No Time For Aggressive Blunder

What life lessons have you learned to best handle hatred intentions?

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that.” (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.)

As the Palestinian/Israeli and Ukrainian/Russian conflicts  continue to drag on, one wonders what it will take for “cooler heads” to prevail. So on this solemn Memorial Day tomorrow  when we honor millions of soldier deaths in battle, I offer the following story of children embracing actions of peace rather than war in handling a real life crisis. 

No Time For Aggressive Blunder

Ms. Gordon, knew from experience that the end of the school year in this inner city environment would again present a difficult challenge. Many of the  5th grade students in her self contained, gifted class the week before Memorial Day seemed to be growing edgy as student absences escalated, and she seemed to struggle more with getting them to line up quietly for lunch at noon. When several fights broke out outside her classroom last week, she knew that something drastic needed to be done.

She thus felt that changing the dynamic of student communication would help ease the impending crisis of classroom management that she currently faced. So she decided to shake up her curriculum and turn to role play as an effective way to handle such pupil tensions. Over the holiday weekend then, she pasted full length, photo profiles of ten people exhibiting a variety of physical appearances on sturdy poster boards. Eight of those individuals included a nurse, fireman, mother with baby and other figures of a more positive light. The other two would depict the obvious threatening images of a bare chested robber with mask holding a loaded gun and a scowling wrestler flexing his bulging biceps to arouse a raucous crowd. 

On Tuesday morning, Ms. Gordon’s students seemed quite interested that these large, human display boards sat conspicuously in front of the classroom. So the time seemed right for Ms. Gordon to introduce her role play lesson. She first chose ten students randomly to each grab a poster and then write their first name in large letters on the top. She furthermore revealed to them that sometime in the afternoon, they would be asked to perform an imagined skit together with their poster board images nearby in mind. In accepting this learning challenge, the chosen ten pupils would need to watch a short action video depicting a family locked in a tightly secured room filled with booby trap bombs, double locked doors/windows  and the uncertain return of enemy intruders. Their job would thus involving acting out a suitable plan of escape.

Sadly, when her class returned from lunch that day, she noticed that the two poster board figures of the robber and wrestler were gone from the room. Two of the students assigned to the role play would ultimately confess to her that they’d pulled a prank to hide these poster boards in the stall of a nearby restroom. Upon prompt return of the missing items to the classroom, Ms. Gordon then made a quick yet risky decision. She would assign the two theft culprits as punishment to play the  villainous roles of the robber and wrestler in the skit. But she had no way of knowing how each of them might react in live action to atone for their previous guilty actions!

So as this role play lesson proceeded, would the chosen ten desire to make peace or harbor hostility in handling this room dilemma?  With peer pressure a significant presence then, as well, would the group feel too ill at ease to perform at all? How excited Ms. Gordon thus felt then when  ALL ten of these students acted in mass to de-escalate the impending crisis by calmly resolving to defuse  the bombs and devise a timely exit strategy to escape from this imprisoned  setting in an entirely non-violent way. Notably the two disobedient pupils despite being tempted to play their  “bad guy” roles on stage in the skit seemed to have learned an important lesson that cooperation not confrontation made best sense at the time.