Secondary Kindness

What did you learn best in school?  Literature?  Algebra?  Physics?  These subjects, along with many others, get pushed down students' throats as teachers desperately attempt to improve their students' intellects and future prospects, but we produce intelligent, callous members of society when we forget to teach one thing:  kindness.  Now, for a Kindergarten teacher, kindness might be an easy subject to teach.  Kids can sing songs about manners and play games about courtesy.  But how can we teach this seemingly simple subject to secondary grades?

In my classroom the past two years, I have assigned a personal narrative speech to my tenth-grade students, but this personal narrative focuses not on an event in the distant past, but in the present.  I push my students to commit a random act of kindness -- whether leaving a plate of cookies outside someone's door, delivering flowers to a nursing home, or leaving encouraging notes on fellow students' lockers.  Then they must tell the story for their classmates to hear.

Some students take an easy approach and clean their parents' houses.  Some may argue that they should help with the cleaning already, but hey -- it's a start.

Other students try to impress the teacher.  I received cookies, crackers, and even a live fish during this unit.  Some may argue that these students had shallow motives, but the cookies and crackers tasted delicious, and I still have the fish in my classroom to this day.  Teachers deserve a little attention now and then!

Then we come to the students who creatively carried this assignment to fruition.  One student handed out bubbles to over twenty small children as they left their elementary school.  Another taped dollar bills to a vending machine and recorded people's reactions as they suspiciously eyed the money.  These stories, along with the others, held every student's attention as they laughed about the awkward encounters but realized how easy it can be to make a difference in someone's day.

Growing older doesn't have to mean that we give up our innocent enthusiasm for kindness and spreading joy.  Kindergarten kids, high-school teenagers, and even middle-aged teachers could use a little reminder that a smidgen of kindness can turn a bad day around.

--The Bigger Desk

P.S. If you are interested in trying this assignment for yourself, feel free to check out the assignment sheet and rubric that I used in my classroom here.