quote:

I’m pretty sure the public school teachers were running psychological experiments on the students back then. They made some of us hate and/or fear authority and others depend on authority without separating us into different classrooms.

I saw some get coddled and helped while others were not just ignored, they were yelled at for asking for help or an explanation.

In my first grade class (1974), Mrs. Tinstman made us count "one, two, one, two ..." until everyone in class was either assigned a one or a two.

The ones were to come to her with even the slightest question, even if the lessons were completely understood. She'd have the ones stand closely next to her while she touched them with her shoulder while pointing to the explanation on her worksheet. It was intimate and motherly.

The twos were to figure everything out on their own. If we didn't understand something, we were to work it out. We weren't to approach her desk and when she did explain something to a two, it was gruff and felt angry. You can tell that I was a two by the way I'm explaining it. Once I asked what a question meant as the wording wasn't clear to a first grader. "YOU'RE A TWO! FIGURE IT OUT!"

Yikes. I still cringe when someone yells in public. She was a comely woman. It taught me that skin deep beauty was often frightening.

quote:

Originally posted by sandman76:
I don't really remember anything like that. I did have a teacher in third grade that was an evil witch. She treated every student in the room the same. How she kept her job when she was so damned hateful is beyond me. To this day some fifty odd years later I still have a mental block on some parts of the multiplication tables. That fuckin zombie will haunt me till my dying day. I can still picture her hideous face with absolute clarity.

quote:

Originally posted by redstone:
This happened a lot. One of the most famous is the Blue Eyes/Brown eyes experiment. She is celebrated to this day when in fact she was doing psych experiments ON HER own STUDENTs. but it was to show the pain 'of discrimination' and the dangers of bias.

I had to study this and others in grad school. It is also one of the reasons why we have the IRB (institutional review board) and EVERY study has to be approved by the board.

Link

Elliott, who developed what has become known as the “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., will show how people can learn to recognize and identify disparities in the ways in which power is assigned and maintained.

She asked her students if they wanted to participate in an exercise to see how discrimination worked. The students agreed. The next day, she separated the children with blue eyes from the children with brown eyes. The blue-eyed children were told they were the superior group and given extra privileges such as more food portions at lunch, more playtime and they sat at the front of the class. The blue-eyed children were encouraged to play only with other blue-eyed children and ignore those with brown eyes.

The brown-eyed children wore collars made of fabric to identify them as a minority group and made to sit in the back rows. Elliott also reprimanded the brown-eyed students when they made mistakes or didn’t follow the rules.

The brown-eyed students initially resisted the notion that the blue-eyed students were better, but Elliott deliberately lied, telling them that the melanin responsible for making the students blue-eyed also gave them higher intelligence and learning ability. As the experiment progressed, the blue-eyed students became arrogant, bossy and otherwise unpleasant to their “inferior” classmates. Their grades also improved. The brown-eyed “inferior” classmates changed into timid and subservient children, who isolated themselves during recess. Even their studies suffered. The following week, Elliott reversed the exercise, making the brown-eyed children superior. While the brown-eyed children did taunt the blue-eyed ones in ways similar to what had occurred the previous day, it was not as intense.

At the end of the exercise, the students were asked to write down what they learned. The students wrote that it was not right to be judged by the color of their eyes and that the color of their eyes did not make a difference on the type of person they were.

The children’s compositions were printed in the local papers and the story was picked up by the national news media. The story led to Elliott’s invitation to be a guest on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” to talk about the experiment and the children. After her appearance, the “The Tonight Show” received hundreds of phone calls and letters, many of them complaining. An often-quoted letter states, “How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children?”

But not all the reaction was negative. As more people learned about the experiment, Elliott was asked to repeat the exercise and it eventually evolved into professional training for adults. In 1970, Elliott staged the exercise at a White House Conference on Children and Youth, staging it for adults.

Elliot now works as a diversity trainer and lecturer who is recognized most prominently as an anti-racism activist and educator. She has been the focus of two television documentaries, “Eye of the Storm” in 1971 and “A Class Divided” in 1985, and has received many awards, including the National Mental Health Association Award for Excellence in Education.

quote:

Originally posted by Chris Orndorff:
Surprised you recall with such detail your first grade experiences!

quote:

Amy and I kissed on the school's playground's swing set

quote:

Originally posted by Chris Orndorff:

Surprised you recall with such detail your first grade experiences!