Building Character
“Never underestimate the power of a single act of
kindness. Your act may just be the added lift that someone needs to go from
falling to flying.”
-Zero Dean
About a year ago, a friend
asked me: “Jen, what do you dislike most about teaching?” In the moment, I said
absolutely nothing. I love every part of it. My passion for teaching blinded me
and made me forget that there is something I dislike. I don’t like that
building character in a classroom takes a back seat to the “rigorous” and “time
consuming” standards that we need to meet as teachers.
In elementary school, kids
are still learning right from wrong. Some children, if not all of them, are not
fully aware of the power words or actions can have on somebody. There’s this
perception that you must fit in or else you’ll be an outcast. Here’s a
question: what’s the criteria for fitting in? This is the problem and what MUST
be addressed in your classroom. John Mays Hammond once said: “Building character
is the real foundation of all worthwhile success.” I love this quote! Building
character is just as important as teaching the curriculum for each subject throughout
your day. Students need to understand the power of their actions as well as the
power of their words.
In my classroom, I launch
character education right away and I start with this idea of belonging.
Everyone wants to feel like they belong, but there’s always a cost to this. You
might have to change your appearance. You might have to change the way you act.
WHY? Why are you doing that?
The video above is one of
the most powerful videos I’ve ever watched in regards to belonging. I’m so
happy a friend from college presented this video for one of her projects. The girl in the video went to all costs to change herself in order to belong!! She first bought the hat because it was the new trend, but then it
didn’t fit. Next, she tries to paint herself the same color as everybody else!
It broke my heart the moment I saw that because that’s what kids are doing
these days! They are changing the way they look in order to fit in. Yet, some “educators” feel that this
PROBLEM doesn’t need to be addressed in the classroom.
It’s critical that these
types of issues are addressed! I have shown this video for each class I’ve
taught (two 5th grade classes, one 3rd grade) Show the video and
then discuss it…
· What did this girl try to do to fit in?
· How does she feel when the things she tries to change about
herself don’t work out?
· Why is she trying to change herself?
I don’t really like the
ending to the video because it shows the girl finding a friend who has the same
color hat. However, the ending can still become a powerful discussion in the
classroom. In all 3 classes, I always asked this question:
Why couldn’t green and red get along?
What did each class say?
NOTHING. That’s the power of building character in your classroom. Each class
didn’t understand why green and red were not getting along. It was simply
because the girl in red didn’t look like those with the green hats. Children
need to have these moments of clarity! Like Martin Luther King Jr. said:
“Intelligence plus character – that is the true goal of education.”
At the beginning of the
2015-2016 school year I read Thank You, Mr. Falker by Patricia Polacco.
At the end of the year, I showed this picture from the same book:
Some of my students were
not being mindful of the words they were saying to other students. So, I
presented the picture and I asked my class: “Who wants to make someone feel
like this?” No one raised their hand.
Words hurt. Nine times out
of ten the reason someone said something hurtful was to fit in. They wanted to
feel like they belonged. It worked, right? You get to go home and feel
accomplished. You said something hurtful and got a positive reaction from your
friends…
…but what about the person you directed your words to? Does that
person simply forget about what was said and move on? No. That person looks
like the above picture and goes home miserable, feeling like absolute garbage.
Then, I asked my class this
question: “Do you want to make someone’s life miserable?” No one raised their
hand.
The cost of making someone
feel excluded is MUCH MORE than the cost of kindness. It can cost a life.
That’s why I feel character education is paramount and must become a part of our curriculum day in and day out.
Here are the two bulletin
boards I use in my classroom. The first picture shown is the one that goes up
first and stays on for a few months. Then, the second picture shown is the one
that stays up for the rest of the year. I am trying to create or find one more
that I can post in the middle of the two I use.
Important note: I did not
create the idea of the boards. I changed or added to them, but all credit goes
to the wonderful people who developed such a fantastic idea! I have included
the name of the people I got the idea from below each picture.
charactercountsin3rdgrade.blogspot.com
This board is a perfect fit to our conversation in the beginning
of the year about belonging. You need to BE YOU in order to belong! J
The idea of this board is
that students will pick a strip at the start of each week and fulfill the act
of kindness. They will write about their experience on Friday. This idea
perfectly relates to the quote I used at the beginning of this post – your act of kindness can
turn someone’s day around in a snap of a finger.
I’ll leave you with this
quote/image I found…always remember to BE YOU!
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