On Friday (day 3) my teacher asked me to do journal with the kids. It's a pretty easy thing. The kids come in and answer in a paragraph some question that my teacher has written on the board. Fridays was "what do you look forward to in the future and what do you fear about the future." Kids voluteer to share after they have had time to write if they want. Many kids had things to say about this. They look forward to not living with their parents, to having jobs, to getting married, to having kids. They fear being homeless, not having a job, beign alone, and being parents. It was an interesting discussion to have with these 9-12 graders (two of my classes have a mix of grades in them).
Today I did journal again with the same two classes. Todays question "Is doing the right thing its own reward? Explain." Woah. This question led us to some festive discussion. Kids said everything from "only do what you want, don't worry about rewards" to "always do the right thing no matter what because you should." Towards the end though, I had a kid start talking about evil people. He said something along the lines of "Evil people don't start out thinking I want to do something really evil to these other people. They are just thinking I want to do what I want to do, what benefits me. They probably never really meant to be evil in the first place. They just weren't thinking about what would happen to other people, or were more focused on doing what they want." I thought this was insightful and presented a different perspective from ones I had encountered with these particular kids and talking about 'bad' vs. 'good.'
Unfortunately we were out of time and did not get to pursue this course of discussion further. I was really unsure of what to say to them though. No one asked me what I thought, although I did say multiple times that this was a complex and complicated question. In my new role as a teacher, I have no idea what I am supposed to say about things like this.
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