Black Ants and Buddhists

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the "Black Ants and Buddhists" article.  The teacher handled this situation amazingly.  If she had not let the students begin to work out the situation on their own, and had told Som Jet that it was okay in America to kill ants, or gotten angry, because of the situation, then the students and herself would have missed an incredible learning experience and meeting people from around the world.  After the incident had happened with Ben stomping on the ants and Sadie jumping up and down from a "black ant" bite, the teacher reminded them about their class rules (or we should say procedures) and asked them where would this apply.  This just reinforces how important it is to have these class procedures that the students and the teacher in collaboration come up with, so that they can easily refer back to these procedures and how to handle a situation.    

Look at all they learned.  They learned about diversity, not only about different views across the world, but the views of their fellow classmates that were present right their in their classroom.  The teacher did all she could to discover more about different views of Buddism, Hinduism, Isam, and others about what had happened in the classroom.  I loved the teachers thought mentioned in the article, "You could live your whole life, hanging with White Christian Americans, crushing ants and swatting mosiquitoes, thinking you were acting like everyone else on the planet, and you'd be wrong."

The students learned to take responsibility for themsevles by helping keep the classoom clean and remembering to take lunch boxes with food in them home.  Some of the students even took what they had learned from the classroom home, and started being more responsible there.

There are several more lessons that were learned; from diversity, personal responsibility, principle of guerrilla warfare, learning about power and government, and several other learning experiences, and this all happened from spilled juice and ants....