Interesting Experience

I had a very interesting experience the other day in school. I was teaching a lesson on Beowulf. Onviously teaching sixth grade, I had the class read a water down version of the story that appeared in their textbook. I then had the students do a six square activity, in which they folded the paper into six squares and I asked them to draw the most important scenes of the story. The story was pretty vague and didn't include many specifics. In the story there was a slave and in the story the slave didn't have a name. As I said in my earlier posts the class is pretty homogenious when it comes to ethnicity. There is however, one African American student named "D". All of the students drew the scene including the slave. It was interesting to see that all the children drew the slave in a dark color. One student even asked if he could name the slave in his picture "D". At first I felt an incredibly uncomfortable wave pass over me, but then I realized that the children had provided me with an incredible opportunity to teach. I then had them stop drawing and pay attention. I aked the students what they had known about slavery and all of them included African Americans in their explanations in some form or another. I then had the opportunity to tell them that many different cultures and ethnicities had been subjected to slavery at some point or another. I felt that this was an important topic, even though I had not planned to talk about it all.