Videos

http://www.tolerance.org/sites/default/files/general/someone%20else's%20shoes.pdf Empathy Unit Quotes toc

Empathy Quotient
Empathy Quiz (Online) Rules to Live By: Compose rules that you would like others to follow in order to create a community. Sample:

Whose Adjective Is It, Anyway? (Game)
The objectives are to build group member relationships through verbal and nonverbal cue-sensing and effective adaptation to others' displayed emotions through entertaining and nonthreatening skits.

Materials: You will need a timekeeping device. You will also need 20 blank notecards. On these notecards, the group leader will write 20 different adjectives that members will act out. Our suggested list of adjectives is as follows: annoyed, busy, interested, embarrassed, tense, uninterested, jealous, superior, supportive, charming, agreeable, energetic, competitive, aggressive, passive, dramatic, guilty, suspicious, sarcastic, shy

But of course you can adapt your adjectives to your group! Come up with any that might be fun.

In an open space, set the chairs up in a semicircle formation, and allow enough space for two members to act at the front of the room. Have the adjective cards near the front of the room.

First, complete the set of notecards.

Split your group members up into groups of two.

Each group of two takes turns going to the front of the room. When it is their turn, each member picks a card.

Each group has two minutes to act out the adjective on the card, and each member must act out their individual adjectives to each other in the form of a short skit.

The situation that they are acting out is: two friends meeting for lunch.

At the end of the skit, each member of the group of two must guess what his or her partner's adjective was.

After the actors guess each others' adjectives, the audience and the actors can discuss how the actors portrayed their emotions, how they might be misinterpreted, and how to more effectively display that feeling. This is like a short reflection period.

Debrief - This exercise is to help members to pick up on verbal and nonverbal cues, as well as to adapt to others' feelings in a group situation. The reflection is to help each group member improve his or her expression of emotion in a complex situation. This is to help group member identify effective cues, and to better understand how they display their own cues.

This idea comes from the show "Whose Line is it Anyway?" and the idea of guessing how another person is trying to behave. The following skit might help serve as inspiration to the group members.

The way that the audience interacts with the performers is adaptable (for instance, they might also want to score the performers, to create a more competitive game). This activity will still be effective with a slightly larger group. The adjectives are interchangeable. The situation may also be changed by the group leader to a situation that may fit the specific group more effectively (for instance, a business team might want to put their performers in a business situation).

Black/White
Have discussion about stereotypes. What are they, why are they in existence? What groups are often disparaged against? What is often underlying stereotypes? (ignorance). Watch video (black/white racism - 6 1/2 minutes):

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Black/White continued
(6 1/2 minutes) media type="youtube" key="HIVgMvuCM_k" height="349" width="425"

Show me the dumb child
(1:00) media type="custom" key="9385616" width="150" height="150"

Why do you want that skin color?
(5:04) media type="custom" key="9385474" width="150" height="150"

Doll Study Psychologist: Parental Role
(2:15) media type="custom" key="9385708" width="150" height="150"

Interracial Couple Fighting in Park
(4:11) media type="youtube" key="Tnbj5Bc_VWo" height="349" width="425"

Muslims
Teachers talk a little bit about 9/11 - where were you when that happened? What impact did that have on you personally? Ask the students what impact that has had on our world? And finally, to lead into today’s video (~7 minutes), what impact has that had on the Muslim population?

Debunking Misconceptions about Muslims and Islam

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Racism and Illegal Immigration
(8:25) media type="youtube" key="HKKnFwaGJoM" height="349" width="425"

Racist Realtor
(8:30) media type="youtube" key="-ovWSAfu0AQ" height="349" width="425"

Latino Hate Crime
(8:17) media type="youtube" key="ru1F29vuVKI" height="349" width="425"

When Women Abuse Men
(6:28) media type="youtube" key="1hn-wL6hPq8" height="349" width="425"

Special Needs
(8:26) media type="youtube" key="ObkxEXKoklI" height="349" width="425"

Collapse
(7:28) media type="youtube" key="49YQhTLoGuA" height="349" width="425"

Baby in Hot Car
(8:18) media type="youtube" key="saqIf6wIMhc" height="349" width="425"

Overweight Family Humiliated at Grocery Store
(7:18) media type="youtube" key="DuRQUiBttVU" height="349" width="560"

Out-of-Control Soccer Coach
(8:04) media type="youtube" key="kZmxirK9hWY" height="349" width="560"

Most Typical Face on the Planet
(2:56) National Geographic Magazine released a video clip, below, showing the most "typical" human face on the planet as part of its series on the human race called "Population 7 billion." The researchers conclude that a male, 28-year-old Han Chinese man is the most typical person on the planet. There are 9 million of them.

Don't get used to the results, however. Within 20 years, the most typical person will reside in India. media type="youtube" key="4B2xOvKFFz4" height="349" width="560"

Did You Know?
(4:56) Karl Fisch provides some interesting facts about the world in 2008. media type="youtube" key="cL9Wu2kWwSY" height="417" width="509"

Making the Invisible Visible
Each student should come up with a poster (decorated) that explains something about themselves, cutting through a stereotype. Advisors should do their own first. (e.g., Andrew's idea was to make one that says something to the effect of, "Just because I'm a guy doesn't mean I don't know how to take care of my kids.") Other examples are two blonde girls holding a sign saying "Just because we are BLONDE doesn't mean we are DUMB!", three girls holding a sign saying, "Just because we went to private school, doesn't mean we grew up in a BUBBLE.", a guy holding a sign saying, "Just because I'm BLACK doesn't mean I'm good at basketball. (I'm not.)", a girl with a grumpy face and a sign that says, "I don't actually hate you...this is just my face.", and a guy with a sign saying "Just because I'm gay doesn't mean I know how to decorate." Students should make their own sign, and work with Martin Tucker during an extended advisory to have their picture taken with it. Would be a fabulous display somewhere - maybe along the walls in the A&T building, or outside the theater, or somewhere in the Upper School.


 * Empathy Article: "Nice Girls"**

NYT article for discussion about an encounter on a bus with "Nice Girls."

February 25, 2011

= Nice Girls =

By JOHN MOE
**My daughter Kate** loves horses, her violin and, above all else, her friends. She also happens to have been born with dwarfism, a condition that makes her smaller than other kids. She will always be smaller. Kate’s fine with that. She doesn’t give it much thought, really. But I’ve become increasingly full of dread that her generation of mean girls will eventually stop accepting her for who she is, seize upon her obvious difference and just destroy her. Kate goes to a school in St. Paul that teaches grades 1 through 8 (she’s a second grader), and when I was there for a parent-teacher conference a few months ago, I noticed the older girls traveling in packs, whispering, laughing with mockery at whichever poor victim they were savaging at the time. I didn’t know these girls, but I didn’t like them. Next afternoon, I was riding the No. 63 bus home from work. At the stop after mine, five pretty, well-dressed teenage girls got on and sat right behind me. I wished I hadn’t forgotten my headphones that day because I didn’t want to hear the horrible things these girls were inevitably about to say. They talked nonstop. “Hey, is it O.K. if Rachel comes with us on Friday?” “O.K. But I don’t think I know her. Do I?” “She’s my friend from that summer program. She’s really funny, I think you’d like her.” “Great! I’m looking forward to meeting her!” It seemed to me they actually talked like this. Flattering descriptions and anecdotes about Rachel followed. Miraculously, this conversation was conducted without sarcasm. Was I missing something? Wasn’t Rachel going to be ripped for being five pounds overweight or wearing the wrong shoes? I didn’t turn around, but I leaned back and listened closer. “Sometimes I don’t think I’m as racially sensitive as I should be.” “Well, we all have to work on that. But it’s a huge step to recognize it.” “Thanks!” Down North Smith we rode, past the hospital, up Grand. The girls talked in overlapping bursts and lots of sentence fragments, a little too loudly, but everything was friendly and positive. These weren’t mean girls. These were nice girls. As we passed over the freeway, I capitalized the Nice Girls in my mind to give them a title, to make them a team in the hope they would stay together. I needed them around when Kate got older. Maybe she could join them! Maybe they could get jackets made! “I was so awkward in eighth grade. I didn’t have ANY friends.” “Oh, I felt that way, too. I still do sometimes.” “Me, too, but you have to reach out to people and get to know them. And then they’re really great!” Here I was on the bus, moved almost to tears by the Nice Girls. I wanted to turn around and thank them, tell them how much hope they had given me, tell them how wonderful I thought they were. But I’m 42. I look like [|Michael Douglas] in “Falling Down” but with less hair and a few extra pounds. There is no conceivable scenario in which a guy like me on a bus can talk to girls like that and not have it be creepy, if not directly prosecutable. Especially with tears in my eyes. It’s just not done. So I sat staring straight ahead telling myself://Don’t turn around. Read something on your iPhone. You want to look at them, you want to just smile, but DON’T. IT’S JUST NOT DONE.// “Ohmygodyouguys! We just missed our stop! We have to get off here and walk back!” “Oh, no! We were having too much fun!” There’s a door midway back on the bus, and I was sitting right behind it. The Nice Girls exited directly in front of me through that side door. I watched them go, pretending just to be staring into the middle distance. As the last of them departed, she turned and smiled at me. I did not say what I wanted to say: “I think you’re really great because you give me hope that people will be nice to my daughter later on, and so this is a completely platonic thing and it’s O.K.!” And I did not become a stalker of teenage girls around downtown St. Paul. But the Nice Girls are on my mind whenever I ride that bus, which is nightly. I’ve wanted to hear them talk. I’ve never seen them all together again, though I’ve seen a few of them a handful of times. I might secretly turn down the volume on my headphones, catch a few words and feel ashamed for listening (even though it //is// a bus). But it’s just never the same. John Moe is the host of “Marketplace Tech Report,” which is broadcast on public-radio stations. He lives in St. Paul.

September 22, 2011 =Bullying as True Drama= By DANAH BOYD and ALICE MARWICK

THE suicide of Jamey Rodemeyer, the 14-year-old boy from western New York who killed himself last Sunday after being tormented by his classmates for being gay, is appalling. His story is a classic case of bullying: he was aggressively and repeatedly victimized. Horrific episodes like this have sparked conversations about cyberbullying and created immense pressure on regulators and educators to do something, anything, to make it stop. Yet in the rush to find a solution, adults are failing to recognize how their conversations about bullying are often misaligned with youth narratives. Adults need to start paying attention to the language of youth if they want antibullying interventions to succeed. Jamey recognized that he was being bullied and asked explicitly for help, but this is not always the case. Many teenagers who are bullied can’t emotionally afford to identify as victims, and young people who bully others rarely see themselves as perpetrators. For a teenager to recognize herself or himself in the adult language of bullying carries social and psychological costs. It requires acknowledging oneself as either powerless or abusive. In our research over a number of years, we have interviewed and observed teenagers across the United States. Given the public interest in cyberbullying, we asked young people about it, only to be continually rebuffed. Teenagers repeatedly told us that bullying was something that happened only in elementary or middle school. “There’s no bullying at this school” was a regular refrain. This didn’t mesh with our observations, so we struggled to understand the disconnect. While teenagers denounced bullying, they — especially girls — would describe a host of interpersonal conflicts playing out in their lives as “drama.” At first, we thought drama was simply an umbrella term, referring to varying forms of bullying, joking around, minor skirmishes between friends, breakups and makeups, and gossip. We thought teenagers viewed bullying as a form of drama. But we realized the two are quite distinct. Drama was not a show for us, but rather a protective mechanism for them. Teenagers say drama when they want to diminish the importance of something. Repeatedly, teenagers would refer to something as “just stupid drama,” “something girls do,” or “so high school.” We learned that drama can be fun and entertaining; it can be serious or totally ridiculous; it can be a way to get attention or feel validated. But mostly we learned that young people use the term drama because it is empowering. Dismissing a conflict that’s really hurting their feelings as drama lets teenagers demonstrate that they don’t care about such petty concerns. They can save face while feeling superior to those tormenting them by dismissing them as desperate for attention. Or, if they’re the instigators, the word drama lets teenagers feel that they’re participating in something innocuous or even funny, rather than having to admit that they’ve hurt someone’s feelings. Drama allows them to distance themselves from painful situations. Adults want to help teenagers recognize the hurt that is taking place, which often means owning up to victimhood. But this can have serious consequences. To recognize oneself as a victim — or perpetrator — requires serious emotional, psychological and social support, an infrastructure unavailable to many teenagers. And when teenagers like Jamey do ask for help, they’re often let down. Not only are many adults ill-equipped to help teenagers do the psychological work necessary, but teenagers’ social position often requires them to continue facing the same social scene day after day. Like Jamey, there are young people who identify as victims of bullying. But many youths engaged in practices that adults label bullying do not name them as such. Teenagers want to see themselves as in control of their own lives; their reputations are important. Admitting that they’re being bullied, or worse, that they are bullies, slots them into a narrative that’s disempowering and makes them feel weak and childish. Antibullying efforts cannot be successful if they make teenagers feel victimized without providing them the support to go from a position of victimization to one of empowerment. When teenagers acknowledge that they’re being bullied, adults need to provide programs similar to those that help victims of abuse. And they must recognize that emotional recovery is a long and difficult process. But if the goal is to intervene at the moment of victimization, the focus should be to work within teenagers’ cultural frame, encourage empathy and help young people understand when and where drama has serious consequences. Interventions must focus on positive concepts like healthy relationships and digital citizenship rather than starting with the negative framing of bullying. The key is to help young people feel independently strong, confident and capable without first requiring them to see themselves as either an oppressed person or an oppressor. Danah Boyd is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and a research assistant professor at New York University. Alice Marwick is a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research and a research affiliate at Harvard University.

= = =How to Make a Stress Ball=

media type="youtube" key="zDzNt8PVo8Y" height="315" width="560" media type="youtube" key="IGQmdoK_ZfY" height="315" width="560" = = =Extraordinary People: Synaesthetes= media type="youtube" key="1R_A4tUMOtI" width="425" height="350"
 * The Monkey Business Illusion:**

=Buck Documentary= (in library; 89 minutes)

Prior to watching the film, students can read this article and discuss. [] Pre-Viewing //Buck (//Topics for discussion)

What are some of the advantages of being around animals?

If someone had a troubling childhood, how could working with animals help?

Which is more motivating to you in changing a behavior, sensitivity to why you are behaving that way, or punishment for the way you are behaving?

If you have pets, do you believe you can communicate with them? Do you have an emotional connection to them?

WHAT WOULD YOU DO--Empathy Video Drunken Mother Brings Kid to bar--from ABC News Story: media type="youtube" key="a9fshYHEWmc" height="315" width="560"

Find Out Your Learning Style
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= = =Walking in Someone Else's Shoes Activity= =http://www.tolerance.org/sites/default/files/general/someone%20else's%20shoes.pdf=

=Mix It Up Day: Tolerance at Lunchtime= =http://www.tolerance.org/mix-it-up/what-is-mix=