One UK-based teacher decided that she wanted to teach her students about bullying. But she didn’t want to just talk about it. She wanted to show her students the negative effects of bullying, so they would remember to never bully others.
That day, she went to class with two apples, both of which were red, of comparable sizes, and looked good to eat. She had the students describe the apples; everyone noted the external similarities.
What the students didn’t know, however, was that she’d repeatedly dropped one of the apples on the floor before class, but made sure to not damage the skin. The students couldn’t tell that the apple had been dropped at all.
After their discussion about the apples’ similarities, the teacher then announced to the class that she, for a variety of reasons, didn’t like one of the apples. She was referring to the fruit that she’d dropped. She made up reasons to convince her class, talking about how the apple was “disgusting,” how it was a “horrible color,” and how its “stem was too short.”
The students slowly caught on, and as the teacher passed the apple around the class, each child added their own criticisms like “You’re a smelly apple,” “I don’t even know why you exist,” and “You’ve probably got worms inside you.”
Once the bruised apple had made its way around the room, the teacher repeated the process with the good apple. She complimented its beautiful color and its perfect skin, and the children followed suit as they passed this second apple around the classroom.
After the second apple finished its round, the teacher made sure to confirm with the class – although they’d favored one apple over the other, both fruits still looked the same from the outside.
That was when she cut both apples open, revealing the mushy, bruised interior of the first apple, and the fresh, crispy flesh of the second one.
According to the teacher, the children had a “lightbulb moment” and “they really got it” once they saw “the bruises, the mush and the broken bits” inside the fruit. They realized that although their words didn’t change the outward appearance of the apple, their words had made a negative impression on the inside.
The teacher wrote about her experience later on social media, saying, “When people are bullied, especially children, they feel horrible inside and sometimes don’t show or tell others how they’re feeling. If we hadn’t cut that apple open, we would never have known how much pain we had caused it.
“More and more hurt and damage happens inside if nobody does anything to stop the bullying. Let's create a generation of kind, caring children.”
This teacher is an inspiration.
