I Have A Dot On My Forehead

Tonight during our Ed. Psych class we participated in a very interesting activity. We were told that we needed to close our eyes and that someone would be coming around and would touch our foreheads. After this had taken place we realized that each of us had a dot sticker on our foreheads and that there were three different colors of dots…blue, yellow, and red. We were then instructed to “Find our groups” but there was a catch…we were not to speak or use sign language. We proceeded to group ourselves according to color of dot. After doing so, we easily discovered that there were many more people with blue dots than with red, and especially than with yellow. The people who had blue dots were instructed to sit in the very back of the room, red dots in the middle and yellow in the front. Each of the color groups were then presented with a plate of Oreo’s. The yellow group, which had three people, was given a huge plate of cookies, many more than they could possibly have eaten, the red group was given a plate that had enough for each of them to have one cookie, and finally the blue group was given about eight cookies to split between about 20 students. Then our evening lecture continued with a student group presenting on Randy Pausch’s book “The Last Lecture”. After the group had finished presenting, it was time to discuss what we had learned from the dot activity. First of all how and why did we divide ourselves by color? We were all walking around with dots on our foreheads, that was something that we could have grouped ourselves by but we didn’t, we automatically moved into color groups because that is what we knew was expected of us, we have all been taught from a young age exactly how to put ourselves into groups based on our differences. We then went on to discuss how those people with blue dots sat and chatted during our classmates presentation, while the yellow dot people who were right up front paid attention to the entire project with out a problem. We discussed how multiple teachers have already predetermined their student’s grades about two weeks into the class, and how easy it is to make this mistake, even with the best intentions to do otherwise. Where is the line between grading the student based on a specific assignment, and grading the student based on their previous aptitude, or possibly the aptitude of other students in the class? I think this was an excellent activity and it definitely made me think about the fine line between making your students understand that you are grading their assignments and not grading them as people. Excellent activity, I really want to remember this one because I think that you could probably change a few of the objectives to demonstrate a concept like racism, or classism. Great Lecture, Point Taken!!!