Extra Credit Assignment

A few weeks ago when I entered the classroom, two women were standing in the front of the class and introduced the discussion about the importance acknowledging bullying. They made each of us put on name tags and make a circle out of the chairs. From that point, we had to stand up, say what our names were and then we had to answer a question about ourselves. The question was: If you really knew me, you would know______. My answer was that if you really knew me, you’d know that I actually like animals more than I like people. When we went around the circle, I was really surprised to hear everyone’s different answers. It was cool because I found out I had a lot more in common with my classmates than I had originally thought. After the introduction, we were asked what we considered bullying to be. On the board we listed a few things we considered bullying. A few examples were cyber bullying, verbal bullying, non-verbal bullying, sexual harassment, physical bullying, racial bullying, emotional bullying, and even something I never considered bullying until that day, ignoring people. I ignore people more often than I should, to either put off a situation or to not cause conflict, so this exercise really opened up my eyes. On the floor was two pieces of red duct tape the girls layed out earlier. They asked us to pick a side and stand on it. They asked us a series of questions and if that question pretayned to you, you would step on the line. This exercise also showed me how much I had in common with these people I really don’t know too well. We had a lot of common bullying situations which was nice to see that someone else knows what I had once gone through. They asked us questions like: Have you ever done something illegal? Has someone ever judged you because of what you wear? Have you ever bullied someone? Have you yourself ever been bullied? Have you ever felt like you don’t fit it? These few just a few of the many questions we were asked in this moving exercise. My favorite part of this exercise was when Emily passed out a piece of paper with each of our names written on it. With this paper, each student in the class wrote a nice thing about each person. The papers went around until you ended up back with your original paper. I had comments like: I love your sense of originality. You’re beautiful. You have an awesome smile. It’s simple, kind gestures like these that made me realize how awesome of a class we had. I didn’t find it hard to find something nice about each person in our class which made the exercise much more enjoyable. The purpose of this was to make each individual feel good about themselves, and make everyone realize that we all have a lot more in common than we once thought. I never really realized how good compliments felt before this part of the exercise. The presentation was phenomenal and the two women did an awesome job spreading the message of treating others the way you would like to be treated.