For our last lesson in this rotation, we discussed prejudice and how getting to know others keeps us from making prejudgments about others. I started the lesson by making an (hypothetical) announcement to the class: Students born in August, September, October, November and December will be able to continue going to recess; however students with birthdays later in the school year will need to start staying in during recess to work on math because they are younger. Because they are younger, these students probably aren't as good at math so they need extra time to work. After the announcement, I asked students for their responses. Many students felt upset and said that it wasn't fair.
I agreed with the students that what I had said wasn't fair, and told them that I had made that judgment without really knowing anything about their math skills or checking any of the grades for the students. Next, we talked about what it means to have prejudice, where people judge or form an opinion about a person before knowing him or her. We spent the remainder of the lesson talking about a video we watched about two students: Kaden and Miguel. The two students were not friends, but the two ended up waiting together for their parents to finish working (their parents worked at the same place). We talked about how the two boys were different: They look different, Miguel is from another country, they have different friends, Miguel is new to the school, Miguel is shy and Kaden isn't. These differences were very apparent in the video.
Then, we talked about ways the two boys were similar. We were able to determine several similarities between the boys: they're in the same class, their parents work in the same place, they both like sports. Once we had determined that the boys had some things in common, we talked about why they probably weren't friends: they have different groups of friends, they don't know they have things in common, they like different things. We talked about the importance of having differences and what would happen if we were all exactly the same (the world would be pretty boring!). We talked about how our differences make us more interesting, and how having differences allows us to learn from one another.
We watched the conclusion of the video clip, which showed the two boys finding out they had a lot in common. After the video, we decided that Kaden and Miguel could be friends. We talked about how learning about each other allowed the boys to become friends, and how important it is to get to know someone before making judgments about them. We ended our lesson with an activity where students took turns answering questions with a partner and learning what they had in common.
