Gene Woods teaches history at Bayonne High School. But that’s not him standing in front of the whiteboard. That’s him over there in a wheelchair, reassuring the nation that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. That’s right, the topic is World War II, and Mr. Woods is FDR for a day.
His specialty as an educator is classroom reenactments that work better than just the facts, baby.
Though the reenactments are accompanied by seminars, Woods sees them as a “way of getting kids involved as opposed to reading or looking at pictures.”
“We dress up as historical characters,” he says. “When we study World War I, we turn the classroom into a trench, purchase fake barbed wire, fake rats, wear uniforms, helmets, and have a stretcher and a stuffed mannequin as one of the people killed during the war.”
The class also reads poetry written about or during World War I.
If the class is studying World War II, Woods will bring in Eisenhower to reenact the D-Day invasion; if it’s the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK will make an appearance.
Woods’s uncle lent him real military uniforms, and he kept building on each reenactment every year. “I became very engaged,” he says. As did the students. Woods doesn’t do a lot of traditional testing. The reenactments “provide another way for the students to express themselves and are more hands-on.”
Woods is in his ninth year teaching at BHS. He’s a Bayonne native who attended Lincoln Community School, Bayonne High School, and New Jersey City University.
But when he was doing an internship at the high school in the history department, he asked to accompany the students on a class trip to Colonial Williamsburg, a trip that sowed the seeds for his interest in teaching through reenactments.
History R Us
“It’s not just my reenactments that draw students into a deeper study of history,” Woods says. “The greatest focus in all the classes I teach is inclusiveness and social justice. I show all my students that they are and can be a part of history. I stress the fact that the smallest act can make a difference. I truly believe that when students can see themselves and people like them in the history of the world, then they become invested in learning. Engaging my students through a variety of sources in which women, African-Americans, Muslims, LGBT people, Latin Americans, and teenagers make contributions in changing the world is a major part of my classroom. This, I believe, is the reason that my students learn to love history.”
It’s especially important, he says, to get girls involved because women have largely been left out of the historic record.
“I’ve always been interested in history, but in time, I went on to become more interested in social justice, looking into the Holocaust and the Civil Rights movement,” he goes on. “I became more intrigued with the study of human nature.”
Kudos from Kids
Woods’s innovative teaching methods are a hit with students. Bassant Atia, a 17-year-old senior, recalls a class in which Woods sang “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” and dressed up as an impoverished person selling apples. The historic period was the Great Depression. Mr. Woods, she says, “brought everything to life. I wasn’t experiencing it, but I was experiencing it.” During a D-Day reenactment, she says, one of the students dressed as a medic.
Atia plans on majoring in English but will again take Woods’s class as an elective. “It absolutely is helpful,” she says. “It taught me ways to look further into what we were reading, to do my own research and argue my opinions. It widened the way I perceive things, definitely.”
Alaa [Her full name] agrees that Woods “brings history to life, while other teachers use boring PowerPoints. The room is filled with flags, and you feel like you’re a part of it. Reenactments help us to get involved instead of just sitting and watching.”
Alaa acknowledges that “History is not my best subject, but in his class he made me feel comfortable. He’s really inspiring.” Alaa, a senior, plans to study clinical lab science in college but will take Woods’s “Facing History and Ourselves” course, studying the Holocaust and genocide.
Another student who claims she was not good at history is Emily Cubilete, who took history from Mr. Woods her junior year. “I was never good at it. I always got Cs. He took the time and had the patience to make sure students got it. I fell in love with the class and history itself.”
Her senior year she took “Facing History and Ourselves.” She says, “I didn’t have to take it but chose to because of him. I stayed after class and asked more questions.”
Cubilete benefited from Woods’s philosophy of inclusiveness. “I learned that I had something to do with history, not just people in the past,” she says.
Now at Kean University in Union, she switched from Psychology to Women’s Studies, largely because of what she’d learned in her BHS history classes. She says she learned to stand up to evils such as racism, sexism, and domestic violence, and to stand for social movements like feminism and civil rights. Woods calls it being an “upstander.”
Hands-On History
An important topic of Woods’s class is the grim legacy of the Holocaust. Woods has taken students to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.
Woods himself visited many of the infamous death camps during a seminar in the summer of 2013.
The Majdanek concentration and extermination camp in Lublin, Poland, made an indelible impression on Woods. In a thank-you letter for a grant from the New Jersey Education Association he received for the trip, he wrote, “We were allowed to walk around the memorial. Within this gigantic structure lay a large crevice that contained the ashes and bone fragments of those who were murdered at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators within the confines of Majdanek. Walking around the tomb and seeing the bones within the ashes while passing by the plethora of flowers and candles left in honor of all the victims was the most powerful part of this journey for me.”
It is this kind of experience that Woods seeks to recreate for his students.—Kate Rounds