Martin Luther King, Jr. Assembly
Middle School and Upper School students participated in separate activities to discuss race in honor of MLK Day.
During an assembly in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Middle School focused on the civil rights movement. Each grade watched a video and then reflected through guided discussion. The 6th grade focused on MLK and his "I Have a Dream" speech; the 7th grade focused on the March on Washington; the 8th grade focused on the "separate but equal" school issue back in the 1950s.
In the Upper School, each grade listened to a podcast called "Six Words: 'With Kids, I'm Dad. Alone Thug'" about an African American man who is married to a Caucasian woman and how he feels that he is treated differently when he is with his family versus when he is alone. After listening to the short podcast, students were asked to reflect on three questions in small groups. The first asked them to identify the problem discussed in the podcast; the second asked to what extent they feel that they or people they know are treated differently due to race; the third asked how this discussion related to recent events in the news. The group discussions were controlled in a way that gave each person in the group a certain amount of time to speak and share with the group. At the end, we came back together as full classrooms to discuss the whole experience.