 I stress to students that we wouldn't just begin a weight training program lifting a fifty pound weight. We would build up to it. So we build up in our classes. We build up in learning about war and human rights violations and death and dying and international criminal law and different cultures views of what it means to be human that may vary from our own. So we build up over time. There are films I show at the end of the class. I would not show at the beginning of the class. So students develop a kind of emotional muscle. They become scholar warriors where they work over time to develop their scholarship and to develop the insight to know the road signs on the way to genocide, to recognize the denial, the blaming of the victim, the sense that it wasn't such a terrible thing that occurred or the simple wanting to deny it entirely and ignore that it occurred or to blame ancient ethnic hatreds or environmental competition rather than realize that an aspect of being human is that we can all under the right circumstances commit these kinds of crimes that no one is immune to either the committing of the crime or having the crime committed and being a part of that whether it's immediate or in the long term affecting international politic and ruled relations and what goes on in life in Bellingham and their own lives. So we build up over time. We try to avoid compassion fatigue and based upon my own experience in struggling with the material and struggling with the emotional fallout of the material and listening to students, listening to students tell me that they almost reach a time in the class and particularly in the war on human rights class where they begin to question basic human goodness that they had always taken for granted. And so on hearing them and knowing of my own struggles with the material, I have a few recommendations that I always offer on how to take care of themselves to consider their health throughout the quarter, to try and eat right, to try and go out, to have some fun, to incorporate exercise, all of the healthy living styles, but also to stop reading this material to stop studying the horror after eight o'clock at night so it doesn't affect them. This works for me. If I think that I can handle more and I go on, there are repercussions eventually. So I tell them my story about working with the material and I tell them it's important to have human connections during this kind of work, to have people they love and if they struggle with the material to tell us to work with each other in the classroom. And I let them know that there isn't anything that they feel or they would experience in relation to the material that I haven't experienced as well, but I haven't gone through as well. We talk about it, but we don't move away from it or try to ignore it or put it aside in such a way that we don't want to come back. But we try to avoid compassion fatigue because it doesn't allow us to continue and we want to continue this work for the sake of the work and to grow stronger. Everyone has things in their life which are difficult. And no one is shielded from the facts of death and suffering. And by involvement with the subject matter, students develop a kind of strength and a very specific knowledge which is helpful to them. I have students still today post me that they had taken one of the classes earlier and it's applicable in their lives at this moment. A student will say someone in their family died and the family didn't know what to do. They turned to the student because they've had a class on death and dying. That someone is in a situation where they are dealing in their own life, in their work, in their further education, with issues of human rights abuses, with issues of justice, and they have the skills now in order to do the research, in order to have the strength to be able to articulate how they feel and what can be done.