Comments on for the love of learning: The folly of artificial and arbitrary recognition

I'm actually glad that my school never had any...

2012-01-16T20:34:45.407-07:00

I'm actually glad that my school never had anything as stupid as the TurkeyTrot. The closest we do come, however, is the Terry Fox run in which we're the ones earning the profits. I've always hated the segregation that comes with physical activity taught in schools.

Mark Barnes, your story reminds me of a video we w...

2012-01-16T01:50:32.149-07:00

Mark Barnes, your story reminds me of a video we watched in Social Studies about the "Brown Eyes Blue Eyes" experiment done by a Grade 3 teacher.

On the first day of the experiment, the Grade 3 teacher told the class that people with one of those eye colours (I can't remember exactly, I think it was blue eyes) was superior to people with the other. She also said that brown-eyed students weren't allowed to play with blue-eyed students and so on. During that day, the students with blue eyes performed better than the brown-eyed students overall.

The next day, the roles were reversed, and the brown-eyed students performed better than the blue-eyed students.

At the end of the day, the teacher spoke to the class about racism and how skin colour, like eye colour, don't really matter and no colour is better than another. Then everyone had a big group hug and resolved never to exclude anyone for trivial reasons again.

This may be an extreme example, but in the movie, ...

2012-01-15T09:06:58.469-07:00

This may be an extreme example, but in the movie, The Wave, based on a true story, a teacher re-creates Nazi Germany in the classroom by getting his students to conform to a new and unique community -- at least that's what they believe. They behave differently and ultimately wear badges on their arms that identify them as part of this special group. Only after weeks of perceived superiority do the kids learn a valuable lesson.

I'm glad your students left the hats on the floor. Perhaps they learned the lesson much more quickly.