I played this game as an icebreaker with the 6th graders today – Day 1 of “media literacy” as part of the Health Curriculum. Each person has to give three statements about themself, two that are true and one that’s a lie. The others have to guess which is a lie. For instance, I said:
I was born in Rhode Island.
Dogs are my favorite pets.
I go to school in Massachusetts.
Can you guess? 🙂 Anyway, the kids have fun with it and so did I. However, one “truth” threw me (and the teacher). He (the teacher) recovered and tried to save it but we’d already missed the moment and agreed we’ll have to come back to it. One boy shared, “My sister died.” When he said it, I had an odd reaction – like, that’s not something someone would joke about it, and when one of the kids guessed that was the lie and he said, “No, it’s true” there was a bit of a silence. Then a kid guessed one of the other statements correctly…we started to move on. A kid said, “Did your sister really die?” He said, “yeah”….bit of a silence, then the teacher shared his sister had died too but the next kid (at my request) was starting to share their three statements.
I was too caught off guard. We “should” have dealt with it as we had some of the other topics that came up, by asking who else had lost a sibling or member of their family, but somehow it was shocking in comparison with the other kinds of statements. Anyway, the teacher and I agreed that we’d come back to it at some point.
Wow, that’s really intense. When Angela and I did our media literacy project in Turners Falls, we had a few of those types of moments that we didn’t exactly know how to handle. One student made a comment about her dad hitting her mom. We ended up reporting it the school counselor (she was also our entry point into the school). When are you planning on going to Hannah’s school? My schedule is really crazy this semester, but maybe we could figure something out. Also, Chris Boulton from the new cohort is really interested in media literacy, and he might be interested as well.