Oppenheimer, along for a show and tell

Mention the name Robert Oppenheimer to someone who’s English is their L1, and you’ll get a multiplicity of responses. Getting a comparable response from a student where English is their L2 or even L3 then it would take some priming to do, if at all. The boys (at a boys high school, of course!) knew some of what he did, and took sometime to think of an answer.

The planners of the English room or ‘어l학실’ had the good foresight to project the screen onto the whiteboard. This suited me just fine. Putting the picture up, I asked them the question, “What did he help make?”. Silence.

Atomic bomb falling towards Hiroshima should be sans ‘briefcase’.

Beside the picture of Robert Oppenheimer, I drew a crude rendering of the Fat man atomic bomb, the one that was dropped on Japan. To add to the drawing I also drew an airplane and under the now falling A-bomb I wrote HIROSHIMA*. Plain enough, and this was sufficient to elicit the right answer. Easy when you know how.

To add to the name, I also stated that the dropping of the A-bomb had lead to the ending of  World war two. The responses in some classes was “He’s a hero”. I hesitated to add that because of his extra-curricular activities with the Communist groups at university, he was accused of being a Communist and his security level access revoked by the American government. An odd turn of events for an apparent ‘hero’.

* Edit: Mistakes in research are made at times; the atomic bomb that is depicted in the sketch was in fact dropped on Nagasaki and not Hiroshima, but point made and TL elicited.