Thursday, November 12th 2010
Its dark and pretty cold outside.12pm in room 214, my American National Governments class, which I’m possibly failling.2/3 of the class, decided it’s too cold to come to class today. My teacher Melissa, who is a new teacher this year, starts the class a bit differently. First she wore clothes my sexy best friend for 7 years would wear and she didn’t look that bad. Second she gave us a handout that had 4 questions on it:
1: why did the teacher conduct this experiment?
2: what were the blue eyed student’s privileges?
3: what were the brown eyed students forbidden to do?
4: why did the teacher do this experiment?
The title on the paper was 'A Class Divided' I never heard of it. Third she told us that we will be watching a video and we will be answering these 4 questions. I thought great a crappy movie when I could be at home sleeping. How ignorant I was. The video was made in 1968, and it was about a 3rd grade teacher conducting a simple exercise on her kids.
She wanted to simulate the discrimination on going on in America so she divided her children up based on the color of their eyes, there were blued eyed kids and brown eyed kids.
First since her eyes were blue she said all the blue eyed children were better than the brown eyed children. The blued children were smarter than the brown eyed children and would get 5 minutes extra during recess and could get seconds at lunch. The brown eyed children were not allowed to play with the blued eyed kids and couldn’t use the drinking fountain.
She gave the brown eyed kids a scarf to mark them. And then went about their day as usual, during math, the blue eyed children were faster at getting the answers to the problems while the brown eyed kids were slower and just put their heads down. During recess the brown eyed kids didn’t want to play on the equipment. And they were teased by the blue eyed kids.
The teacher asked why the blued eyed boy teased the brown eyed boy. The boy said because he was better than the brown eyed boy and he wanted to hurt him. The teacher then reversed the order. The brown eyed kids were better than the blued kids. After she ended the exercise she asked the kids why they were slower at math one day and faster another. They told her, their minds were focused on what made them different instead of what was important.
All I could do after the video was smile to myself, a 3rd grade teacher just taught her students about discriminations and showing them how it affects those that are harassed by it in our society and how it hurts them.
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