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Posted: October 16, 2019By Enuel Matthew Caraballo, Elementary School Teacher
As a man who works in the field of education, I would recommend that students in elementary school be taught Overcoming Obstacles Curricula Grades 3-5 Lesson 2: Empathy. I recommend this lesson so students may be able to avoid a situation similar to what happened to me in middle school.
When I think back to my middle school days, the one image that comes to mind is the gym locker room. I can’t think of a single happy memory. I remember the mornings, dreading going to school because it was gym day. It was not because I was not active—on the contrary, I love playing sports! It was what happened after every gym class that I did not enjoy. After gym class, a group of boys would harass me because of the way I smelled. The group would call me names which they would later try to get the rest of the school to use, and some would even get physical.
I mean, in my head it made sense. During the facilitated sports like floor hockey, football, and baseball, I played with all my energy and gave every class my very best. So naturally, I would sweat. However, I sweated so much that my shirt was drenched; it was as if I had just taken a shower.
My ever so simple solution to this problem was to change my shirt and put on a new one. After I did that, I would spray a body spray all over myself and thought that I smelled like one of the popular kids in television ads. Unfortunately, I was wrong and learned this the hard way.
After gym class, we had lunch and then math class. In math class, we had to sit in pairs because that’s how desks were arranged. But no one would sit next to me. The only way someone would sit next to me was if my teacher ordered me to sit next to someone or vice versa.
The thing was, I had no idea what I was doing wrong. Every day after gym, the boys would harass me for my smell and even when I thought I had fixed the smell, no one would sit next to me in class.
What I had finally come to learn was that by using the body spray on top of my foul odor, I was enhancing the stench instead of eliminating it. But how was I supposed to learn this? I had no father figure at home to teach me proper hygiene. It was only after three years of being bullied in middle school that I finally learned how to use deodorant properly.
So, why do I recommend the Overcoming Obstacles Curricula Grades 3-5 Lesson 2: Empathy? It has two very important objectives: 1) Students will be able to explain why it is important to be empathetic toward others; and, 2) Students will be able to express how someone would feel in various presented scenarios. The activity sheet, Empathy Scenario Cards, is great because it puts students in different situations and then asks them what they would do. The teacher is then able to facilitate a discussion around empathy. If that group of boys was able to understand even slightly how I felt, then perhaps we could have had a conversation instead of their bullying me.
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