Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue

When I was in 5th grade in the Henrico county school system, we had two high school students come and visit our classroom once a week to "teach" us something. At least that was their goal. We never thought of it as a lesson, though. To us, it was an hour a week where we got to hang out with High School kids, and that was cool. The organization the students belonged to was called S.O.D. A. ( Student Organization for Developing Attitudes) I knew from that moment on when I got to High School, I wanted to participate in that organization, and I did. My junior and senior year of high school I was on a SODA team that went to elementary schools, specifically 5th grade classes to "teach" When you become part of SODA, you are given   reference material that has several examples of lessons to use with your class. Most are activities that all have underlying themes to teach the right attitudes toward ourselves and others. One of the ones I remember was "Warm Fuzzies/Cold Pricklies" My partner and I made little fuzzy characters with google eyes and had a bag of the prickly "gumballs" that fall from trees. Each student was given 1 of each, and asked to describe what holding each one felt like. Then we would talk about our words and how they can be just like warm fuzzies or cold pricklies, and how we should speak to each other with kindness. You get the idea. We had a lesson like that one each week through the whole school year. By far, the most powerful lesson we ever did, was the Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes lesson. My partner and I came into the classroom as we had done each week, and without any explanation, we asked all the children with Brown eyes to raise their hands. My partner then asked them to line up at the door, and he took them outside. The blue eyed group stayed in with me. In a fairly stern voice, I told them all to take out a piece of paper. Questions were asked where the other group was going. I told them they were going outside to play. When questioned further about why they couldn't go, I told them it was because they had blue eyes. They had to stay in and do work. Harsh warnings of "NO TALKING!" were given. The Blue eyes were treated less than nice. Both my partner and I were active in our school's theatre department, so we played it to the hilt. After 20 minutes or so, we reversed the groups and they were given the same treatment. The children came back in and then we all discussed how they felt when they were the group being kept inside. No one said they liked the way they were treated. I'm sure you have figured out that this was a lesson on discrimination. That was back in 1981, a time that was past the civil rights movement and huge strides had been made, but it was still a powerful lesson about being treated differently for being different. There is a video floating around Facebook right now of a classroom teacher, Jane Elliott, who created and did this exact experiment with her third graders ( all white) back in the 1960's in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

I watched it today. There are parts that actually made me cry as you see the looks on the faces of the students who are being discriminated against. I did not know that the SODA lesson I was teaching 20 years later actually began when I was a child myself. I'm sure these children's lives were changed after what Miss Elliott taught them or better yet let them see, firsthand, what it was like to be treated as a lesser person, to be called stupid or slow just because you were different. Some groundbreaking events are happening this week that deal with exactly this issue. We should all be ashamed of ourselves that the highest court in the land needed to tell us the simple truth that Miss Elliott tried to teach her third graders in 1964 and I tried to teach my SODA students in 1981, that we should all be treated the same, equally, no matter what our differences are. What color are your eyes?