So the woods can be scary for city kids. This should not be too surprising. Only 2 weeks in I have already been asked countless times "Can it bite? Is it poisonous?" and had students refuse to touch anything that is "gross" which is anything not made of plastic for some. A harvestman drew a chorus of blood curdling screams from the girls in my Stanley Clark group the other day. I couldn't believe it.
So the question for me is how do we help students overcome their fears rational or otherwise? I wanted to tell the girls whaling at the harvestman that they were being ridiculous and to get over it. I didn't, but I wanted to. I think that I just told them it could not possibly by any means hurt them, and picked it up so they could see me hold it. Did that debunk their theory that harvestmen are the embodiment of all that is scary in the world or convince them that I must be a real wild card? Who know? If this is a real problem for urban kids, which it obviously is then it is our jobs to make the world less scary for them. They are part of it and should be able to enjoy it too. Hopefully they took Lisa's lesson to heart. "Bats eat bugs, they don't eat people."
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What I get kick out of is that, that we told them that the harvestmen isn't dangerous. I just goes to show how fear will still continue even though there is nothing to fear and people have confirmed that.
ReplyDeleteI think you answered your own question. To help them overcome their fears it is best that you model positive relationships in nature. You showed them how harmless it is. I think it would have been alright to call them out and let them know they were being a little ridiculous and extreme. At 7th grade they could handle it.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely, Ken. See my teaching post that I just did. This is a great area where we can teach by example. During my first What's Buggin You program with the homeschoolers, I got halfway through my introduction when my group pointed out that there was a harvestman (of course they said Daddy Long-Leg) crawling on me! I just calmly said that was fine, took the opportunity to talk about harvestmen a little, and then went on with what I had been saying.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, with the Stanley Clark group, no one would actually pick the macros out of their nets and place them in the bins. So, I started grabbing dragonfly nymphs left and right, and before long not all but some of the kids began to get their own macros out of their dipping nets. These students are absolutely looking up to us, and maybe the best way to squelch their fear is to show that we are not afraid of whatever they may be worried about.
There was a child who took time to tell me he had seen a "daddy long legs" near the pigs. I walked over with him and picked it up and said that it wasn't a spider, it was a harvestman. A nearby girl asked if it bites people. I told her that it eats plants. She then asked if she could hold it.
ReplyDeleteI would do the exact same thing, of course: be wary of a spider/snake/etc unless I knew it wasn't a poisonous spider/snake/etc.