At the same time, my Uncle teaches middle school and barely makes enough money to survive. I can see both sides of the coin, and understand that a lot of it depends on where you work, but here most of our teachers are severely overworked and underpayed.

That being said, she worded her assignment very poorly. I think that it is a VERY important thing to learn to debate two sides of an argument (some of the most interesting school debates I've seen are where someone has to defend something they find immoral or incorrect) but that you don't have to be so insensitive. She stated to write an antisemetic essay, which is racist and historically incorrect. While 1/3 of the people killed by Nazi soldiers were Jewish, they essentially wanted to eliminate anyone who wasn't atheist/Aryan. While it's certainly not WRONG to ask a class to think about something from the Nazi position of superiority, asking them to focus their hate on one group of people is bad.

I also think that it matters what grade level is being taught. At an upperclassman highschool or college level, where the students have a good grasp of morals, tolerance, and their sense of self, I think that this could be an interesting topic to discuss. A younger student I would hesitate to give this assignment to, simply because it's inviting people into a train of thought that could be unhealthy if they don't understand that it's just a way of broadening their view point.

Don't they have to get their curriculum approved by the board before they ask students to write a paper? :/

I would commend the teacher after I ruled out any nazi sympathy. To my mind this is a great exercise and it teaches the importance of not doing anything with blind loyalty and how easy it is to be a part of horrible things while believing that you are doing the right thing.

I have asked my daughters to write many an essay on the side of the worst criminals just to teach this sort of thing. It's a viable exercise. Now should they find that she is a Nazi sympathiser and a white supremacist or something she should be reprimanded and probably fired...but if she is teaching the importance of entering anything with open eyes and a questioning mind she should be commended and the students reprimanded...or perhaps asked to write about how they felt.

I think that her stance is an admirable one, and that her students were very close-minded in refusing to do this assignment. I should think that by the time you make it to high school, you're mature enough to tackle sensitive issues without crying to your parents about how horrible the teacher's being in asking you to try to imagine things from a historical point of view. I think that it would have been awful to be on either side in that war, but if my family was at stake, who knows how far I would have gone. Many Germans started out believing that Hitler was doing a great thing - he targeted the homeless and those suffering from mental illness before he ever got to the Jewish, homosexual, Polish, black, etc, and many people thought that the country was a better place because of it. That's part of how it was so easy for him to gain such a large following in the first place.

I mean, Hitler was just a normal man. He did horrible, horrible things, but he didn't do them because he was evil, he did them because he thought that they were right. He was obviously wrong, but it would have been super interesting to research that and write about how horrible the war was from that side. I mean, there may have been some Nazis who were sadistic or power-hungry and enjoyed themselves, but the vast majority of people find that war is awful once they get there. Writing a letter to prove your loyalty to your leader could be a very powerful lesson. I especially think that the way that the students reacted could have proved that. They were disgusted by the thought of it, as were tons of Germans who did what they had to do to save their lives or their families.

I don't think that the wording of the assignment is particularly horrible - how else could it have been worded? It ticks me off that the article quotes a single line about the argument that "Jews are evil," as it seems to me that there was probably a lot more surrounding it. The closing lines of the article make the assignment seem perfectly rational. She's not asking the students to post why they agree with Nazism, she's asking them to do something that they find appalling, and that makes this lesson even more powerful.

I think that a lot of good points have been made in this thread, but that unless there was something in that assignment that we're not seeing, the superintendent is full of shit and the community is trying to be politically correct to a detriment of education.