to string them together. The auditorium filled with noise from the excitement as friends hooked their strands together to make longer chains. Some hung them around their necks and others stood on their chairs and held their chains up to show just how long theirs were.
They can either take it as a memento of the day or they can use it in their classrooms, says MacIntyre. He wanted to show how such a tactile activity really grabs students’ attentions.
Sara Henneberry is a social science teacher at Cornwallis Junior High and she’s also stringing paperclips together. She has so many ideas running through her head from the presentation that she needs time to think about what she wants to do with her classes, she says.
Henneberry is inspired by MacIntyre’s project but she says she probably won't use the paperclips. She’s thinking of getting each of her students to research different topics – for example, profile a family that survived the Holocaust – then present it in a similar miniature museum.
Cornwallis Junior High teacher Sara Henneberry is inspired by the Paper Clips Extension Project and may do something similar with her students. Photo: Jamie Lee
The paperclips are the centrepiece, says MacIntyre. He says students need them to fully understand how big the number of Holocaust deaths really is. A museum might look good, but it’s not the point. The number becomes aloof, he says.
Michelle Masters is the co-chair of the Holocaust Education Week Committee that is made up of Halifax-based groups like the Atlantic Jewish Council. She says whatever inspires the students is a good idea. Doing something different might even be beneficial. “Whether it’s the same or something different,” she says, “make it your own, make it different, so you can relate to it more.”
MacIntyre reoucnts how one of his students lay down on the floor under the strands of paperclips and didn’t want to go home after the project was completed last year. It’s an investment, explains MacIntyre. Students look at the strands as their families, their Jewish spirits.
MacIntyre is speaking out because he worries that teachers aren’t talking about the Holocaust in their classrooms. He says they might feel they don't know enough to teach it. “Don’t feel you can’t do this because you’re not an expert,” he says. He’s trying to make sure that these teachers realize that any teacher can learn as they go. Let the students teach you, he adds.
During the process of putting together the Paperclips Extension Project, he may have jumpstarted the idea, he says, but the students taught him how to put it all together.
