The Wave Essay Example

The book The Wave by Morton Rhue is a fiction story but is based on an incident that occurred in a high school in Palo Alto, California. In the book, history teacher Ben Ross shows a movie to his high school class about Germany while studying World War Two. After a series of questions after the movie, Ross conducts an experiment to roughly explain the cruel behavior of the German Nazis during the Holocaust. He starts an organization called the Wave in his class that spreads rapidly throughout the school. Laurie Saunders, one of Mr. Ross' students, is against the Wave and believes that it is controlling the majority of the school, who are forming a huge group dedicated to recruiting new Wave members and following the rules set up by Mr. Ross. Mr. Ross gets in trouble when the Wave turns violent against the non-members. Ross then explains to the members how they have absent-mindedly let someone control their decisions, just like the Nazis following the commands of Adolf Hitler. The Wave is a thought-provoking book that is full of surprising events that continue until the end. Laurie Saunders is a girl in high school that has Mr. Ross as her history teacher. While studying World War Two in his class, she does not to understand how so many Nazis could slaughter millions of people without even trying to fight back at Hitler's demands. Even though her teacher tries to explain her question to Laurie, she still fails to understand. Mr. Ross is surprised that even he did not fully understand his own answer to Laurie's question. Because of this, he decides to try an experiment on his class. The next he introduces the Wave to the class. The Wave is an group that Mr. Ross uses to teach his class but the Wave becomes an organization spreads throughout the school and soon, Laurie and a few other kids are the only students left that have not been brought into the group. Laurie is against the Wave, and writes about how the Wave has influenced the school into joining a kind of