Angel Girls

All week, I've been teaching an empathy lesson to the second graders. We've watched a short video called "But Names Will Never Hurt Me", which is about a girl who's made fun of and left out because she's overweight. Although there are some sad parts, of course it has a happy ending, with all the mean kids learning an important lesson about bullying and inclusion. After the video, we've had important discussions about what we can learn from the show. Well, the class I taught this afternoon had three different girls who had very insightful comments, which I'll try to share accurately.

In the video, the main character, Rebecca, was being bullied. Her dad had died in a plane crash two years earlier, but most of the children didn't know that. One of my teaching points was that we can't look at people and know what kinds of problems they've had to deal with in their lives, so we need to be gentle with everyone and treat them with respect. In response to this point, a curly-haired child with a sprinkling of freckles raised her hand and said, "It's like you're holding a glass ball in your hands. You need to protect it and be very careful with it, or you could break it."

Another little girl, this one with long thick hair and a gap-toothed smile, said, "You know how you hear that some people have hearts of stone and some have hearts of gold? Well, the bullies had hearts of stone and the bystanders who helped Rebecca had hearts of gold."

As I was packing up to leave, a chubby golden haired child gave me a hug and said, "Miss Mimi, I wish you could be the teacher of everybody in the whole world. You could teach them how to take belly breaths and calm down so they wouldn't do mean things to people."

I'm always happy to have a funny or sweet incident occur at school, as these remarkable moments make my day, but today I was blessed to have three wise and compassionate comments happen in the very same class.