Is There a Lesson You Wish Teaching Tolerance Would Create?

This year I had a very unfortunate yet I fear common interaction with parents and a certain teacher as the first African American PTSO president of our high school. The lack of respect and support from the school and from parents has left me withdrawn and disengaged. I must say, our new Principal and his administration went above and beyond to ensure that things went as smooth as they could, but they were even disrespectful to them in my opinion. My husband and I were very active parents, we are college-educated, and pretty-well rounded people. My background is children's advocacy and underserved populations so I tend to speak for those that are often left unrepresented and looked over.

My experience this year has caused me to fight harder for AGAINST the laid-back school environment. I am tired of schools telling parents that they need us, but only as long its how they want it, and what they feel like they deserve. I am so sick and tired of teachers talking about how hard they work (in the AC all day) with good health benefits, decent salaries, and other fringe benefits, when 60% of our school live at or below the poverty level. I wish you would do a feature on helping schools and parents work together to better serve our children, and teach educators to respect us and our input. Just because they are educators doesn't mean they know what's good for every child, especially those that are of a different race or ethnicity. They stick together even when they know one of their own is wrong.

I refuse to attend another meeting or any school event that I don't have to. I AM OFFICIALLY DISENGAGED in SC! ADD ME TO THE STATISTICS!

I would love some short 10-15 minute lessons that I could use with my homeroom students.

I am not a teacher. I am now retired and worked for years as an oncology nurse and did some volunteer mediation. Nonviolence, problem-solving, communication skills and, of course, tolerance are subjects I still get passionate about.

Working among children is a world all its own. I have experience working with a dozen or so children at a private co-op preschool when my daughter was young. Being around a population of young children sometimes made me think that the world was a much worse and yet a much better place than I ever realized before!

I would like to see well thought out activites and games that would need a small group. Give each student specific traits, interests, guidelines and other instructions to role-play diverse people, families, groups, nations and/or world corporations. Add an international bully or two and let them interact and deal with each other to work on a pre-determined problem. There could be scripts given to each player presenting ground rules, temperament, resourses, etc. Let them form alliances, get to know each other and problem-solve.

OR--

Devise a "plane crash" scenario where the survivors have to work together until rescue arrives. Maybe each child would be assigned roles such as hotel chef, corporate CEO, farmer, housecleaner, child and perhaps someone to play a sick or wounded passenger. Let them use their own individual personalities, talents and abilities to transcend their assigned roles and keep group cohesion paramount so that the basic survival needs (both physical and pyschological) could be employed in useful ways. Allow them to develop and evolve their own "soceity" to start and complete essential important tasks.

I have no idea if or how such ideas could be structured and used for specific classroom situations. My philosophy is that anything is possible; anyone interested in trying these approaches will need to brainstorm and carefully plan the structure and the content.

If these ideas resonate with anyone, let me know. Just to stimulate and challenge my own thinking, I would find it useful to get some critical feedback from those with more classroom experience than myself.

I would like to see articles on Immigration.

We are a non-profit that supports mentors in their relationships with mentees/proteges. Lately, we have developed a series of life skills trainings for mentors and mentees. However, we have decided to offer them to youth at organizations. These life skills training include cultural diversity.

However, the trainings are not successful with students that do not have mentors in the classroom with them.

I would like some short but interactive cultural diversity exercises, games, etc. for very active elementary and middle-age students. The cultural diversity such as a multicultural bingo game, exercises about respect and a exercise that provides the students an opportunity to learn about each others' backgrounds. These do not work within a class of loud, noisy and talkative middle-schoolers. We want to provide the students with cultural diversity training that they can understand and engage in with creativity.

I work with a variety of ages of children. I primarily deal with children who have qualified for special education in some way. I think it would be great if we could have a lesson designed for younger children (preschool, kinder) and older kids that just kind of helped to promote acceptance and appreciation from an early age. It is so much easier to start little and have it be a theme so that by middle school/junior high it is the new "normal" that we are more understanding and tolerant of our differences. Something that is a short, recurrent theme so we don't use it during "cultural awareness month" or "black history month" but part of our daily routine. Promoting the variety of differences: racial, ethnic, socio-economic, gender, appearance, would be great. A hispanic boy in a wheelchair who appears in a lesson but isn't the focus. just soft, gentle exposures to a more reflective reality.

How about something dealing with intolerance towards those with physcial disablilities??? I have been using Teaching Tolerance with the at risk youth that I work with for the past 8 years and I love it!!! I would like to have something more structured to provide to them on physical disablilities and maybe learning disablilities.

Oh, and a personal side note . . . I love Gandhi!! If you need an amazing civil rights activitist, who has inspired many, I think a feature on Gandhi would be great.