Bridging Friendship on the Titanic

Sometimes school tracking sets students up for failure, academically and socially. My students with disabilities, who require extra academic assistance, often ended up on the short end of the stick. Because they were in all of the same classes together noticed that they also clung to each other in the cafeteria. They had a difficult time fitting in and making friends with other students.

I approached one of my colleagues about mixing her gifted and talented students and my resource room students to work on a project. It was a big, big project—Titanic, in fact.

In a six-week unit centered on the Titanic, we taught both classes about the class structure of society, the unfairness and inequities and the great tragedy that killed more than 1,500 people. We paired students from each of the classes. My colleague and I shared teaching responsibilities.

On the very first day of our joint unit we assigned every student an actual passenger from the Titanic. We made sure we had a good variety of first-, second- and third-class passengers and we set out to study the disaster. Students were reminded to stay in character and to write as if they were actually their assigned passengers.

This lesson offered an opportunity to blend the classes because it was a high- interest subject presented in a format neither class had experienced. Students were so absorbed with who they were in the past that they forgot who they were in the present. The present-day barriers no longer mattered. Students formed new friendships.

Any historical simulation [2] like this one must be handled with sensitivity.

We read plays and survivor accounts. We used film and primary source documents. We wrote narratives, poems and persuasive essays. We studied the clothes, the food and the structure of the ship. We spent six weeks aboard Titanic and in the process everyone made new friends and worked hard. They focused on learning about their Titanic passengers, Mrs. Eleanor Widener or Henry Sleeper Harper.

As the culminating activity, we recreated the last dinner on board the Titanic in our cafeteria. We built a smoking room with a fireplace and a card table and covered all of the windows with golden port holes. We asked parents to help with donations of food and money to offset the expense of the adult meals. Students ate free. We made allowances for families who could not afford to pay.

The 10-course meal included roasted squab (our version was a chicken leg) on wilted cress and potatoes Lyonaisse. Our students sang songs from the Broadway musical about the Titanic, danced the waltz with their parents and read from pieces they had written. They presented facts about the ship, about icebergs and about Victorian society. They wore period costumes. We had well over 100 people, parents and students, all dressed in their finest first-class attire or their immigrant third-class clothing.

We gave each student partial information about their passenger to help them connect to that person. But we withheld their fate and asked the students not to research what happened to them. On the evening of the dinner we read the names of the passengers and revealed whether they survived. We then had a moment of silence as a symbol of respect to the victims.

That night, we crossed many lines. We crossed the lines of time to experience life in the Golden Age of society. We learned that discrimination and segregation existed and was based solely on your status in society. We crossed the lines of school tracking and learned that when given the opportunity to shine, students with learning disabilities can rise to the occasion and surpass their greatest expectations.

We crossed the lines of middle school dynamics and built friendships that transcended the labels of “special education” or “gifted and talented.” We truly experienced a night to remember and learned a titanic lesson about the power of acceptance.

Spain is a middle school language arts teacher in New Jersey.