Racism

I'm not really sure how helpful the movie we watched today was. In the first place, I don't think anyone seated in our classroom would ever exhibit the type of overt racism demonstrated by that teacher. We have grown up in a multi-cultural society and have had a great deal of training in not being racist. That's not to say that we are free of prejudice and free of any attitudes that may adversely affect our students, just that I don't see any of us berating our students and calling them 'stupid indians' or anything. Therefore, I'm not sure how helpful that particular video was as a learning tool for us. It may have been better to focus on the inadvertent ways in which we may disadvantage minority students in our science classes and discuss ways to avoid that. I didn't really appreciate the lack of time for discussion of the video either as many of us were bothered by her methods and by various aspects of the video and it would have been good to have a chance to talk about it. In the end, the group of us that have chemistry after our class ended up discussing the video for the first 10mins of that class as we needed a debrief time. Thankfully Sarah was willing to tolerate our discussion as we cut into her class time a little. Next year, if I were you I would either not show the video or cut the intro down to 20mins so there would be time afterwards for discussion. Its just not a video you can watch without talking about it as that's really the whole point.