The Misfits: Acceptance in the Classroom

I was 11 once and I remember the assemblies I was forced to attend on diversity, bullying, discrimination.  Things I experienced every day.  Junior high is not easy, kids can be mean and it is easy to get caught up in the name calling, pulling down others just to keep your head above water.  Even though these are real problems for kids name calling and verbal harassment seemed too complicated and covert to be "bullying" and as soon we walked out of those assemblies everything went back to the way it was.  "The Misfits" presents a great message of how 'you are not defined by the names people call you' at a time when this is often seems to be the case.  However if there is a message I would want my students to walk away with after reading the story it is one of acceptance and the complexity of people when you take the time to really learn who they are.

The people in Bobby's life undergo a number of transformations in his eyes  from his father to "Mr.Killerman".  He realizes there is a lot more to getting to know someone than how they appear and everyone deserves to be looked at as a whole person.  To stop name calling, harassment and bullying we need to start on a personal level on an everyday basis.  Lectures, assemblies and pamphlets are not going to solve the problem because it runs deeper than that.  Telling a child that it is wrong to call someone a "fag" is not going to stop them, children attack others because of their own insecurities or misunderstandings.  I will teach acceptance and understanding of others in my classroom be being a living model of these behaviors every day and addressing individual instances.  I would use "The Misfits" to show how people who look or act different are just like you on many levels when you get to know them.  The book does a wonderful job of representing children who would often be "misfits" because of how they appear and giving such a personal insight into their characters that they are very relatable.  I will have an open environment in my classroom so children do not feel threatened because of who they are and are not afraid to ask questions about what they do not understand.  When reading the book as a class I would create activities around putting yourself in the position of different characters.  This would be easy because we are given so much detail about them and students could reflect on how they might see the world or respond to various situations from that persons shoes.  I might then expand this to classmates and have students do in depth investigations on other classmates and try to write a credo for them, as they would want to be seen.   This would be a great opportunity to get to know classmates on a deeper level when we often do not make it past surface knowledge. 

I might actually take the no-name sign strategy directly from the book.  By having these verbal attacks clearly posted around the school students in the story were constantly  aware of what they were saying.  It is easy use names and not take them seriously but they have meaning for the person on the receiving end and the signs made the students think about that.  They also devalued the power behind the words.  Words only have power when you give them power and by displaying these often taboo words they no longer held the same power.  The signs seemed to call the students out on their actions and take away their power.